Why ? What kind of pertinent information do you get from seing bars ?
I've always wondered this as well. The only thing I could think of is maybe making a "who lives/who dies" decision based on how much mana a dps'er has left?
Personally, I can't imagine running a mod just to make a decision like that that would come up pretty rarely.
I want mana bars on my grid frames simply because I want to know who is in mana troubles, needs an innervate call, who is regen capped, what the distribution of mana is going into the next phase etc.
I think folks are fine to get along without mana bars. But I find it strange that people have to justify why that information is useful. It simply is. Not as useful as health, but more useful than a raid wide mana level indicator.
One of the first modules I activated for old grid was the mana bar. Without mana bars I wouldn't use grid, but other raid frames.
And I don't ask anybody to pick my preference or see my reasons. And certainly I think authors of any raid frames (whether Grid2 or anything else) are fine to not include mana bars if the authors don't find them useful for themselves. That's the author's perogative.
But mana bars on raid frames are very useful and I'm happy as long as fitt's law efficient raid frames with them exist.
I have to admit when i started out with Grid i missed them as well and used GridManaBars, due Performance Issues i dropped it and learned to life without them.
Depending on my class i use different levels of low mana warnings (druid i think 20%, Shaman 50%). For my healing i don't look how much mana a player has left to heal him - in dire moments i don't have time for this.
Grid tries to present you with important information. A full mana bar is nice, but doesn't require any action. 4/5 low mana bars on the healer side may call for a mana break - the other 20 full energy bars do add information that i don't need and my brain needs to filter costing time and concentration.
I think it's fine for people to choose not to use mana bars. I would feel gimped and underinformed, but yes Grid is my raid-frames. There is no other source to decide intelligently who to innervate for example. Also I still have the raid leader chimp on my shoulders (I don't do it anymore but I still like to see raid-leady info). And mana distribution does matter if you do have people struggling to keep their mana up and wipe because of it.
I really don't understand the dogmatism about this. You don't mana bars, fine. But don't tell me that in absolute terms there is no use for them.
You can choose to never innervate others, but again that choice shouldn't dictate what is right for everybody. I personally would frown upon a raid druid who is not in a solid position to innervate others and be informed about where that makes best sense etc. And I wouldn't be that fond of a raid leader who is incapable of keeping track which part of the raid were struggling with mana when. I certainly never would allow that for myself.
Hence mana is important information for me. And I will choose my addons based on it being visible.
I don't ask anybody to pick my preference or see my reasons.
Well, I do if I think this can help. In this case, I had to try Grid without mana bars to see how useless they are. I also think that most people want mana bar without even thinking about the reason why, and maybe they should. So, by asking them the question, I hope to make them realise how little information they get from watching mana bars during a fight.
Have you considered how distracting mana bars can be ?
I'm not against the existence of Grid2ManaBar. It would be a lot easier to write with Grid2. But I still don't think it's a good idea.
Just to make myself clear: I have been a resto-druid raid leader too, and the lack of mana bars has never been a problem to identify who needs an innervation. I think that raid frames are a bad way to convey this information. I used XRS for that, and it was way faster to get a good feeling of the mana of the raid as a whole, and of particular healers within the raid.
Frankly I think the distraction thing is a red herring. I know of no credible evidence that the mana bar in any way distracts and I have raid healed for two years now and before that played raid leader on a hunter with mana bars up.
People are very good at selective filtering. Excessively good actually. There is a very famous experiment that illustrates this. It's extremely compelling so I don't want to give it away. The field of study is called "Sustained inattentional blindness" or "selective looking" for those who want to get spoiled ;)
The conclusion is though that people are very good at selective attention. If we stare at health bars even very obvious changes in our field of view will not distract us.
I have SCT spamming excessive amounts of information, and frankly 90% of the time I don't even see it anymore. Why? selective looking. I pay attention to the scene in the background, or grid.
On XRS, I used it for a while. I tried a lot of addons while raid leading to keep track of as much as possible. I eventually dropped it because all I ended up using it for was DC/death counts.
That's what I'm saying though. Don't underestimate people's preferences. I'm not saying that XRS is not more efficient for you. I'm saying it was ineffective for me.
