Grid, QQ, And You

When I was a wee little healer and I had just dinged 70, the healing lead in my guild directed me to the raid frames addon Grid. It's extremely customizable and has pages of plugins to further tailor it to your preferences. Because it was the first addon I used for healing, I had not had any experience with the other options. I'm quite attached to Grid, so when I updated it after the patch and was unable to get my hots to display to my liking, I decided to try to make it work before starting to learn another healing addon. Wall of text inc!

Halp halp!

In particular I used GridStatusHots, a druid-centric plugin designed to show my hots on a target as colored squares that change colors based on how much time is left in their duration. For instance, Regrowth would appear in the bottom right corner as a dark green square at first, turning to light green halfway through it's duration, and yellow in the last 3 seconds. I was also using GridStatusLifebloom, a plugin specifically designed to show the number of stacks of LB on a target (given as red, yellow, and green for 1, 2, and 3 stacks respectively) and the time remaining. The problem is that both of these immensely useful addons now refuse to play nicely with the updated Grid.

Quick Fix

Lifebloom

StatusLB hasn't been updated in forever and a day, but it was an easy fix since Lifebloom is now restricted to one target only. Let's dive into the Grid settings and have a look. Using only the default Grid options, we can put a big Lifebloom icon in the center of the target's frame.

Status > Auras > Buff: Lifebloom > check Show if Mine, check Show Duration

Indicators > Center Icon > check Buff: Lifebloom

As you can see on my grid, it shows a white number indicating the stacks of LB, and the dark/light contrast in the icon shows the duration. Also I should add that if you want to watch other druid's hots in addition to your own there's no need to check Show if Mine. Personally I find it incredibly confusing, but I could see it being situationally useful if you had two druids keeping LB stacks on two targets and wanted to make sure you didn't overlap.

Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Wild Growth

This is where I would normally bust out StatusHots, but since that isn't behaving I've gone with GridIndicatorCornerIcons. What this does is give you eight spots, two in each corner, to place icons of your choice. The default shows things like dungeon role, lootmaster, buffs and raid marker, but I specifically want it to replace the colored squares I was using to track my hots.

Frame > Icon (Corners) > check Enable Icon Cooldown Frame

While you're on this page take the time to check the Configuration Mode box and move the Icon Top/Bottom Left/Right Corner sliders around to make your icons big enough to see. You can change how close or far away from the edges of the target frame they are with the Offset X/Y-Axis. Be sure to uncheck Configuration Mode before you move on, because it keeps those sample buffs visible.

Rejuve and Regrowth are the main hots that I want to keep track of, but since I've freed up a corner spot from LB I decided to add Wild Growth for shits and giggles. It's not in the default Auras list for Grid, but you can very easily add it!

Status > Auras > type Wild Growth under Add New Buff > click Okay

As you can see I've already done this and it's in the Auras list to the left. Now go to Buff: Rejuvenation, Regrowth, and Wild Growth and check Show if Mine and Show Duration like we did for Lifebloom. My plan is to put each hot in it's own corner, using the indicator the closest to the edge. For instance, Rejuve goes in the top right, using the right indicator of the two. 

Indicators > Icon (Corners) > Top Right Corner Icon (Right) > check Buff: Rejuvenation

Then do this for Bottom Left Corner Icon (Left) for Buff: Regrowth, and Bottom Right Corner Icon (Right) for Buff: Wild Growth. Now all of your hots should be set! Let's see it in action.

Three stacks of Lifebloom, Rejuve, Regrowth, and Wild Growth

Curse and Poison and Magic, oh my!

I haven't gotten a chance to see these bad boys in action since the patch. What I usually do is, using the default Grid colored squares, put them all in the upper left corner. 

Indicators > Top Left Corner > check Debuff type: Curse, Magic, Poison

It's unusual that they all occur at the same time, and if they do, you can set the levels of importance for each. All of the debuffs are set at a default priority of 90 out of 99. If you don't change it I'm pretty sure that they layer alphabetically. The only time I've really dealt with multiple debuffs is during Yogg-Saron, in which case I was first cleansing the debuff on top, then cleansing the second that was revealed after I cleansed the first. As in, see a curse on someone, decurse, the curse square is gone and now I see the poison square, abolish poison.

I think I can probably get along with this same system, but now that I have the nifty corner icons I'm thinking about using the top left right and left corner icons to show my poisons and curses. For now I will hold off; I don't particularly need to see the icons, since the color is enough of an indication, and I've made the icons pretty big so I can see the durations on my hots.

General Grid WTFery

If you are completely new to Grid, my advice to you is to turn off options. There are a ton of options because Grid is good for many different types of players. Think about what sort of buffs and debuffs your class cares about and how you would like to see that information displayed. Like I've outlined above, I want to see debuffs I can cleanse, and where my heals are and what they are doing.

General Recommendations

Starting with the Frame menu, you can start changing the look of Grid. I recommend enabling the Center Text 2 Indicator so that you have two rows of text to provide information. My Indicators look like this:

Border: Aggro Alert, Your Target

Healing Bar: Incoming Heals

Center Text: Unit Name

Center Text 2: Death Warning, Debuff: Ghost, Feign Death warning, Offline warning

The Layout menu offers more customization for the look of Grid, with the border color and the padding and spacing of the frames themselves. The scale slider is nice, because if you get all the proportions how you like them in the frame, you can scale the entire thing bigger. I cranked it up to 200% to take these screenshots.

TL;DR

That was my impromptu Grid customization guide. I am by no means an expert (as evidenced by the fact that I can't make StatusHots and Grid play nicely), but hopefully this helps someone with the same problem who is still clinging to their traditional addons. Some of us fear change, and that's ok. If you have any comments, suggestions (corrections!), or questions feel free to leave me a message.