Elemental Love Letter: Event Horizon
Dear Event Horizon,
Let me count the ways in which I love thee…..
Or not, I don’t feel particularly poetic at the moment. Most caster DPS will extoll the virtues of Quartz castbar (with built in latency indicator for dealing with lag.) If you are raiding, you are likely to have DBM, Bigwigs or DXE installed. I don’t usually cover addons because I’m not a huuuge customiser of them, and I find I only need a select few. However EventHorizon was something of a game changer for me, when it came to managing DoTs. If you’re already happy with your DoT Timer you may not find Event Horizon useful, but for me it visually lays out several separate bits of information and shows how they interact with each other.
“When I was a young waaaarthoooog Shadow Priest.”
I had a lot of trouble timing my casts so that I was able to refresh my expired dots in a timely fashion, manage my Mind Flay AND keep on top of my Mind Blast cooldown. I have a limited capacity for information like that. The more I had to think about managing my spells, the less I was able to focus on my placement, my up time, and any additional movement issues or tasks that the fight entailed. So sometime last year I discovered a little addon called EventHorizon.
Originally written by Tiff, the addon has been taken over by a lovely chap called Taroven and is now called EventHorizon Continued. As you can see from the image above, the addon is designed to keep track of a few minimal things. It has been updated since the above screenshot, but I wanted to use a simpler screenshot to explain the basics.
The white line represents what is happening now. Greyed out areas respresent cooldowns, while blue bars respesent DoTs. The little dash at the top of the blue bar represents the tick of the dot. The second white line is the global cooldown marker. Everything except the white line moves from Right to Left, with Left being the past and right being the future. Additional features include markers that show when you need to recast a dot with a cast timer (more applicable for Shadow Priests recasting Vampiric Touch, for example.)
For my Shadow Priest alt, this addon has been a revelation because it shows these cooldowns and counters in relation to everything else. My eyes tend to glaze over when I’m presented with a ton of numbers to compare, and I don’t have the extra focus to spare to figure that stuff out on the fly.
Dead…space?
Dead space is when you are not casting. Or it is time when you are Lightning Bolting when your Lava Burst is ready to cast. You probably spend more time between casts than you think. I don’t think there is another addon that shows you those gaps so explicitly. I’m so used to this addon now that if we’re in combat and it isn’t filled up with grey and blue and green I get slightly panicky.
Above is the new version of Event Horizon Continued, as of 3.3.3 it now applies Haste to Flame Shock, shows Fire Nova cooldowns, and clearcasting charges (on the same bar.) It’s all very well to have dot timers running down, but seeing their lengths relative to each other makes a huge difference for me. It has enabled me to judge Chain Lightning and Lightning Bolt use more accurately, and to see when I’ve left a gap between my Lava Burst Cooldown and actually casting it again.
No Easy GUI and No Bloat
The author of the addon has made the decision not to add a pretty GUI config, and for a very good reason – this works, out of the box, for all specs and classes. It would not be nearly so configurable or flexible if he had to add a GUI to allow one to make adjustments.
This won’t track Thunderstorm Cooldowns, unless you configure it to.
This is not a TotemTimer. It won’t track Grounding Totem or Fire Elementals.
This will not track your watershield or your Flametongue Weapon.
Despite being immensely clever in the way it presents information, the addon author likes to avoid bloat, so it generally tracks spells that are essential for your rotation, rather than useful cooldowns. Only recently were Elemental Mastery, Fire Nova and Clearcasting added into the mix. It can track additional procs and internal cooldowns, but you will have to learn how to use the config file to do so. Thankfully the addon author has created a 4 part guide to Event Horizon, and how to customise it.
More on Event Horizon
EventHorizon @ WowInterface
EventHorizon Course 1: A Brief Introduction
EventHorizon Course 2: What EH Is Not
EventHorizon Course 3: Pimping EH
EventHorizon Course 4: Mucking With the Class Config
Hrm, I’m currently using Forte, specifically because I was frustrated at the lack of GUI customization. I see the allure of having it all in one box. Now that you’ve pointed me to the guide on how to config… I may give Eventhorizon another shake for shadow priesting.
Nice article! You’d be amazed at how a lot of people don’t understand why I do the things I do to EH.
Just some fair warning to readers, I haven’t updated those guides in quite a while. One of these days I’ll have to get those updated. If you think there might be an easier way to do something, it’s always a good idea to ask in the comments section of the EH WoWInterface page. I’m always pretty quick on the reply there.
Some how your comment got dropped in the spam box, sorry about that! Thanks for the pointer about your articles. I haven’t tried customising it myself because it already tracks what I need it to, especially now you’ve added in Fire Nova/Clear Casting/Elemental Mastery tracking out of the box
I’m glad you’re giving it a try, please be aware the info Taroven has put is a little out of date, but he is always happy to take suggestions and so on
Heh, figured something might’ve been up when my comment didn’t appear right away.
Speaking of Elemental Mastery, I needs me a test subject if you happen to have some tier 10 handy. That little issue with the EM cooldown needs to die, preferably before the people that have been bugging me about it drive me insane.
Get in touch via email or WoWI PM if you’re interested, and I’ll walk you through it. All I need is a couple of screenshots at a target dummy, won’t take more than five minutes of your time.
Sent you an email, should have time to help you out on Friday or over the weekend.
[...] either simpler to understand, or present existing information in a more logical fashion. For me Event Horizon is a Paradigm mod, and I’m sure I’d be a little lost without, because it presents time [...]