Same goes for mana bars with grid. It is the best solution for inspecting mana situations that I have seen.
How do you know how to innervate that one player X who is struggling on MT healing based on XRS anyway?
That works, but you relinquished quite some control, furthermore you need to mouseover to actually extract that info. I get it much quicker, and also I can actually innervate people who don't yet have triggered mana warnings... and that's the control given up by going that route. As said, that's fine if it works for you. It doesn't for me. I don't want to move my mouse off grid to extract info. I'm click-casting, so it better stay on the grid area ;)
Grid mana bars rock. They do exactly what I need. And they do it faster, more efficiently (in terms of my performance) and with more situational flexibility for me. But that's how I look at that.
furthermore you need to mouseover to actually extract that info
You misenderstood. Tablet allows to have a tooltip always shown. I simply had this to look not just at the state of the healer I'm looking for (the alert is enough), but comparativily the others.
Yes, I agree, it is a matter of habits and taste, but I stand by the idea that the bars are not a good indicator for this information. They give too much information that I don't need and not enough that I need.
I think your idea is unfounded but it doesn't look like I won't be changing it ;)
As said, I'll be happy as long as I can have a Fitt's law efficient raid frame solution with mana bars. If that goes away I'll start worrying.
And do look at the selective attention research... maybe you will change your mind based on some actual science. After all grid is a good idea for plainly scientific reasons.
Finally back to your solution: So you see Player X is low on mana in your separate tablet. Now you have to search grid to find that player before landing innervate. I doubt that this is more efficient than mana bars. Furthermore in my case that woN't work because I have toned down the player name lengths (3 letters I think) on Grid because I don't need that information in my case. If I had to search for players by name in grid I would need more name info than that and linear visual search is slow.
Mana bars in grid make sure that you have the info where you need to apply the action (like cast innervate). You could achieve that with other means too, but mana bars are a fine solution and frankly I see them more efficient than what you propose.
And as said whatever yout think is superfluous information (I still don't get that argument tbh) there is no good evidence that that slows us down at all.
So how is slow visual search and gaze shifting more efficient and a better solution?
I cooked up a proof-of-concept version of Grid2ManaBar. It does use the indicator (bar)/status (mana/manacolor) paradigm, but it could be cleaner. For now the bar width is hard-coded to be 20% of the full width and it doesn't flexibly stick to any side, but just the bottom one.
It does however link nicely to varied statuses like low mana etc if wanted.
Top is Grid2, bottom is Grid, each with ManaBars.
Main thing about the code. ManaColor would very likely be better placed in StatusMana.lua. For now it duplicates virtually all of the code of LowMana/Mana to offer the appropriate power-based color status.
And the bar code is hacky. I didn't find a clean way to hook the current bar indicator layout function, so I had to duplicate a lot of the code to allow for an alternative layout function to be fed. There are various ways to make this cleaner/easier. Either the bar indicator gets made more flexible to allow width hence removing the need to override, or a second indicator type such as sidebar for that purpose might be helpful, or a clean way to provide alternative layouts is also a possibility.
With those changes doing mana bars or any sub-sized bars for any percentage status would be rather trivial. E.g. if people want rage bars, energy bars, general power bars, or just plain old mars bars, they could do it. Cast bars and debuf timer bars also possible.
Like Elsia I too find that mana bars provide useful information in the most convenient location and look forward to the availability of optional plugins to enable this functionality in Grid2 when it is ready.
In Grid I have the mana bar height set to one pixel. This takes up almost no real estate but allows me to see both a detailed report on my raid's mana at a glance and analyze mana usage/regen rates over time. For me, it's worth the fps hit.
I understand and appreciate that some consider mana to be information overload and also that there are technical and performance reasons (and annoyances caused by bugs and subsequent forum mayhem) for some not to want or use them.
Alternatives like XRS and individual tooltips would not fit *my* style because I find averaging mana is often a meaningless and misleading stat, and I wouldn't want to look around to various frames all over my screen to see individual mana information. My focus as a healer is split between Grid and my toon in the viewport (gotta dodge those Void Zones etc)
This is why I am a huge fan of Grid: it is amazingly flexible so we can both customize it to our preference. It is hands down the best unit frame addon, and I use it on all of my characters to keep me far far far more informed than most players about all sorts of scenarios.
