I have been a long time Healbot user and proponent. Recently I got an email from a reader Nebelmond that inspired me to give Grid another try. Usually, I use an add-on for a while before I write a guide and review, while I have used grid for about 3 weeks now I think that Nebelmond (who is German) wrote an excellent druid specific walk-through in his email to me so I figured I’d just pass it along. Enjoy.

Grid (and its configuration) differs from other add-ons and that makes it hard getting used to it. But investing maybe 1h of your time trying to understand it will pay off many, many times over.

I use Grid in combination with Clique. Almost everything I do in a raid is done with click-casting. The big advantage of click-casting is the tremendous speed increase while healing. This might not be obvious at the first glance but not having to manually change the target to cast a spell on it will save a lot of time and makes you react much quicker.

First of all I would like to point you to a very good Grid introduction at wowinsider.com where they explained pretty much the main concepts of Grid and its configuration. See: http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/01/22/raid-rx-unkicking-butt-a-grid-story/

With all those basics in mind you should make a list what you would like to see in Grid. Imho, this step is very important because otherwise you will be overwhelmed with all the features and information it has to offer. My List looks like this, in a raid I want to see for each group/raid member:

  • which class is it
  • how much HP it has lost
  • has it aggro
  • is it low on mana
  • is it dead
  • is MotW missing
  • is it poisoned
  • is it cursed
  • is it innervated
  • is it in range
  • is my regrowth on it
  • what is the duration of my regrowth
  • is my rejuvenation on it
  • what is the duration of my rejuvenation
  • is my lifebloom on it
  • how many lifeblooms are on my stack
  • what is the duration of my lifebloom stack
  • how many hots in total are on it

To achieve that I had to install several Grid-plugins which added some desired status and indicators. These are:

  • GridIndicatorText3 (adds a third text row to a unitframe)
  • GridSideIndicators
  • GridStatusHots
  • GridStatusHotstack
  • GridStatusLifebloom
  • GridStatusMissingBuffs

The following are some examples of my configuration in fancy action screenshots. Note that every indicator, color, whatever you will see is customized. That’s the way it works. The out-of-the-box default configuration of Grid is only usable to a certain extend. You have to know want you want and how it should look for your particular needs

(remember the list).

“out of combat.jpg”- shows raidmembers missing MotW with a green border

“low mana.jpg”-shows players with low mana (below 1k) with a blue border

“combat1.jpg”-shows:

  • aggro as red border and red dot on the left side
  • shows *my* lifebloom stacks as dot in the upper left corner (blue dot means one, yellow dot means two, green dot means three lifeblooms)
  • shows *my* regrowth as white dot in the upper right corner
  • upper text “4-8″ means: duration of my lifebloomstack on that
  • raidmember lasts for 4 seconds, there are 8 hots in total on that player
  • lower text “6-8″ means the same for regrowth

There is so much more in my Grid config which isn’t shown in the screenshots but I think this gives you a first impression. Hope this helps. Good luck! :-)

Related Links

Download Grid and Plug-ins
The Grid Wiki