[Archonyx]

(Re-posting in the public area for a few friends who wanted to see this)

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Got a couple new folks hopping on the bandwagon, so I thought I'd toss in a mini-guide to the interface here.

Here's what it looks like:
http://s.wowinterface.com/preview/pvw6559.png

Each raid member is represented by (duh) a box, colored by class. By default, it is quite compact, but you can adjust the overall size and the box sizes to be whatever you want.

Deficit Healing

At first blush, it looks and works like any other raidframe. The boxes display the color of the class as a health deficit bar. Put another way, the black/dark part is their health, the colored part is how much damage they've taken. This is highly recommended, as all of the bars are going to look roughly the same to you if everyone's at full health (as opposed to being a multi-colored mess). You only see color on the bars when something is happening, and thus you'll notice it faster. When combined with click-casting (typically through the add-on "Clique," this healing style is often referred to as "whack-a-mole" healing (you see the "mole" (color), you "whack" (click) it, it goes away).

This is nothing new to anyone who has set their raid UI to show "health deficit," and while it's great that Grid has it, it's not where the real power of the interface comes into play.

Indicators & Status

Take another look at the picture above. Each box has the following characteristics:

• Center Text (There is also an option for 2 lines of center text - not shown in this picture).
  
• Border - Notice that some of the frames have a 2 pixel white border around them.
  
• Health Bar - The main part of the frames - note that it's displaying health deficit, as explained above.
  
• Four Corners (top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right) - Note the tiny colored squares in the corners of some of the frames.
  
• Center Icon - You can see some of these in the picture, esp. in Group 2 (2nd column - by default each column is a group in grid)
  
• Frame Alpha - Notice that a number of the frames are faded out.

Here's the key to Grid: each of these indicators can be customized to correspond to anything you want. The events that "trigger" changes in these indicators are called "Statuses" in Grid. Here are some examples:

Unit health
Unit mana
Unit Name
Health Deficit
Low HP indicator
Low mana indicator
Range >20 (or 10, 40, 100 yds)
Aggro indicator
Incoming heal from someone else (and amount of heal)

And (most importantly) any buff or debuff (or family of buffs or debuffs) (pitbull calls these "auras") you can think of, with the option to add your own.

Before I go on, let me give you an example of a full setup so that I'm not confusing anyone. Here's how my Grid system works. Yours can/will/should differ, but I want to make sure everyone's following me so far.

• Center Text 1 - Player's Name (actually, the first 4 characters of it. This will be weird for about 5 minutes, until you realize that you only need 4 characters to figure out who someone is).
  
• Center Text 2 - Normally nothing. If the player has any HOTs on him, this displays the total number of HOTs. Otherwise, if the person takes damage, it shows numerically what their health deficit is (you can see an example of this in the picture above - the rogue with 1.0 displayed, for example, is down by 1000 health).
  
• Border Lights up white if the person is low on HP to attract my attention, making it more likely I heal them earlier.
  
• Health Bar - Default - shows the player's health deficit. You can also add in an incoming heal feature here, which ghosts in a graphical representation of what your (or someone else's) heal is about to do.
  
• Four Corners Each of my 4 corners lights up for something different. One lights up red if the player has aggro (= is being targeted by a mob). Another lights up green if someone else (but not me) is casting a heal on them so I know to cancel mine. A third lights up white if I have sacred shield on them. A fourth lights up if I have beacon on them, and then changes color over time as the beacon wears off (this last feature requires GridStatusHots, a separate add-on).
  
• Center Icon If someone takes a debuff that I can dispel (magic, disease, poison), an icon for that debuff will appear right on top of the health bar. I have this icon shrunk a bit from default so it doesn't obscure the health bar too much. I can then not only see that the person needs a cleanse, but also see what the hell I'm cleansing so I can make an informed decision of whether it's a priority or not. I have also added a LOT of custom debuffs to Grid (how to do this explained below) that I cannot dispel, but that I really need to know if they happen. Many are very fight specific. Example: KT's frost blast. These custom debuffs will also throw up an icon as well.
  
