Healer Efficiency Mod
 

What I'm looking to do is modify the eq2ui_mainhud_target.xml and eq2ui_mainhud_impliedtarget.xml to detect certain effect names and display the icon larger or smaller depending on a match.

For instance, if one of the 30 spell effect icons have "Malignant Shroud" or "Ethereal Aegis" in the text name it should display that icon twice as large as it normally would be.

The idea behind this is to boost mana efficiency when using single target Reactives/Wards/HoTs since they aren't stackable.

For instance, if I see a large ward icon on the main tank I could simply save my mana and cure/direct heal/group heal etc.

With that being said... Is this at all possible? I figured I'd ask here before I waste my night trying to do something that is impossible.

I could give you a long explanation about the issues you would run into, but I let me just say that for any practical purpose this is not possible. :)

The non-UI way to do this is to decide beforehand which healer wards and which healers HoTs or reactives, cure and debuff. This is because even if you had the big ward icon in the UI, there is nothing to tell you that it will still be there once you finished casting your own group ward 5 seconds later. ;) If you want to set up a heal chain, use macros to announce casting to a custom healer channel or /tell the other healers directly.

And before you ask: We can't display remaining ward amounts either. :p

I understand the non-UI way all too well unfortunately.

Could you explain why it wouldn't be possible? If it is a matter of the text not being available until you hover over it I can see that.

But.... since we know the particular icon graphics that are displayed can you test for the existence of the three different icon types instead of the text compare?

To test changes in the text or the icon name you need to get a handle to them. I suppose the text can be found in a standard tooltip field, but this may not be the case. No idea if you would find a handle for the icon name, either. Both are pushed by the server.

Even if you could get around this step, you can only test upon a specific event, e.g. moving your mouse over the window.

Furthermore, you have no way to guarantee that the icon did not move to another place in the list while you tested. So you might end up making the wrong icon larger.

Even if you make the right icon larger, it will stay large even if a new effect is shown in that place, so you would have to check as well whether you need to reduce the icon size again.

Last but not least, to show one icon double size, they will all have to be double spaced regardless of size. This will look more than ugly.

And I don't even mention the horrible lag that you would cause on most machines by testing this for 60 icons (target and implied target) at any meaningful frequency.

So while theoretically you might be able to get this done, I still say that for practical purposes this is not doable.

Thats exact "No f'ing way" answer I wanted to hear. :) Thanks!

Props on the idea, though. :nana:

As a healer I think this would be extremley confusing to follow on screen

Not really.. All you'd really be looking for is the one big icon that looks like the single target for your subclass. So if I was a defiler I'd just look for the big single ward icon.

Its a moot point though because it doesn't seem like its possible. :(

Although the OP's idea can't be accomplished, someone kind of touched on something I've been wanting to do - and that is Display the name of the debuffs on Mobs in a Target window. So, instead of this tiny window showing a bunch of tiny icons that I can barely see, I would like to create a larger Target window with vertical icons and their names. Is this data available either directly or as a property to the icons (such as a tooltip text) ?

Thanks,

Sabist

I believe that it's hardcoded in the tooltips only, but I could be wrong about that -- they slip things by me sometimes hehe.

However, i'm not sure how useful it would be (if it's possible)... theres a lot of tiny icons in there, your window would have to be mighty beefy to fit them all. Heck, in raids most mobs exceed the maximum shown for me even with small icons.