Guide to Grid - Part 2

[Darista]

Welcome back! In this post, I will be finishing off what I started -- an overview to the basic Grid add-on. In the first post, Grid - Part 1, I went over all of the options you have available at your fingertips save for the ones in the "Status" menu, so that is what I will be covering today. There is a lot of good stuff in there that will further enhance your unit frames, such as buff/debuff priorities, color coordination, and thresholds for various statuses, so read on to find out more!

Auras

The first sub-menu under "Status" is Auras. This is basically a compilation of all of the currently saved buffs and debuffs that appear in your list of things to choose from for your indicators.

When you actually click on the word "Auras", this is what will appear:



This allows you to add any buffs or debuffs that are not already on the list. This can be especially handy when you are raiding and would like to know when players have a particular affliction on them, since Grid itself only covers the very basics.

Being a healer, I need to watch out for certain abilities that bosses throw at players so I can be ready to heal them, such as when a tank has Mangle (from Magmaw in Blackwing Descent) on them. I simply type "Mangle" in the box that says "Add new debuff" above it, hit the "Okay" button that appears when I am done typing the name of the debuff, and it will now appear as an option to select for an indicator. Remember, you must mark it off on an indicator if you want to be notified of it.

When you click on the red "+" button, the Auras menu will expand, showing each of the buffs and debuffs that are set up in the list. When you click on one of these options, this is what will appear:



Color

With each buff and debuff, you have the option of going in and choosing several different things. The first being in the top left hand corner, "Color", which lets you choose what color appears for that particular (de)buff's indicator. When you click on the colored box, the "Color Picker" will pop up (which was discussed in Grid - Part 1), and you make your selection that way.

Priority

The second of these choices is the slider bar to the right of this, called "Priority". With every possible affliction, buff, debuff, etc., there is a bar for Priority. The default is set to 90 on most things, but this can be adjusted to your liking -- especially if you have two or more of these set to show up on the same indicator. I, personally, like to think of indicators as layers; you can choose multiple (de)buffs for the same one, but just because the indicator for Spell A is showing up, it does not mean that Spell B isn't there. It's just hiding, underneath Spell A's indicator, until Spell A has been used up.

Well, what exactly does that mean? What does Priority do, and how can it help me? Excellent questions! Let's use my Disc Priest for example. I have the "Power Word: Shield" and the "Divine Aegis" buffs both checked off for the top right corner, and they both have the default priority of 90. Divine Aegis will always absorb damage before the Shield does if both are active on a player, so I really want Divine Aegis to be showing first. If I set the priority of Divine Aegis to any number higher than 90 -- or leave it as is and set the priority of the Shield to any number lower than 90 -- then Divine Aegis will always show up on the indicator over the Shield.

Like I said, you can have more than two things checked off for one indicator, but you will want to make sure that you have their priorities set according to the order in which you would like them to show up. The one(s) with the highest priority will show up over the one(s) with the lowest.

Show If Mine

So, moving on to the next couple of choices for your Auras -- the first check box on the second line down, labeled "Show if mine", will tell that particular (de)buff to only show up on your indicator if it is your (de)buff. With my Shaman, if I were to check this off for Riptide, Grid will only show the indicator I have set for that spell on the unit frames if it was cast be me, and me alone. No one else's Riptides will show up on Grid.

Show If Missing

The second check box here, "Show if missing", can be quite handy for actual class buffs. On my Mage, I have this checked off for my Arcane Brilliance spell. What this will do is show the indicator I have checked off for this on my Grid unit frames only if someone is missing this buff. This way I know that someone was either out of range, had died mid-fight and rezzed, or what have you, and needs this particular buff of mine.

Class Filter

The section below this is the "Class Filter". This allows you to go into each (de)buff and pick which classes it will show up on. If there is a debuff listed that drains mana in some capacity, you really don't need to know if a Warrior, Rogue or Death Knight have it on them because it's completely trivial to them and will only clutter your frames with useless information. Simply uncheck the box next to the classes you do not want to have showing the (de)buffs of your choosing.

Range Filter

Beneath this section are three more check boxes. The first of these is the "Range Filter". Having this checked off will cause the indicator for the (de)buff not to show on your frames if they are not within range of you.

Show Duration

The second check box, "Show Duration", will let you see how much time is left on the particular (de)buff. Truth be told, this will only work for the (de)buffs selected to show as the Center Icon, as it does its countdown using the same "radar looking thing" as your abilities do on your action bars when they are coming off a cool down.

