Hekili New Year!

Aloha all!  I hope y'all are enjoying WoW in patch 8.1.  My personal opinion is that the game is improving a fair amount but that 8.2 is going to be the real gamechanger when we get a new Azerite system that is hopefully more interesting and engaging.  As for 8.1, a lot of specs got some updates and having more Azerite Powers once the new gear is available is going to shake up the balance of things.  

With that said, I want to confirm that I'm continuing to do my best to support as many specializations as possible (DPS and tanks, of course) and that hopefully, you've found that priority lists have been kept up to date within reasonable timeframes.

That's the main goal from here on out, to continue to support the existing specializations, update priority lists when there are necessary updates, and to squish bugs as they're discovered.

Issues That Survived 2018

While I've tried to follow-through on as many announced goals as possible, there were a few things that I had hoped to resolve that are not yet done.  I'm hoping that I'll make more headway on these issues within the next month or so.  These issues are:

1.  Arcane Mage.  To really support Arcane, I need the addon to have a better grasp of the distinct phases in the Arcane priority.  While it seems straightforward, one of the issues with an addon like this vs. SimulationCraft is that SimulationCraft knows why its sim pushed a certain button.  The addon does not.  You may have even pressed the same button that the addon recommended, but you may not have done it for the same reason -- maybe you hit the button by accident, maybe you're expecting something that the addon can't forecast.

2.  Fire Mage.  I did a recent pass on Fire that has had reasonably good results, but it turns out that this specialization is more sensitive to the distinction between what occurs at the start of a cast, what happens at the end of a cast, and what happens when the spell actually impacts.  Additionally, because you can Fire Blast while casting, the addon will need to better identify what spells are in-flight.  I can go into more depth on this if people express some interest, because it's actually fairly interesting for modeling reasons.

3.  Keybind Detection.  I am experimenting with a couple of new and different approaches to keybinding detection and am hoping to have a better, more consistent solution available in the near future.  While being able to manually set keybindings for your abilities via /hekili > Abilities is a reasonable stopgap, the real problem is the way that WoW recycles action slots and how different addons may use them differently.  Additionally, things like shapeshifts and stealth may change your action bar paging, which changes which binding you may want to reference for an ability (maybe Backstab is "1" outside of Stealth but "2" in Stealth).  One idea is to manually parse the conditions for your action bar paging rather than assuming that you've organized things in an expected way.  Another idea is to just wait to identify keybindings in different forms/stances/stealth until you've actually swapped to the form, which would be reactive and slower but would be fine after your first fight after logging in or reloading.

Projects for 2019

There have been a number of features requested recently, and here are a few that are on my list.  This isn't a promise to implement them within a short timeframe, but these are things that I want to accomplish this year when time allows (i.e., I'm not bogged down with patch changes or other hurdles).

1.  Display Anchoring.  I'd like to make it pretty easy to anchor the primary display to your Personal Resource Display or other elements in your UI, and then allow you to anchor the other bits to your primary display.  The biggest hurdle here is similar to the issue with keybindings -- there's some inconsistency with different kinds of UI mods and addons.  I either have to manually accommodate the most common nameplate addons and then maintain that, or come up with another, better solution.  And then I have to make the options for that comprehensible.

2.  Sharing.  I'd still like to make it easier to share update your own priorities and display layouts.  While it's not that hard to do, there are some issues like people tending to edit the default priorities and then losing their changes when the addon is updated.  I plan on adding a warning in those situations, with a prompt to create a copy of the priority instead of editing the default.

3.  Options Layout.  For BfA, I made the design choice to move Priorities, Abilities, and Gear and Trinkets out to the left-hand navigation in the addon's options.  However, each of these sections is actually sensitive to the specialization you're looking to edit.  For instance, you could disable Vanish for Outlaw Rogues but leave it enabled when you're playing Subtlety.  I plan on moving any spec-bound options into the specialization's section going forward.

4.  Target Swapping / Cycling.  Some specializations have started to make liberal usage of the target_if syntax in SimulationCraft, with recommendations to target the lowest health enemy with Nemesis (for example) or to refresh a DoT on the enemy whose DoT has the lowest duration.  The addon's dirty secret is that it doesn't really create a profile for each active target that would allow for that sort of logic.  It'll track your buffs/debuffs, your target's buffs/debuffs, and then keeps track of the number of each buff/debuff applies to other targets.  Since there is no duration information tracked, the addon can't suggest swapping to specific target.  It can only recommend swapping to a different target.  To that end, I'd like to improve the aura detection, the time to death calculations, and possibly add indicators that you can enable/disable when an ability should be used on a certain target.  If you don't want the addon to tell you to swap targets, then you'll have that option as well.

5.  Borders.  Right now, the way the addon's pixel borders are added technically makes each icon slightly larger than the stated measure.  In the long run, I want to make the addon's border system more consistent with other addons so that if you make a 64x64 pixel primary icon in Hekili and place it next to a 64x64 pixel WeakAura icon, that the icons are identically sized.

Other Stuff

I have received more requests for adding the DPS priorities for healer specializations and I'll say that, at this time, I'm not opposed to adding them.  The biggest issue is finding time and then leveling/boosting characters to test them.  So you may see Discipline or Mistweaver added eventually, but only if other, higher priority projects haven't taken up my time.

Additionally, I'd really like to get a website online for the addon this year.  I'd like to have a good forum for sharing/updating priorities, and to help refer people to good WeakAuras that pair well with different classes/specializations.  It would also be good to get an actual reference online (and in-game!) so that if you're editing priority lists, you can see what options are actually available.  That's planned, but no progress to note at this time.

THANK YOU

Once again, I just want to say thank you to everyone who has supported the addon over the past year.  I'm willing to call myself out and say that I've posted fewer updates than I'd planned, and often this was because I preferred to put the time it'd take to write something into developing the addon itself.

As we start the new year, I'm going to go ahead and add another tier of patronage for those who want to contribute more support.  The current level of support enables me to basically buy one day off in a month, in addition to doing a lot of coding in the evenings and on weekends.  If support increases, I'll be able to allocate more time to the addon by taking another day or two off from my 9-5.  As the $10 tier is added, I just want to add that all levels of support are greatly appreciated!