Come get the Vuhdo

Everyone who has addons has a few they can't live without. My absolute most favorite addon is Vuhdo. It's a comprehensive healing/decuring/raidframe addon. It tracks HoTs and debuffs and raid icons, and of course the health of all your raid members.

Setting it up as a first time user can be a little bit intimidating. Tam at righteous orbs used to have a guide, but the blog is defunct and the guide was a little old. Here's my version after the jump!

The first thing that you'll notice when setting up Vuhdo is that it has a graphical interface that is quite different than most addons.

It has tabs on the bottom and buttons on the side. The tabs define a general area  that you are changing and the buttons go into more detail. This is the first page you come to. See the button that says "Lock panels"? When you're all done you'll want to go back and click that.

When you first install Vuhdo, all your frames will be on top of each other in the corner and look extra confusing. You can "x" out of most of those frames just fine on the move tab. Just save the one that shows your character.

One of the main features of Vuhdo is that you can click cast without the addition of the clique addon. The spells tab allows you to set up the click casting along with key binds. The best strategy that I have come up with for setting up click-binds is to put instant cast spells on just click with no modifier (ie alt, ctrl, shift) and things with cast times to clicking while holding down a modifier key.

Did that make no sense? Okay I click on a raid frame to cast rejuvination, and hold down alt and click the same frame to cast regrowth. I hold down shift and click the frame to remove a curse.

Keep in mind what your push to talk key for any voice chat programs are. If you use ctrl to push to talk, then that might be a bad modifier key for you to use as you would queue up to speak every time you use that healing spell.

The spells tab also has the buff tracker. It lets you track weather or not your group has the buffs that you can provide. It'll catch duplicates such as mark of the wild and kings. It's somewhat useful, but not needed if you can monitor your buffs on your own.

Most of how the addon looks on your screen will be controlled on the panels tab. A little trick to use while adjusting the look of the addon is to go to the "Move" tab and click on test once you select the size group that you are normally in.

I heal a lot of 5 and 10 man groups, so I like to arrange everything so that it will look good with either group size. But you press the button, hit test and when you are editing the rest of the panels, it will test it with a "group" that size.

The sizing and bars buttons change most of the appearance of the frames. Sizing is controlled by sliders and can be used to make what ever size boxes you want.  The custom settings drop down menu "Custom health bar bouquet" is where you can change what color the boxes are displayed in. I personally like class colors so that when I pug I can tell what type of dps I have and who's the tank very quickly. Also it's just pretty that way.

If you are a healing class that uses HoTs at all the HoT icon button is also an important one. It lets you arrange how it displays either a colored block or a small icon of the healing spell. This is a very useful feature since it will also count down how long the spell has left so that you can refresh it before it runs out. It can also track some not HoT spells such as Disc priest bubbles and Beacon of Light.

That's the basics of Vuhdo! The best way to figure out how it works though is to just play with all the different settings to find what you like best.

Happy healing!