The last check box, "Enable", is pretty simple. Either the affliction, buff, or debuff is -- or is not -- enabled to show up on your Grid frames.



Delete (De)Buff

The very last thing to go over in the Auras menu is all the way at the bottom, before you run into the "Health" sub-menu, called "Delete (De)Buff". Clicking on this will bring up an overview of the buffs and debuffs you have manually added to the list, as shown above. In order to delete one, simply left click on it and it will go away forever.

Health

The next sub-menu, "Health", does not have any options when you click on it (like Auras does), but the red "+" button will reveal three more menus to choose from: "Health Deficit", "Low HP Warning", and "Unit Health".

Health Deficit

The first sub-menu is fairly basic in options. We already went over the color and priority options in the last menu, as well as the "Enable" and "Range Filter" check boxes, and those rules apply to anything that has these options available to them. So let's go over the two new guys in here: "Health Threshold" and "Class Color".



"Health Threshold" controls the percentage of health at which you will be warned of a health deficit for a player. It will show up as actual numbers if you have this checked off in an indicator such as one of the two "Text" options, or it will show as an indicator on your frames, such as one of the corners, the border, etc..

The second of these, "Use Class Color", will show the health deficit on the Grid frame as the player's class color. Remember in the beginning of my first Grid post, I was talking about the dark color, the light color and the "in betweener" color that shows up on your frames as you take damage and receive heals? Well, the health deficit is that lighter color. You can change this by unchecking this box and then choosing a new color for the health deficit by clicking on the box next to "Color". By doing this, any health that is missing from a player will show up as the color you have chosen.

Low HP Warning

This menu is solely dedicated to what you believe to be considered "low health" for a player, how high on priority that ranks in comparison with the other things you may have checked off for the indicator (if any others), and at what point Grid will warn you about it.



The "Health Threshold" in this menu is a little different from that the Health Threshold for a health deficit. Here, it lets you choose at what remaining percentage of health a player has you will receive a warning (only if you have it checked off for one of your indicators) for what you believe to be low health -- not simply a deficit. 80% is the default, as shown above, so feel free to adjust it as needed. A healer, such as myself, would probably much prefer to have a warning for low health show at about 50% or lower, that way we aren't getting warnings all over our unit frames when the rest of the raid is taking less critical damage.

Unit Health

This sub-menu deals directly with the unit frames health and how that appears. As shown below, the options are much the same as most others:



The "Use Class Color" check box here will enable the unit's health to appear as the same color as that player's class; ie: a Rogue's unit frame would be yellow and a Mage's unit frame would be light blue. By removing the check from this box, you allow yourself to create a custom color for the unit frames using the "Color Picker".

Range

Before you expand this menu by clicking on the "+" button, first click on the word "Range".



The one and only option here, as shown above, allows you to set the rate at which Grid will check the players in your group or raid for set distances from you. You can have Grid check for these as often as one tenth of a second or once every 5 seconds. How these different distances appear on your unit frames is completely up to you, as well as whether or not they will appear in the first place. Read on to find out how!

More than ....

Upon expanding the Range menu by clicking on the red "+" button, there will be four new sub-menus -- these are the four set distances that Grid will scan the players for. What these ranges do and how they appear depend on what settings you choose for each.



Taking a look at the screen shot above, you will see that I have the "More than 40 yards away" sub-menu selected. Each of these menus will look the same, hence why I will only go over the options in one of them. Depending on the particular class that you are playing and the abilities available to you that are castable on other players, you may be able to ignore some of these options. Most people never have to worry about someone being more than 100 yards away from them while in a raid or group encounter, 'cause the typical maximum range for most players' abilities is around 40 yards.

Like most other options in Grid, you have the ability to set a priority for each range with the "Priority" slider bar, as well as enable/disable it altogether with the "Enable" check box. Priority has the potential to play a big part for range if you have both the 30 and 40 yard options enabled -- chances are you'll want to be able to tell if they are 40 yards away, moreso than just 30 yards. If you set the priority for the 40 yards higher than that of the 30 yards, you will be able to achieve this.

In addition to this, if you have one of the ranges enabled, you will be able to choose a color and/or opacity for when a player is out of range by that many yards. There are a couple of unique ways to be able to tell how far away a player is from you based on these set distances; one being how transparent/opaque the unit frame is. You could have a very transparent color for being very far away (40 or 100 yards) and a transparency somewhere in between this and the normal, full opacity for being less far away (10 or 30 yards).

