Highlighter WeakAura Documentation

Photo by Nathan Jennings on Unsplash.

Table of Contents

• What's a "Highlighter WeakAura"?
• Showcases via Clips
• Setup
  • Example 1: Living Flame

This is the documentation for my Highlighter WeakAura.

What's a "Highlighter WeakAura"?

Initially conceived as a theorycrafting / debugging tool for Alpha/Beta/PTR content, it's a tool listening to the combat log to highlight specific abilities only.

What does highlighting mean, exactly?

Well, it's as simple as it sounds: show the icon of the ability and how much it did. This works for both damage and healing done, although the primary use case has been damage.

Ok cool, but where's the difference to the default UI scrolling combat text, MSBT, Details, Logs, etc.?

• the default UI has no customizability and numbers may appear in any position they want.
• MSBT hasn't been updated for a while and especially by now, the number filter values are way too low so it's just spammy noise
  • here's a side by side comparison of how it looked with MSBT on the left, and an implementation of this WeakAura on the right:
    

    
• Details can be valuable for this, but you wouldn't want to look at Details in real time during a fight.
• Logs are the tool for post-fight analysis. Can't look at it in real time at all however for obvious reasons.

Since this implementation is a WeakAura, you can visually alter and position it in any way you'd like.

But wait, there's more! Features none of the above support at all or only partially:

• combine an arbitrary amount of ids into one
• override shown icon
• reset individual ability values on a custom-defined per-cast basis
• ability to single out numbers done only while a certain buff is active on you or debuff is active on the target
• ability to calculate throughput increases by modifiers such as Shattering Star
• it's a WeakAura and when you export it, all your configuration is included!

Uuuuh, performance footprint?

Surprisingly low, but obviously not zero. It's built with performance in mind, profiled from the start on. I have it disabled in raid, not because of performance problems but because I don't care about it there. I'd expect it to be more impactful there naturally.

Showcases via Clips

Setup

A plethora of features was mentioned above and this documentation will eventually cover them all. For now, we'll focus on the basics only.

Example 1: Living Flame

Living Flame is a rotational filler for all Evoker specializations. You can hard cast it or spend procs to instant cast it.

It doesn't do much damage, but is as simple as it gets as example.

As first step, navigate to the Custom Options tab of the WeakAura and click Add Entry:

Give this entry a name. You can of course name it whatever you want but as best practice I recommend giving it a clear and recognizable name.

• Active allows you to toggle this entry without having to remove it entirely. By default this is on.
• Own only allows you to include other peoples abilities in the calculations. By default this is off, its use case is extremely limited to e.g. Breath of Eons-like abilities.

Everything here stays as its defaults for this case.

• Cast Spell ID refers to the spell id of the cast that should reset this counter
• Icon ID allows you to override the display icon - some abilities, especially trinkets, use different icons than what you may be used to.
• Has Dots surfaces a performance optimization under the hood. If none of the added abilities has dots, all periodic events will automatically be ignored.
  • naturally, enable this only if your ability actually has dots
• Has Hots works identical to Has Dots... but for hots.

Living Flame can do both damage and healing. For this example we only want to highlight damage done, so we need to find out its damage id.

How do we get ids?

• all tooltips in logs link to wowhead for the corresponding ability and tab. note the URL in the bottom, it includes the id:
  
• using Details and idTip, you can see it in the damage breakdown:
  

Which allows us to add this damage entry:

Now all that is left to do here is to actually load this ability for this spec, another performance optimization, but it also allows you to share entries, e.g. trinkets you have on multiple characters and/or specs.

And voilá, we have our first working entry!

You've already seen the default duration value of 5 seconds at the top before adding any entry - this now becomes problematic with a spammable ability such as Living Flame. It would make sense for it to reset its value on every cast.

For this, we have two options:

• use the id from the spellbook ingame. this works for most abilities but... let's say spells in World of Warcraft work in miraculous ways, so if you want to avoid confusions, just use logs.
  
• in logs, you'd have to swap to the Casts tab and look for Living Flame there, then proceed as above hovering or clicking the icon.
  

Now this works as expected: