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sRaidFrames and BeneCaster - Blog-o-rama

March 5th, 2008 by mischief

Rating: ★★★★☆
SraidFrames and BenecasterI’ve decided to go a bit crazy today and post about two addons in one article. Reason is that these addons go hand in hand, just like beer and football. sRaidFrames gives you replacement frames (windows) showing your fellow raid members with a lot of improvements over Blizzard’s default ones and BeneCaster gives you dynamic casting icons next to your group members or raid members. This might all sound a bit foreign for some of you, but read on and I will show you the light.

SraidFrames and BenecasterTo put it simply, what these addons will give you is the chance to have frames of all the raiders, filtered as you wish, with icons of any spells you wish next to each raider for quick healing. You don’t have to mark a target and then click the spell and you can easily see who is getting hit. You can set options to have any player who is currently being hit to stand out as well as show clearly who needs decursing and such. The frames can also use a range check, and dim out any members that are not within your spell range. This should all make you a much more responsive and efficient healer, which your fellow guildmates will love.

SraidFrames and BenecasterLet’s go a bit more in depth with each of the addons now. sRaidFrames is part of the ACE system which means you can use the WowAceUpdater for easily updating it. It replaces the raid frames Blizzard gives you with more dynamic ones where you can have range check, see who has aggro and much more. You can setup the content of the frames using a wide range of filters.  There’s filters for classes, roles and you can partially make your own definitions. There’s options for showing what debuffs people have on them, as well as buffs, and you can choose to display health, mana, rage and energy in a lot of different ways. You can show the numbers, percent and setup colors, layout and just about anything you’ll need with the frames.

Benecaster is a merger of Benecast and Caster which gives you the options to attach spell casting icons for party members and raid members for simple 1 click casting. You can attach it to your own portrait, to the party and to raid frames, with support for X-Perl, SraidFrames and others. You can easily choose what spells you wish to attach, be it healing spells, cure disease or buffing etc. You can choose to add range checks so that icons turn red if you are out of range and mana checks which makes icons turn blue if you don’t have enough mana.  The icons support downranking, so you can left click for max rank and right click for minimum rank and use CTRL + right or left click for 75% and 50%.

When you add sRaidFrames and BeneCaster you’ll start to see the beauty of it all. Easy one click casting instead of having to target anyone first. All is not perfect though, as currently, BeneCaster has a bug that makes the raid icons not always show up next to the correct player. This is obviously a disaster, but doesn’t happen always. Hopefully it will be fixed soon, and I’ll report back as soon as I see it fixed. For groups or solo playing BeneCaster is great though. If the BeneCaster bug gets fixed, I’ll up the rating of these for sure.

You can find BeneCaster at:
http://wowui.worldofwar.net/?m=3606&p=mod

and sRaidFrames at:
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info5661-sRaidFrames.html

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1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Healdur Apr 25, 2008 at 3:45 am

    I must admit that I have never used Benecaster, but I can tell what I use with sRaidframes and that is Clique.

    This is basicly what Clique does:

    Clique is a simple GUI that lets you assign click-casting for any number of unit frames. Click casting allows you to define the behavior the game takes when you click on a frame. This can be casting spells, running a macro, using an item, or something as simple as changing targets or assisting a unit.

    Can be found at: http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info5108-Clique.html

    There are also demonstration how it is used.

    My main concern with BeneCaster is that it would fill my UI to the max. My advice for healers is the combo sRaidframes with Clique.

    Ty MisCheif for your bloggs