• Frame Alpha If a player is more than 40 yards from me (or dead or offline), they get grayed out. Grid checks range every .1 seconds, so I never even attempt to heal someone I can't reach.

You'll notice in that list that I have some indicators set up to do multiple things (e.g., the Center Text 2 shows both health deficit and number of hots). Grid lets you give each status a priority, so that if you have an indicator set up to display multiple statuses, it knows which to pick (remember, a "status" is just something in the game that Grid can track, like HP deficit or even something as simple as your class or your name).

Note that the color of the corner indicators is determined at the status level. This allows you to, for example, use one corner to let you know if someone has a debuff and have the color indicate to you what type of debuff it is.

The overall point, however, is that ALL of the above can be customized, tweaked, changed, whatever. The four corners in particular, combined with the border and the center icon give you a LOT of ability to display information however you feel.

Interacting With Grid

If you're coming from an add-on like HealBot, you'll have noticed something by now: there's no way to interact with the Grid display, no way to customize what happens when you click on it, or mouse over it, or whatnot. This is on purpose: Grid is a replacement for your raid frames only: so if you left click on a player's name, it's just as if you clicked on their default UI frame or pitbull frame or whatever. If left clicking targets the person in your normal UI, it will do that for grid too.

Therefore, most people combine Grid with an addon called Clique, which allows you to map spells, macros, /targetunit, the right click menu, whatever to different mouse buttons (or combinations of mouse buttons and KB presses). Others instead prefer mouseover macros. Both of these have great synergy with grid. For example, my left click is holy light. Any time I left click on any player frame, it casts holy light on them (middle click is target unit for me). So with grid, I can easily see who needs heals, and then just click, click, click, click .... whack-a-mole.

Or you can just have grid be your raid frames, and you interact with them the same way you do already with your normal raid frames. It's up to you.

Adding Custom Debuffs

Grid by default can show you if someone's taken a curse, magic, poison, or disease debuff (and show you a corner square or center icon), but it can also show you debuffs that aren't classified (e.g., Mind Flay, Demon Chains, Ice Tomb, Garrotte, etc.) Here's how:

1) You can add your own personal selection of buffs and debuffs to Grid.
Grid -> Status -> Auras -> Add New Buff/Debuff -> Type in exact name like Last Stand
If you misspell it, it will not work.

2) Once they have been added, you can select to display them however you see fit. Example:
Grid -> Frame -> Center Icon -> Check Buff: Last Stand

Also, (and this part rocks), you can filter out debuffs so that they don't light up Grid.

Add a (de)buff to Grid and hide it by not attaching it to a indicator (e.g. make sure you have not checked it somewhere in the "Frame" section of Grid's configuration menu). So you basically do #1 above without doing #2.

E.g., you normally can dispel magic and you have Grid set up to show you anytime someone takes a magic debuff. But those damn mages keep crying wolf with their Arcane Blast debuffs and you can never tell when you should be cleansing them.

Grid -> Status -> Auras -> Add New Buff/Debuff -> type in: "Arcane Blast"

Then go to
Grid -> Frame

and make sure Debuff: Arcane Blast is not checked anywhere. Bingo, no more arcane blast.

A Final Note

All of this sounds complicated at first, but no more so than many other add ons. Once you're all set up, the complexity drops to near nothing, and you're left with an incredibly powerful, yet lean raiding interface that puts all the useful information you'll need in front of you in a really small area so you can take it all in at once. This is one of my favorite things about this interface: you don't have to look all over the screen to find various bits of data: it's all there in 4-5 square inches. This has the added benefit of speeding up your reaction time by minimizing the distance your cursor has to travel to heal different folks.

[Phin]

tell em to get GridRaidStatusDebuffs. it's awesome. auto-adds debuff types to the frames (i typically use center icon for most), so you don't have to hand type in every single debuff of every mob.

[Novell]

^^