As Elsia pointed out, there may be other uses for "bar" indicators beyond health and mana. Maybe a Lifebloom tracking implementation with a timer bar indicating duration and the bar color indicating the number of stacks.
I'm splitting these posts into a new thread, because the merits (or lack thereof) of mana bars are really not relevant to the topic of the thread you guys kept posting in.
1 - druids vision to who needs an innervate and a way to compare them (an indicator only tells them "these two people are low" not "this person is 15% this person is 0%")
2 - the ability for raid leaders to watch mana consumption across the raid. This is done by many guilds (mine included).
3 - the ability for a resto shaman to determine when to do mana tide. I do *not* want an indicator at 75%, which is about when I drop my first tide. I want to see everybody in my group and know if they are all below 75% or not. I want a low mana indicator for people at 5% or less....these two things server two distinct purposes for restos
All three of these are significant reasons for mana bars. I'm sure there are others I'm not thinking of right now.
1 - druids vision to who needs an innervate and a way to compare them (an indicator only tells them "these two people are low" not "this person is 15% this person is 0%")
Maybe it's because my vision sucks too much to effectively show that much information, but I just don't think it's necessary to know that PriestX has 2% mana and MageQ has 8% mana and RetPallyB has 21% mana.
On my feral druid alt, I have the low mana threshold set to 15%, and filtered on priests and druids only. Nobody else has much Spirit regen anyway, and even those that have some (mages and warlocks) generally aren't critical targets for Innervate. If I see that PriestX and PriestY are both below 15% mana, it doesn't really make any difference if one is at 7% and one is at 11%. I'm just going to read the names and pick the one who's more useful; if one is a healer and the other is shadow, the healer gets the Innervate. If both are healers, I'll pick the one I know is a better healer. In pugs, this might not work as well, since you don't necessarily know everyone's skills, but it's good enough.
2 - the ability for raid leaders to watch mana consumption across the raid. This is done by many guilds (mine included).
As a raid leader (I lead my guild's 10-man achievement raids) I don't feel that knowing the exact mana percents is useful either. On trash, it doesn't really matter if someone is OOM from buffing. On a boss, I'm doing a ready check anyway. Plus, everyone is on Ventrilo, so if someone needs to drink they just say so. Again, may not work as well for pugs, but the same principles apply. It's not the raid leader's job to babysit every detail of everything everyone is doing at every moment... if someone is incapable of managing their mana effectively without the raid leader holding their hand, they're probably not the best choice to fill that raid slot. This applies equally to guild runs and to pugs.
3 - the ability for a resto shaman to determine when to do mana tide. I do *not* want an indicator at 75%, which is about when I drop my first tide. I want to see everybody in my group and know if they are all below 75% or not. I want a low mana indicator for people at 5% or less....these two things server two distinct purposes for restos
On my resto shaman main, I have the low mana threshold set to 35%. Maybe my guild does it differently than yours, but we expect our raiders to be able to manage their own mana, just as we expect them to move out of void zones, attack the right target, keep the zombies away from Gluth, heal the tank, and not pull aggro.
If I know a fight will last long enough for a second Mana Tide, I'll drop it early when I'm around 75% mana myself, regardless of how much mana anyone else has. If the fight isn't that long, then I just wait until I see blue borders on everyone in the party. If PriestX is running OOM and needs the Mana Tide early, well, he's a big boy and he can communicate. If he's consistently running OOM before anyone else, it's probably time to sit down with him and figure out why he's having such a problem managing his mana.
Also, if I really have some burning need to know the exact amount of mana someone has, I have tons of time while the lasers are charging to just target them. :p
Let me make this short. To me this discussion is silly. We don't have this discussion for arbitrary unit frames. And people do not have to justify why they want functionality from action bars that the default frames provide.
But I understand that major stakeholder - for reasons that are not really clear to me - think noone should want mana bars in grid2. For practical purposes that doesn't bother me. Once I'll fully switch to Grid2 I'll polish my mana bar mockup and solve the problem for myself. If I get permission and have time to make it release-clean, I'll share it.