Another option is to simply change the color for the individual ranges you wish to see. Maybe you want red to be the color that shows up when they are very far away, and a happy-medium orange when they aren't too far off.

Text

The Text box allows you to create a custom text for what appears on your unit frame if you have one of the "More than ..." ranges set to one of the Text indicators ("Center Text" or "Center Text 2"). If a player is out of range by 40 yards or more, and I decide I want to see something different than just "40 yards" like the default is set to --maybe spice it up a bit -- I could write "No Heals", or what have you, so I know they are out of range. Keeps it fun, anyways!

Aggro Alert

Oh, how I love aggro. Given Grid's many different Indicators, you have several options for how threat and aggro will appear on your unit frames. Personally, I like to use the border for this -- it's clean looking, and a bit more obvious for me, given that the default Blizz UI shows it this way as well.



Aggro definitely ranks among the highest of the things you would want to be warned of; whether you are tanking and need to pull off a healer or DPS, you are a DPS and need to stop DPSing or use a special class ability to dump it, or if you are a healer and need to remind the tank that their threat against healing aggro is rather awful and you'll drop group if they don't step it up a rung on the ladder. As such, I would highly recommend leaving the Priority for this at 99.

I would also recommend keeping it enabled (for obvious reasons), as well as not using the range filter, as people out of range from you are still very capable of pulling aggro off of a tank. In a raiding situation, this can be extremely helpful in letting a tank near that player know that they need to taunt off of them, or what have you.

Threat

The one thing on here that is different from other options in the other menus is the "Threat" check box. I love it. Enabling this will make some new options appear on the screen:



You will notice that the "Color" box has been replaced by three new ones, titled "High Threat Color", "Aggro Color", and "Tanking Color". The colors next to each of these are what will appear on your unit frames (in my case, the border) when a player has reached one of these levels of threat/aggro.

The "High Threat Color" will appear when someone is at, or over, the limit established for high threat, and has the potential to pull off of another player. Most thresholds for high threat are set to be at 90% of the tank's.

The "Aggro Color" will appear on your Indicator when a player has successfully pulled aggro off of someone and a mob is/mobs are going to start attacking said player. This is generally never a good thing unless it is the tank trying to re-establish threat.

The "Tanking Color" is when a player is actively tanking something -- aka: the player is hitting it, and it is hitting them in return. Don't let this be you if you are not a tank!

Incoming Heals

Again, this menu has the typical "Color", "Priority", "Range" and "Enable" options. A few different things to make note of are the "Ignore Self" check box and the "Minimum Value" slider bar.



Ignore Self

The first of these, the "Ignore Self" check box, will allow you to only view the heals that are being placed on a player by someone other than you. Grid will not in any way, shape, or form notify you of any healing you are putting out. As a side note, the Incoming Heals indicator (I suggest using this as a Text) is fantastic for healers to have, as it allows you to view how much health a player is potentially going to get back by the heals being cast on them, thus allowing you to decide if you even need to bother wasting time and mana on that player in place of another.

Minimum Value

The second of these, the "Minimum Value" slider bar, lets you set at what point a heal will show up on your unit frames (if you have "Incoming Heals" checked off as one of your indicators). As shown in the screen shot above, this particular toon of mine has it set at 1000. What this means is that only heals with the potential of being at or over 1000 will appear on my unit frames. A really whimpy heal may not be much to fuss over, so setting the bar a bit higher may not be a bad idea. However, if you wish to see just about every heal on your indicator, or if you are leveling a toon that can't do heals this large yet, then set the bar lower.

Low Mana Warning

This menu works much like the "Low Health Warning" one, except that it deals with the mana thresholds as opposed to health.



The Threshold slider bar here dictates at what remaining percentage of mana a player has that you will receive a warning (if you have "Low Mana Warning" checked off for one of your indicators). More often than not, the majority of the people who want to be aware of this threshold are those who have abilities that allow other players to regen mana, such as a Druid's Innervate or a Shaman's Mana Tide Totem. By default, the color for this warning is a light blue, but this may be changed using the Color Picker.

Ready Check

In 5 man dungeons, as well as 10 and 25 man raids, the party/raid leader has the ability to initiate what is called a "Ready Check". Promoted players may also do this, but this allows them to see which players are good to go for the next pull and which are not.



