What Single Button Assist, Assisted Highlight, and Cooldown Manager are missing to displace Hekili

In Development Ghosts of K'aresh PTR
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I’ve been trying to ween myself off Hekili in preparation for losing combat addons, and wanted to share some differences that are holding me back from making the switch for good.

Single Button Assist, Assisted Highlight, and Cooldown Manager, are all great features individually, but they miss the convenience that Hekili currently offers by doing all 3’s capabilities in a single UI and learning from the player’s input.

(I cannot link images, but the imgur album for the screenshot is OhQWwA9)

From this one location in Hekili I can see the recommended ability, and in my case I have configured it to also show the next two upcoming recommended abilities (including GCD or remaining cooldown), along with the current charges and assigned hotkey for that ability. Worth noting that Hekili is does not require an ability to be directly placed on the bar to be recommended, which is helpful to identify missing abilities on my action bar, and still get recommendations for abilities activated through macros.

Being able to see the next 3 actions and their hotkeys (if applicable) enables me to get a feel for a spec’s rotation and learn the rhythm by seeing recurring patterns of icons and hotkeys. Over time, I become less dependent on the rotation helper, until I take a break or switch alts, in which case it helps me relearn the class quickly and become less dependent on assistance again.

  • Single Button Assist allows you to always know where to look for the next upcoming ability, but it lacks the depth in that it shows only one ability rather than a predicted sequence of actions. It also has its own hotkey, rather than showing hotkeys of recommended abilities already on the action bar.

  • Assisted Highlight shows me what ability already on my action bar is next, which helps me learn the hotkey and location of the ability for cooldown tracking, but the glow is difficult to spot in the heat of battle, and it also only shows a single ability at a time rather than a sequence of events. It does highlight macroed abilities, but the macro must be in a condition to show the ability (such as holding a modifier) to be highlighted.

  • Cooldown Manager helps to manage multiple cooldowns at once from a single location in the UI, but lacks hotkey information and dynamically updating recommendations. Plus, I prefer to track cooldowns on my action bars. However, this layout of icons is closer to what I see in Hekili and how I wish Single Button Assist looked, but with a dynamically-changing sequence of abilities with cooldowns, charges and hotkeys included.

Basically, I want all the information these 3 UIs are offering, but I don’t want to have to clutter my UI with 3 UIs where I used to only need 1. I also want these UIs to adapt to the way I prefer to play (hotkeys, macros). I want to process a recommended sequence of events to develop a pattern and become less reliant on assistance. In a way, it’s less the abilities I want help managing, and more the spell button UI itself.

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They’re all terrible in comparison and nothing is gained from putting development time into them that has already been spent by the community in creating objectively better solutions.

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They could contract said mod makers to acquire the mods and have them maintain them. But we know they won’t, just like they didn’t grab the guy who brilliantly made the racial tier sets for all classes of each race that looked amazing.

Or the guy who made extra void elf and lightforged customizations, since allied races have a laughably small amount of customization options.

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Hekili presents the information much better in a small window that shows the next 3 recommendations, rather than having buttons all over my ability bars light up, which I prefer to keep on the bottom of the screen. The Hekili window can be moved easily near my characters feet without taking up much space, but keeping it near the action.

Hekili also suggests cooldowns, and while you certainly don’t always want to listen to those suggestions since it will tell you to blow every cooldown if there’s one mob left at 10% health; it is still beneficial to have it there as needed.

Unless Hekili someday gets disabled, there’s no chance I’d ever use the Assisted Highlight over it.

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The most important thing about Hekili for me is showing the next 3-5 abilities in a small area above my hotbars. That is how I would like the rotation assist helper to work. I’d have my cooldowns in a small area on one side of the screen and a small area with the next 3-5 abilities on the other.

I need to keep my hotbars small at the bottom of my screen just so that I can drag abilities from the gigantic spell book onto my hotbars. The reason I mention that here is because the hotbar location required in my case makes it harder to look down at my hotbars to use the rotation assist if it gets to the point where I can use it with Bartender (it doesn’t work right now).

Going a bit farther on the tangent regarding the hotbar placement problem, the spell book takes up far too much vertical space for my small 17” laptop screen where I run wow in windowed mode. Wow takes up about 60% of the screen when it is running so that I can look things up in wowhead when needed. I need a compact UI and recent xpacs have gone in the opposite direction making everything too big. The cooldown manager is too large as well.