That's pretty much the end of the dicussion as far as I am concerned. People who want mana bars can have them and those that don't don't.
What remains is a discussion about what one ought to want that I hardly see ever coming to a universally agreed conclusion.
The whole point of UI customization is that we have different preferences. In fact I can guarantee you that most people wouldn't want to live with my UI and vice versa. So people telling me what I ought to not want is a tad weird to me.
Phanx, you never cease to amaze me, when you make posts like this, I seem to always learn something I can apply to my WoW-ing. Thanks.
As far as topic goes:
I pretty much wanted to know mana all the time as well, then I realized, while healing I hardly took the time (or had the time - you try healing a crushable and critable tank in ZA pre-wrath k?) to actually look at the mana status. Border = blue, k - mana problem on x. It made it simpler for me in the end that way :) That said, I understand why some people do prefer to know exact mana stati (-us in plural latin is -i). So I do believe Elsias plan to - if possible - do the manabars plug for grid2 is an awesome compromis. She (or are you a he?) is a very good dev, so I am confident that her plugin would be most suitable.
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Personally I agree with Jandari, I think seeing mana bars is a pretty important part to my raiding, and I know its not just me heh.
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Curse PremiumWhy ? What kind of pertinent information do you get from seing bars ?
I've always wondered this as well. The only thing I could think of is maybe making a "who lives/who dies" decision based on how much mana a dps'er has left?
Personally, I can't imagine running a mod just to make a decision like that that would come up pretty rarely.
I think folks are fine to get along without mana bars. But I find it strange that people have to justify why that information is useful. It simply is. Not as useful as health, but more useful than a raid wide mana level indicator.
One of the first modules I activated for old grid was the mana bar. Without mana bars I wouldn't use grid, but other raid frames.
And I don't ask anybody to pick my preference or see my reasons. And certainly I think authors of any raid frames (whether Grid2 or anything else) are fine to not include mana bars if the authors don't find them useful for themselves. That's the author's perogative.
But mana bars on raid frames are very useful and I'm happy as long as fitt's law efficient raid frames with them exist.
I have to admit when i started out with Grid i missed them as well and used GridManaBars, due Performance Issues i dropped it and learned to life without them.
Depending on my class i use different levels of low mana warnings (druid i think 20%, Shaman 50%). For my healing i don't look how much mana a player has left to heal him - in dire moments i don't have time for this.
Grid tries to present you with important information. A full mana bar is nice, but doesn't require any action. 4/5 low mana bars on the healer side may call for a mana break - the other 20 full energy bars do add information that i don't need and my brain needs to filter costing time and concentration.
I really don't understand the dogmatism about this. You don't mana bars, fine. But don't tell me that in absolute terms there is no use for them.
You can choose to never innervate others, but again that choice shouldn't dictate what is right for everybody. I personally would frown upon a raid druid who is not in a solid position to innervate others and be informed about where that makes best sense etc. And I wouldn't be that fond of a raid leader who is incapable of keeping track which part of the raid were struggling with mana when. I certainly never would allow that for myself.
Hence mana is important information for me. And I will choose my addons based on it being visible.
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Curse PremiumWell, I do if I think this can help. In this case, I had to try Grid without mana bars to see how useless they are. I also think that most people want mana bar without even thinking about the reason why, and maybe they should. So, by asking them the question, I hope to make them realise how little information they get from watching mana bars during a fight.
Have you considered how distracting mana bars can be ?
I'm not against the existence of Grid2ManaBar. It would be a lot easier to write with Grid2. But I still don't think it's a good idea.
Just to make myself clear: I have been a resto-druid raid leader too, and the lack of mana bars has never been a problem to identify who needs an innervation. I think that raid frames are a bad way to convey this information. I used XRS for that, and it was way faster to get a good feeling of the mana of the raid as a whole, and of particular healers within the raid.
People are very good at selective filtering. Excessively good actually. There is a very famous experiment that illustrates this. It's extremely compelling so I don't want to give it away. The field of study is called "Sustained inattentional blindness" or "selective looking" for those who want to get spoiled ;)
The conclusion is though that people are very good at selective attention. If we stare at health bars even very obvious changes in our field of view will not distract us.