As you can clearly see above, there are four coloring options for different things: waiting, ready, not ready, and AFK. Along with colors, there will be a symbol that appears on the unit frames if you have "Ready Check" marked for the Center Icon indicator -- if not, then just the color will appear for the indicator. "Waiting" will show up as a question mark, "Ready" appears as a check mark, and both "Not Ready" and "AFK" show up as an X.

Colors

This sub-menu strictly deals with the basic coloring involved with the unit frames themselves.



Taking a look at the screen shot above, this is what should appear when you click on the word "Color" before expanding the menu. This drop down menu is referring to the color you wish to use for pets, should you have pet frames enabled for Grid. The default will be "Using Fallback Colors", which will be set to a green color -- all pets will have their health be displayed as such. The first option, "By Creature Type", will have Grid assign a color to the pets depending on what kind it is; demons will have one color, beasts another, etc.. The middle option, "By Owner Class", will have Grid display the pet colors depending on which class type is their owner. So a Warlock's pet will also be shown as that purple color, a Hunter's pet will be light green, and so on and so forth.

Class Colors

The "Class Colors" section is where you have the ability to change which color represents which type of class. Grid automatically sets them to the Blizzard defaults, as shown below:



Each time you click on one to change it, the "Color Picker" will pop up. However, if you have changed any colors and you are not happy with them, or you wish to start over, you may reset them and start over by clicking on the red "Reset Class Colors" button.

Creature Type Colors

In this next menu, you have the ability to change the colors Grid has assigned to specific creature types. This menu does not have a "Reset Colors" button like in the Class Colors menu, just so you are aware. Nothing new or exciting to go over here, but here is a screen shot for example's sake:



Fallback Colors

This menu is where you may choose the colors for the Fallback Colors. As mentioned earlier in the first menu for "Colors", this refers to pets if you have "Using Fallback Colors" selected in that drop down menu, as well as the pet frames enabled.



There are two options on there, the first being what will show up for all pets. If Grid is not, however, able to identify one of the unit frames, it will use the "Unknown Unit" as the fallback. Also, be aware that when a player is in a vehicle, and the new unit frame pops up for it, that new unit frame will always take the color of the Fallback Color. Not sure how to enable pet frames? Take a peek back at my first Grid post, under "Layout" about halfway through.

Menus I Have Skipped:

Much like it sounds, seems, and appears to be ... I have skipped some menus! Don't worry, I have not withheld any dire information from you! The reason for this is that they have the same exact, basic options as most others, and I do not want to be repetitive and redundant with my writing. However, I will quickly touch upon what each of these menus can do for you:

Death, Feign Death, and Offline Warnings

For "Death Warning", this is simply whether or not you are notified via your unit frames that a player, or multiple players, have died. You must have this checked off on an indicator in order for this particular menu to work. The "Feign Death Warning" -- when a Hunter uses his Feign Death ability to "play dead" -- and "Offline Warning" work in much the same way.

In Vehicle

The "In Vehicle" menu will allow your unit frames to tell you when a player is in a vehicle and you are unable to cast anything on them. How Grid normally does this is by creating a new unit frame separate from the players', but this particular menu allows you to change the color of the players' unit frame so it is a little more obvious at first glance who is in a vehicle and who is not.

Unit Name

Much like in the Health menu, you have the option to either use the Class color for the unit name text, or create your own by using the color picker.

Voice Chat

I have never used this particular feature, simply because I do not use the in-game Voice Chat feature, but I would assume that when someone is talking, or using their Push-to-Talk key, that this would pop up on your frames if you have it check off for an indicator.

Your Target

This is another option available to you in the Indicators section, and lets you know which player you are currently targeting. This is not the same as the golden highlight when you simply mouse over a unit frame, but rather you must have them physically targeted by clicking on them. As always, the color for "Your Target" may be changed by using the "Color Picker".

Ta-dah! Now we have a fully complete and functional guide to all of your Grid needs! There are, of course, several different components of Grid that you are able to download to get even more use out of your frames, but this was an overview of the very basic Grid add-on. If you have any questions, comments, or additional information regarding this post, please do not hesitate to leave a comment!

[Darista]

Just as an FYI to those that have viewed this recently, I updated the original posts for both parts of my Grid guide on my site a week or so ago. This includes new screenshots of the menus, and thus the wording has changed or been moved around a bit in various places. The link I included here to see Grid - Part 1 is still good, but to view the updated version of this particular post (Grid - Part 2), please go here: http://daritos.apotheosis-now.com/?p=85

[Devils]

Good guide helped a lot.

---------- Post added 2011-06-16 at 11:27 PM ----------

good guide looks great.