It also prevents me from having to re-invent the wheel, so kudos to Starryknight! Instead, I thought I would share some highlights of the guide, and my own tips and tricks to using Healbot Continued.

Many of you who read part one of the Healbot Continued saga have asked if this addon is suitable for PvP healing. As it turns out, Healbot Continued has a skin pre-loaded with battlegrounds in mind. Called the Alterac Valley skin, it will build a frame that is well suited to healing your battleground group, but wait, there's more! Healbot Continued has a built-in range finder, which will fade out individual players' bars if they are out of your healing range. This is a great way to avoid wasting heals, although it can't save you from losing a heal because someone leaves your maximum range while you're midway through a healing spell.

I chuckled the first time I heard Watchkeeper Gargolmar yell out, "Heal me! Quickly!" in Hellfire Ramparts. It reminded me of some players in PvP who don't keep their AddOns in check, emoting '<insert annoying player name> calls out for healing!' every time their health precipitates into killing blow range. Here's a tip: if you want to be healed in PvP, don't ask for it. Unless it's an Arena team and you're communicating your every move to your teammates, don't use emotes, don't yell, and don't rant in chat about not getting heals. If you do that, your chances of getting a heal drops considerably. I'll confess that I sometimes deliberately ignore players who have that emote automated. I mean, at least get creative about it, right? If the emote went something like, "<insert dying player's name> is about to die! He pathetically grovels for help! Healing would help him get back into the fray!" healers might consider healing you. Maybe.

Healers don't have it easy. They are the unsung heroes of Battlegrounds. They are the silent partners in Arenas. They are the players in the background that help make things work. If DPS classes are the stars, healers are the supporting act. In fact, if a healer is doing his job right, he shouldn't attract any attention at all. Instead, the only thing you're supposed to see is an invincible force of destruction -- usually *cough* an MS Warrior -- mashing faces with impunity. The best healers are almost invisible, healing from the sidelines, letting their allies do the dirty work and racking up the killing blows. And when they do get noticed, some healers can be pretty resilient themselves, being almost as difficult to take down -- if not more -- than their charges. Here are a few rules to mull over when dealing with healers in PvP.

Healbot Continued uses the embedded Lua scripting language to reconfigure information vital to healers. This retrofitting presents an easily manageable interface that helps you maintain a greater degree of situational awareness. For many of you wondering how this works, it's simply a matter of our program, Healbot Continued in this case, listening to the World of Warcraft client for events. In combat, information is literally flying back and forth between the player (client side) and the game server (server side). Healbot Continued simply listens in and picks out information it wants. This is true of almost all addons, which sift through event information for a variety of purposes. Healbot Continued is easily one of the more powerful addons around, as it goes above and beyond what is normally expected of healing addons.

In expectation of the coming patch (though it might still be a while), Curse has posted a compiled list of all their known 2.1 compatible addons. Unfortunately, that list is of Curse-only addons, so while both KLHThreatmeter and Healbot are on there, lots of other high profile addons are not.

That doesn't mean they won't be 2.1 compatible, however-- it just means that, well, in most cases we don't know. Titanbar (an addon I live by) was updated after the last big patch, but hasn't yet been updated for the new one. It's the same story with Auctioneer. CTMod hasn't mentioned 2.1 yet, but they update pretty quickly, and even if they don't get a new version out before the patch appears, it's very likely the latest version (v2.001) will still work.

Since I'm not an addon creator, I'm not sure how much functionality is changing in 2.1, but from what I can make of the UI Forum, it won't be nearly as much as the expansion patch did. There may be a few problems (ui.worldofwar.net has a short list of known problematic addons on the PTR), but for the most part, we can probably expect 2.1's addon changes to go pretty smoothly. You'll still have to manually enable your addons (since they'll all be out of date), but chances are none of them will be really broken.