Tapline – Heal over Time (HoT) Tracker for Warlock Life Tap

Tapline

Know when it is safe to Life Tap.

Life Tap turns your health into mana, and the question is never really whether you can afford the health. It is whether that health is coming back.

A heal over time ticking on you answers it. If a Renew or a Rejuvenation is running, the cost is already being paid back and you can tap without thinking about it. If nothing is on you, the same tap is just health you do not get back, and the second or third one in a row is how a warlock dies to a pull that was going fine.

That is all this addon is for. A row appears when a heal lands on you and counts down while it runs, sitting wherever you put it, so the answer is in the corner of your eye while you are casting. The sound is there for when you are not looking at all: a noise means a heal just landed, which means tap now.

A row for each heal that can be on you, Renew, Rejuvenation, Regrowth, Riptide, Wild Growth, with the spell's own icon, its name and a countdown.

Why the game draws these and not the addon

On the Forever client, whether an aura is on you is secret to addons in combat. Every read of one errors or comes back as a value an addon may hold but never look inside, the aura events carry secret tables, and the combat log is closed. No addon here can tell you what is ticking on you. That is not a matter of trying harder.

What the game will do is draw it for you. Handed the spell ids of a heal, it keeps a bar right through a fight and fills it from data the addon is not allowed to see. Tapline supplies the ids, the art and the position; the game supplies the truth. The alert works the same way: it is registered with the game, and the game plays it.

This leaves one honest limit. Tapline can show you a heal, never tell you about one. It has no idea which bar is filled at any moment, and nothing it does depends on that. Your eyes do the last step, which is the only version of this that works here.

Spell ids are learned, not assumed

Forever has spells of its own. Riptide and Wild Growth are new here, as are Penance, Lava Burst and Mangle. Ids taken from any other version of the game are guesses, and the game must be given ids rather than names.

So Tapline watches what lands on you. Any helpful aura whose name matches a heal it cares about has its spell id remembered and announced, kept account wide, so whichever character was standing near a druid teaches the rest. A heal it has no id for is not drawn at all, rather than left as a row that can never fill. /tapline learn takes a spell id or a shift-clicked link if you would rather not wait.

The look

The bars wear the Cooldown Manager's own art, copied at runtime and measured rather than guessed at: the fill, the frame, the spark, the icon's mask and the shadow round it, each stored as a share of the bar or icon it belongs to so it keeps its shape at any size. Where this client lacks a piece, one is made instead, and the self report says which you got.

Options

/tapline, or Esc → Options → AddOns → Tapline. Bar width, height and icon size; the gap beside the icon and between rows, both able to close to nothing; opacity for the bar, its background and the box behind the rows; scale; how many times a second the bars redraw; icon shadow depth and spark size; a frame around each bar (on by default) or plain bars with no copied art; a preview that runs the bars on a made-up timer so a layout can be judged without a healer; and the two sounds, one for a heal landing and one for it running out, with files this client refuses grayed out and a button to play them all.

Drag the bars to move them. There is a button on the minimap too: left click opens the options, right click shows or hides the bars, and you can drag it around the edge of the map. /tapline minimap hides it. Everything is saved per character; learned spell ids are shared by all of them.

If something looks wrong

/tapline debug, or the Self report button in the options, walks every call the addon leans on and prints what each one did. The whole report is written to TaplineDB.log a few seconds after every login, so it can be read off disk after a /reload.

What it is for

Life Tap costs health. Tapping while a heal is ticking on you costs nothing in the end; tapping with nothing on you is health you do not get back. Tapline shows you which of those you are in.

Installing

Unzip so that InterfaceAddOnsTaplineTapline.toc exists, then restart the game or /reload.

Setting it up, once

• Drag the bars somewhere you will actually see them mid-fight. Next to your cast bar or your health globe beats the corner of the screen.
• /tapline test fills every row on a made-up timer so you can size and place them without waiting on a healer. Turn it off when you are happy.
• Leave the sound on. It is the part that works when you are watching something else: a noise means a heal just landed, which means you can tap.

Using it

Glance at the bars before you tap. Something running means the health is coming back. Nothing running means think twice, especially for the second tap in a row.

You do not need to read which heal it is. Any of them is the answer.

A heal that never appears

Tapline needs the spell id, and on this client it learns them by watching. If a heal has never landed on you, it has no id for it and draws no row.

• Stand near someone who casts it, out of combat. It will learn it and say so.
• Or /tapline learn <spell id>.
• Or have them shift-click the spell into chat, copy the link, and /tapline learn <paste>.

/tapline learn on its own lists what is still missing.

Making it fit

Reporting a problem

/reload, then send TaplineDB.log from your SavedVariables folder, or paste the output of /tapline debug. It names exactly what this client refused, which is almost always the answer.

Discord

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