Another healing mod thread :)

Specifically in regard to paladins I'd like to share my experiences
with healing/buff mods and hear those of others.

1) Healbot, currenly what i run for healing in groups/battlegrounds

I have left click as flash and right as holy light, as well as mouse 5
for cleanse, this works great and makes dispelling and healing a
breeze. I've set up the interface to show a 2x20 grid of player health
bars and in a 40 man raid it uses only a fraction of my screen due to
the small bars which I have set to become completely transpearant when
the player is 95% or greater health.
This mod shows incomming heal estimates as well as agro alerts in the
form of a >>highlight<< which can help when pre-healing too.
Gripes I have with this is that it's useless for paladin buffs, at
least in the manner in which I cast them, there is space for 10
different class/buff combinations so the best I can use it is to put
for example blessing of salv goes on mages, blessing of wisdom goes on
priests etc. This is flawed because dps warriors want salv not kings
etc..etc.. spec isn't factored in. Also if i re-buff someone with a
different, prefered blessing then the mod will indicate they do not
have the assigned class buff and overwrite my manual blessing with the
designated one, for this reason I have disabled the buff function.
This is especially noticable in a battleground where NOone wants salv.
another gripe i have with it is that if i'm in a party of 5, the bars
are not positioned first downward to form column one then once
reaching 20 members in a raid, instead a 20 man would be 2 columns of
10 and a 5 person party is 2 columns of 3 and 2 which is ugly.
While (sort of) on the subject on easy-blessings I've tried a mod
called pallypower which numerous people have recommended, to me it
seems to do nothing more than the auto-buff function of healbot but
with the added bonus of a hiddeous screen-space consuming interface. I
guess what I'm looking for is a mod that would allow me to save the
blessing for an induvidual player in a history of sorts and allow
buffing based on this, for example "bigmadcow" the dps warrior wants
salv, I give it to him and then the mod remembers I did that, doesn't
pester me to put kings on him, and also doesn't put salv on
"beatintome" the warrior tank, and perhaps doesn't have some
gloriously gigantic timer on my screen. Possibly just a pop-up
reminder when there is less than 5 mins left on the buff or
something..
I'm just suprised that pallypower doesn't do anything like this at all
and I'm struggling to find an alternative.
On a slightly different tangent, what's the story with grid? I hear
nothing but good comments about this mod and i've installed it a
couple of times, but it only remains in my mod folder for an hour
before I get fed up with it. It's nice that it shows the icon of the
debuff on the player, I can see that being really useful, so for
dispelling it's great. The thing is that it's enormous for a dispel
mod compared to a simple color-change on healbot or a popup on
decursive. The healing aspect of the mod is what gets me, how on earth
is it possible to monitor the health of players by looking at a teeny-
tiny color tint on an already color-tinted square? the difference
between a tank with 5k/18k life and a tank with 1k/18k life is a
matter of 1-2 pixels and in the display, that to me seems very
dangerous because a tank can go from 1 pixel to no pixels in a single
swing, at least with standard healthbars there is a lot better visual
representation of the % health a given player is at. Perhaps I've
missed something or perhaps people use it by simply reading the %
integers within the display, I'd love to hear i'm wrong because I'm
fond of the concept.
Pitbull (and other unit frames) I can never seem to configure these in
an astheticly pleasing manner, the ability to shrink the bars is there
sure, but when scaled to the same size as the standard blizzard unit
frames they are less easy to read. To make them as easily readable as
their official counterpart I've needed to scale them to the point
where they occupy approx 50-70% more screen estate. In particular pet
and party target frames occupy a large portion of the screen, the pet
health bars cannot be locked under the players the belong to in the
same manner as the blizzard version. I would LOVE to see people's
screenshot's of their own pitbull unit frame configurations as I do
like the idea of the mod but can't seem to make it look anything but
clunky and obtrusive. I've googled "wow custom interface" and so on a
number of times to discover some truely hideous interface
configurations people play with which makes me wonder how much they
value the appearance compared to the functionality.

for referance here is a shot of a slightly older version of what i'm
running with currently

http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/1550/pvpnc3.png

Modifications I've made since include changing all the buttons on
screen to be circular and the minimap is now a square with the bottom
left corner rounded off, and all buttons aside from the tracking
button removed (including the + and - which can be substituted for
using the mouse wheel)

I'll upload an updated shot when I get home If I get time after
Zul'Aman failing that on the weekend.

this should give you an indication of the approach I've taken, maximum
screen estate and all the functionality of more cluttered interfaces.