I have SCT spamming excessive amounts of information, and frankly 90% of the time I don't even see it anymore. Why? selective looking. I pay attention to the scene in the background, or grid.
That's what I'm saying though. Don't underestimate people's preferences. I'm not saying that XRS is not more efficient for you. I'm saying it was ineffective for me.
Same goes for mana bars with grid. It is the best solution for inspecting mana situations that I have seen.
How do you know how to innervate that one player X who is struggling on MT healing based on XRS anyway?
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Curse PremiumLow Mana will alert me, and I had the tooltip (Tablet to be exact) shown to get a precise reading of the people with low mana.
Grid mana bars rock. They do exactly what I need. And they do it faster, more efficiently (in terms of my performance) and with more situational flexibility for me. But that's how I look at that.
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Curse PremiumYou misenderstood. Tablet allows to have a tooltip always shown. I simply had this to look not just at the state of the healer I'm looking for (the alert is enough), but comparativily the others.
Yes, I agree, it is a matter of habits and taste, but I stand by the idea that the bars are not a good indicator for this information. They give too much information that I don't need and not enough that I need.
As said, I'll be happy as long as I can have a Fitt's law efficient raid frame solution with mana bars. If that goes away I'll start worrying.
And do look at the selective attention research... maybe you will change your mind based on some actual science. After all grid is a good idea for plainly scientific reasons.
Finally back to your solution: So you see Player X is low on mana in your separate tablet. Now you have to search grid to find that player before landing innervate. I doubt that this is more efficient than mana bars. Furthermore in my case that woN't work because I have toned down the player name lengths (3 letters I think) on Grid because I don't need that information in my case. If I had to search for players by name in grid I would need more name info than that and linear visual search is slow.
Mana bars in grid make sure that you have the info where you need to apply the action (like cast innervate). You could achieve that with other means too, but mana bars are a fine solution and frankly I see them more efficient than what you propose.
And as said whatever yout think is superfluous information (I still don't get that argument tbh) there is no good evidence that that slows us down at all.
So how is slow visual search and gaze shifting more efficient and a better solution?
It does however link nicely to varied statuses like low mana etc if wanted.
Top is Grid2, bottom is Grid, each with ManaBars.
Main thing about the code. ManaColor would very likely be better placed in StatusMana.lua. For now it duplicates virtually all of the code of LowMana/Mana to offer the appropriate power-based color status.
And the bar code is hacky. I didn't find a clean way to hook the current bar indicator layout function, so I had to duplicate a lot of the code to allow for an alternative layout function to be fed. There are various ways to make this cleaner/easier. Either the bar indicator gets made more flexible to allow width hence removing the need to override, or a second indicator type such as sidebar for that purpose might be helpful, or a clean way to provide alternative layouts is also a possibility.
With those changes doing mana bars or any sub-sized bars for any percentage status would be rather trivial. E.g. if people want rage bars, energy bars, general power bars, or just plain old mars bars, they could do it. Cast bars and debuf timer bars also possible.
Like Elsia I too find that mana bars provide useful information in the most convenient location and look forward to the availability of optional plugins to enable this functionality in Grid2 when it is ready.
In Grid I have the mana bar height set to one pixel. This takes up almost no real estate but allows me to see both a detailed report on my raid's mana at a glance and analyze mana usage/regen rates over time. For me, it's worth the fps hit.
I understand and appreciate that some consider mana to be information overload and also that there are technical and performance reasons (and annoyances caused by bugs and subsequent forum mayhem) for some not to want or use them.
Alternatives like XRS and individual tooltips would not fit *my* style because I find averaging mana is often a meaningless and misleading stat, and I wouldn't want to look around to various frames all over my screen to see individual mana information. My focus as a healer is split between Grid and my toon in the viewport (gotta dodge those Void Zones etc)
This is why I am a huge fan of Grid: it is amazingly flexible so we can both customize it to our preference. It is hands down the best unit frame addon, and I use it on all of my characters to keep me far far far more informed than most players about all sorts of scenarios.
As Elsia pointed out, there may be other uses for "bar" indicators beyond health and mana. Maybe a Lifebloom tracking implementation with a timer bar indicating duration and the bar color indicating the number of stacks.
