Addon Spotlight: SmartBuff
Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here.
Buff smart: use SmartBuff. This addon is pretty comprehensive and crazy configurable, and is designed to facilitate and partially automate the buffing process. Here's how it works:
Check off which buffs you want to keep up, on what classes, main hand/off hand (if applicable), and when you want it to remind you (in combat, out of combat, 10 seconds remaining, etc).
Under the specified conditions, SmartBuff will put a reminder up on your screen (also configurable, of course) telling you who needs what buffs.
Now simply click the SmartBuff button, or scroll your scroll wheel (if you have that option set), and the necessary buffs will magically be applied for you!
It doesn't get much easier than that. SB also supports setting up profiles, for PvP vs. raids vs. parties, for instance.
I do have a few minor gripes about SmartBuff. It would be nice if it could recognize when I was on a vehicle, and stop bugging me for buffs under those conditions. Sure, "/sb toggle" isn't hard (turns the mod off/on), but then I have to remember to toggle it back on, and remembering to buff is the reason I have SB in the first place. It doesn't do a very good job of recognizing when you've manually re-applied a buff, as I often do with Inner Fire when I have a spare moment. It also used to frequently double-buff for buffs that just recently went raid-wide (like Prayer of Shadow Protection), though that seems to be fixed in the latest version.
That's another good thing about SB: It's under constant development. The author is very responsive to bugs and feature requests, and I've never seen big issues stay around for long. New revisions are usually made pretty quickly in response to patches changing things.
There's more to the mod than I've talked about here, but basically: if you want it to be easier for you to buff, or if you're always forgetting buffs, give SmartBuff a spin. I think you'll like it.
Download Smartbuff at WoWInterface
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