Can't Heal You

Thanks! I'm very glad it's being helpful for people. :-)

Okay... the README explains this, but it looks like a lot of people aren't reading it, so here it is up here:

Can't Heal You works by watching for SPELLCAST_SENT events. WoW sends these when you cast a spell, and they include the name of the spell and who the target is. Those events are the only ones in WoW that tell who the target of a spell is, and CHY needs to know that, so it knows who to whisper.

When you're out of range for a spell, and you hit the button to cast it, WoW simply pops up an "out of range", and never even tries to cast the spell, so no SPELLCAST_SENT happens. Thus, Can't Heal You doesn't know who the target of the spell was, and can't whisper them. It also doesn't know what spell you're trying to cast without that.

What it can do is whisper someone when the spellcast does start, but the target moves out of range before it finishes. For example, if a priest hits Greater Heal on someone in range, gets the cast bar, and then they move out of range before the cast time is over, that person will get whispered.

I could add a slash command to test if a target is in range of a spell and whisper them if they're not, but it would need to know the spell name too, so you'd have to have a bunch of macros like:

/chy Holy Light
/cast Holy Light

I thought about doing that originally, but decided that (a) it would be a huge pain for the healers to set up, and (b) it would mean they couldn't use Healbot, Clique, or any of the other nice healing addons, since those don't do macros.

I actually did write the code for it and tested it: my tester convinced me to take it out, since she found it too confusing, and liked using Healbot anyway. So if you guys would like me to put that in, I can. But that's the only way that it can whisper people when they're already out of range. :-(

By the way, though, Grid and Healbot can both be set up to show you when people are beyond a certain range, so at least you won't waste time trying to heal them when they're already out of range. If they do run out of range after you start casting a spell, CHY will whisper them for that. So, while that's not an ideal solution, it may be a little better for you...

Are you getting any error messages? I don't have any way to test on the EU client myself, unfortunately.

If you're feeling brave, you can open "CantHealYou.lua", change the line

local debugmode = false

to:

local debugmode = true

and give try buffing a player in your party who's not in line of sight. You should get a ton of debug messages that way, and if you could send me those, that may help greatly in figuring out the problem.

New version uploaded: 1.6. The usual "it may be a few hours before Curse approves it" applies.

The new version adds flood prevention -- by default, it won't whisper someone again if it's been less than 10 seconds since they were last whispered. You can use:

/chy interval <seconds>

to change this: for example, "/chy interval 30" would wait 30 seconds. If you give an interval of zero, you'll get the old behavior.

To prevent the data being kept about who's been whispered from growing forever, and as a sort of "safety feature", Can't Heal You forgets all the timers it's keeping whenever you enter or leave combat. Thus, if you just tried to buff someone, and they weren't in line of sight, and then combat starts, and you try to heal them, they'll still get another message, even though the interval hasn't gone by yet. Hopefully, this won't be too annoying to anyone.

For 2.0, I'm planning on adding a configuration GUI (the slash commands will remain, though, for those who prefer them). I'll probably also add an "exclusion list" then, where you can list spells you don't want to ever whisper people for. It may be a few weeks before I have 2.0 out, though.

Happy Healing!

I've been working on the spam-limiting feature, and think I should have it up today or tomorrow, once my main tester gets to play with it and make sure it works satisfactorily.

In the meantime, though, for those concerned with spam, I discovered something in the course of my own testing that should have been obvious to me -- since Can't Heal You watches for spellcasts being sent to the server, it won't whisper anyone more often than the global cooldown.

So, if you're pounding a key over and over to try to get a heal off, your target won't get five messages in a second or anything like that -- they'll get one, then they'll get another 1.5 seconds later (or as little as 1.0 seconds later, if you have a ton of haste rating).

I'm still putting in the throttling, but even without it, it looks like it's not too horrible. For those of you who prefer the old behavior, you'll be able to set the wait time to zero to get it.

It'd take a lot more sophistication for the addon to know the difference between a healing spell and a buff. I'll look into it, but I'm thinking that to do that with full reliability, I'd probably have to make a list of every healing spell (or buff) in the game, then have the addon check the spell you're casting to see if it's one of them (or isn't, if I list the buffs).

It might be possible to have it look at the spell description and try to figure out from that whether it's a healing spell or not... but doing that each time a spell is cast could get expensive in terms of CPU.

I suppose I could add a manual config option, where you could list spells that you don't want it to activate for. That might not be too bad. If I can't find a good way to make it do it automatically, I'll add that to the todo list for it.

Thanks!

I've uploaded 1.5, which adds a slash command:

/chy on

/chy off

-- turn on and off the whisper feature

/chy los Imma let you finish, but I'm tryin' to cast %s on you, and you're outta my line of sight!

/chy range Get back here so I can %s you!

"los" to set the "not in line of sight" message. "range" to set the "out of range" message. They're both global right now, so it'll change it for all your characters. I may make a way to set it per-character later on. For either one, "%s" is the placeholder for where you want it to put the name of the spell you're casting.

Heckler, I'll see about adding flood prevention for the next update. :-)

Oh -- it'll be a while before you see 1.5, since Curse checks addons for nasty stuff by hand before releasing them. It may be tomorrow, depending on how late they're working on it.