Thanks for keeping Grid alive!!!
-oody
1 - druids vision to who needs an innervate and a way to compare them (an indicator only tells them "these two people are low" not "this person is 15% this person is 0%")
2 - the ability for raid leaders to watch mana consumption across the raid. This is done by many guilds (mine included).
3 - the ability for a resto shaman to determine when to do mana tide. I do *not* want an indicator at 75%, which is about when I drop my first tide. I want to see everybody in my group and know if they are all below 75% or not. I want a low mana indicator for people at 5% or less....these two things server two distinct purposes for restos
All three of these are significant reasons for mana bars. I'm sure there are others I'm not thinking of right now.
Maybe it's because my vision sucks too much to effectively show that much information, but I just don't think it's necessary to know that PriestX has 2% mana and MageQ has 8% mana and RetPallyB has 21% mana.
On my feral druid alt, I have the low mana threshold set to 15%, and filtered on priests and druids only. Nobody else has much Spirit regen anyway, and even those that have some (mages and warlocks) generally aren't critical targets for Innervate. If I see that PriestX and PriestY are both below 15% mana, it doesn't really make any difference if one is at 7% and one is at 11%. I'm just going to read the names and pick the one who's more useful; if one is a healer and the other is shadow, the healer gets the Innervate. If both are healers, I'll pick the one I know is a better healer. In pugs, this might not work as well, since you don't necessarily know everyone's skills, but it's good enough.
As a raid leader (I lead my guild's 10-man achievement raids) I don't feel that knowing the exact mana percents is useful either. On trash, it doesn't really matter if someone is OOM from buffing. On a boss, I'm doing a ready check anyway. Plus, everyone is on Ventrilo, so if someone needs to drink they just say so. Again, may not work as well for pugs, but the same principles apply. It's not the raid leader's job to babysit every detail of everything everyone is doing at every moment... if someone is incapable of managing their mana effectively without the raid leader holding their hand, they're probably not the best choice to fill that raid slot. This applies equally to guild runs and to pugs.
On my resto shaman main, I have the low mana threshold set to 35%. Maybe my guild does it differently than yours, but we expect our raiders to be able to manage their own mana, just as we expect them to move out of void zones, attack the right target, keep the zombies away from Gluth, heal the tank, and not pull aggro.
If I know a fight will last long enough for a second Mana Tide, I'll drop it early when I'm around 75% mana myself, regardless of how much mana anyone else has. If the fight isn't that long, then I just wait until I see blue borders on everyone in the party. If PriestX is running OOM and needs the Mana Tide early, well, he's a big boy and he can communicate. If he's consistently running OOM before anyone else, it's probably time to sit down with him and figure out why he's having such a problem managing his mana.
Also, if I really have some burning need to know the exact amount of mana someone has, I have tons of time while the lasers are charging to just target them. :p
But I understand that major stakeholder - for reasons that are not really clear to me - think noone should want mana bars in grid2. For practical purposes that doesn't bother me. Once I'll fully switch to Grid2 I'll polish my mana bar mockup and solve the problem for myself. If I get permission and have time to make it release-clean, I'll share it.
That's pretty much the end of the dicussion as far as I am concerned. People who want mana bars can have them and those that don't don't.
What remains is a discussion about what one ought to want that I hardly see ever coming to a universally agreed conclusion.
The whole point of UI customization is that we have different preferences. In fact I can guarantee you that most people wouldn't want to live with my UI and vice versa. So people telling me what I ought to not want is a tad weird to me.
Phanx, you never cease to amaze me, when you make posts like this, I seem to always learn something I can apply to my WoW-ing. Thanks.
As far as topic goes:
I pretty much wanted to know mana all the time as well, then I realized, while healing I hardly took the time (or had the time - you try healing a crushable and critable tank in ZA pre-wrath k?) to actually look at the mana status. Border = blue, k - mana problem on x. It made it simpler for me in the end that way :) That said, I understand why some people do prefer to know exact mana stati (-us in plural latin is -i). So I do believe Elsias plan to - if possible - do the manabars plug for grid2 is an awesome compromis. She (or are you a he?) is a very good dev, so I am confident that her plugin would be most suitable.