U.I. Mod Review - HealBot

We’re going to looking into a very promising addon known as HealBot. HealBot is a lightweight healing helper that allows you to program 60 key combinations to cast any kind of beneficial spell on your allies. It shows the entire party/raid’s health bars and allows you to press a certain key combination over someone who is taking damage to heal them. This can be very helpful… or can it? We’re going to look into that!

HealBot – What is it?

Type: Raid Frame Replacement
Author: Strife[CUK]
Patch Reviewed At: 3.3
Version Reviewed At: 3.3.0.15
Homepage: Click Here

HealBot is a highly configurable lightweight healing raid frame replacement. It provides a small screen on your U.I. showing the health of all of your allies in the party/raid. It tells you their HP, if they’re in range, and allows you to do various key combinations in order to cast certain spells on your ally. It’s an attempt to provide one easy to see screen showing all of the raid’s health and providing a quick and efficient means to healing everyone.

It is easily configured, can be skinned to fit your tastes, and can be programmed with 60 key combinations to cast spells. So for instance, do you want shift middle click to cast Flash Heal while shift right click casts Dispel Magic? Well, it can handle that and a lot more.

It also provides easy reminders to decurse/purge/depoison/etc. with your available skills, removing the need of additional addons to do the same functions. It also syncs with other heals in order to show incoming heals and better manage healing throughout the entire raid.

HealBot – Review

I’ll start this review off with a story. Back a long time ago in the days of Molten Core I found myself in a very sticky situation. I had to raid heal content that we were way overgeared for in order to farm Nexus Crystals to pay for Naxxramas attunements. I didn’t want to search names out to heal and healing assignments for a 40-man raid were few and far between especially for content you overgear.

So I found an addon that would show the players with the least amount of health on top. I’d spam flash heal on that person over and over and was always #1 in healing and nowhere on the overhealing meters. That was because it was a very efficient way to heal and the addon provided a service. It let me heal content I didn’t want to pay attention to without much problem.

In a lot of ways, HealBot works something similar to this. You can click on a person’s name and you’re healing them. You can use different key combos to accomplish this and it works. For that, I can say this addon is a success. However, the story goes on.

The addon was useless however for real raiding because the person with the lowest health wasn’t always the person you wanted to heal. You wanted to heal people who were about to take environment damage, people who weren’t standing behind a wall, etc. There was a lot more than “x person is the lowest HP person” because it’s DPS’s responsibility to take cover when they’re almost dead. Use a potion, hit mana shield, whatever!

In the same way, that’s how I feel about HealBot. It provides a way to heal easily right out of the box, but easy healing isn’t good healing all the time. The key combos you use in HealBot are only for HealBot. If you click someone in the raid you’ll need to use the game’s regular keybindings in order to heal them. If you’re doing that then why do you need a fancy addon to switch over to?

If we ignore that then the addon is rather solid. It does what it’s designed to do and it does it well. There isn’t a lot of memory usage and it does exactly what it offers. Skinning is rather difficult and the settings menu is very confusing, but with any kind of addon like this you’re going to find the customization to be very in-depth and hard to figure out. So if you’re looking for click-casting right out of the box inside of a raid frame that tells you everything then HealBot satisfies that demand.

However, if you’re looking for a way to heal better then there are many other addons and many other ways to go about doing it. Not to mention you can add click-casting to any other raid frame with “Clique.” HealBot used to automatically downrank for you as well, which would be big, if downranking wasn’t long ago nerfed. So that just leaves HealBot as a raid frame replacement. As a raid frame replacement it lacks in many areas. It doesn’t fit as much information into a smaller area like Grid (or in some people’s opinions VuhDo). It does show you everything other addons show you, but other addons do a lot better of a job of it. The way HealBot shows HoTs also take up space on the healthbars, making them harder to see.

So really, to me, HealBot doesn’t add anything new or exciting to the world of raid frames. I would say if you’re the type who clicks skills then you’re going find this addon to be awesome but that can come with any raid frame replacement. This just does it out of the box. However, looking at the best gaming mouse out there, the MX518, you only have so many buttons on your mouse before you’d have to resort to your keyboard. If you’re using the arrow keys to move then you’re at a disadvantage to use any kind of spiffy combos.

So even then, it’d probably be better to just train your hand to use WSAD for movement and learn how to press keys to use heals. Most healers only use a few heals (Druids use Wild Growth, Lifebloom, Regrowth, Rejuv, and Nourish or a total of five heals) so it’s not hard to bind those to keys near your movement keys and heal efficiently.

If you find the addon useful, then I’d still recommend giving Grid or any other raid frame replacement a try and doing some manual healing. Click-casting to heal can be done by turning cast-on-self off and pressing the keys before you click a name. Debuffs and incoming heals are handled by Grid very nicely, along with indicators of who has HoTs and who has threat all in a compact frame.  

So is this addon useless? I wouldn’t say so. It comes right out of the box ready to be used with no fuss. It does everything that most raid frames these days do (incoming heals, HoTs, health, etc.) and even has click-casting built in. However, it really starts to lag behind once you start customizing it. You can fit a lot more info into smaller areas with Grid and HealBot doesn’t handle HoTs really well (they’re in front of the health bars).

So if you just want a healer friendly raid frame HealBot will work for you. If you want to take the time and customize something to do a lot more then look somewhere else. HealBot will work fine out of the box for casual healing, but hardcore healers are going to be more demanding.