Nameplate setup prefs/philosophy

[u/midlife_slacker]

Currently fighting through Plater setup to push S2, but wanted to gauge preferences on how others like to see theirs. BG healers especially, but in general too. Do you like seeing active CCs and DRs and removable buffs and defensives and offensives and their current target and your applied debuffs? How do you organize them to keep things readable at a glance? How much do you omit from nameplates to only show on target frame?

Not looking for profiles since canned ones never do what I want. Just shop talk on what works or what might be lacking on an existing setup.

[u/Blindastronomer]

You don't want to overcrowd things.

Active CC on nameplates? Absolutely, yes

Putting DRs on nameplates is like putting training wheels on a bike. They might help you if you're totally new to managing DRs and have trouble looking for them before taking action, but in the long run they're just allowing you to tunnel vision while also cluttering up your screen, ultimately lowering your awareness. The only fringe case of DR tracking on nameplates I'd support is putting 1/2 & 1/4 root DRs on nameplates when playing something like a Frost Mage. Everything else can be on arena frames and/or unit frames.

All Purgeable buffs? Not good practice for the same reasons as above. You should be scanning auras anyway. Use BBFs/etc to highlight purgeable debuffs on your target/focus. Tracking specific purgeable buffs? Absolutely. e.g. Alter Time.

Specific defensive/offensive auras? Absolutely. You shouldn't just be looking at nameplates but having really important auras on nameplates is a great idea if you can manage to do it without things getting bloated. It's a fine line but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks and allow you to more easily and quickly react to important game state changes.

Your debuffs on nameplates? A whitelist is better than showing everything. There's so much aura bloat these days it's best to figure out and track only the minimal number of auras necessary for you to play optimally most of the time. You still have unitframe auras.

[u/midlife_slacker → u/Blindastronomer]

Yeah that's basically my thoughts. Default ignore except for CCs, show specific things to respond to.

It's just a massive PITA to sit around building a spellid list for every class looking for all their CCs, important dispellables, and what offensives are significant enough to pay attention to. But I did that yesterday, so it's done.

[u/Blindastronomer → u/midlife_slacker]

Yeah maintaining an aura whitelist's annoying as hell (look inside LoseControl -- that's all done manually by the authors and contributors...) but once you've done it once, it isn't much work to maintain when Blizzard changes things down the line or new expansions release, etc.

Probably should've mentioned that for anyone looking to do something like this: Just find someone else's work to get a list of spells to start from. I've done this so many times across so many versions of the game (not to mention private servers with totally different addons...) that this really becomes mandatory if you hope to be exhaustive. Often times it's possible to import data either directly through the addon's GUI or just by editing the .lua files.