Disclaimer: this writeup comes from experimenting with Grid and Healbot earlier this year (up to about March). If there have been improvements since then, they will not have been included in this post. If you know of a particular improvement that has since implemented, please let me know and I will edit in a comment to reflect the change. For example, if I say that Grid doesn’t let you put your tanks together, and you know that there has been a change or a new module to change this, let me know and I’ll include it.


However, with the many features constantly being added and improved upon, it would be too much work for me to keep updating the post as each addon evolves. Much like my “How to get 50 mounts before WotLK” it will be fairly static; it won’t be a dynamic, evolving “guide”, but a comparison of the addons in their current forms.


(This is basically to prevent comments in 3 months’ time telling me I’m wrong because Grid CAN do XYZ and Healbot CAN do XYZ… which I bet will still happen!)


Also, once again – these are my personal opinions of the various features and drawbacks of each addon. I have endeavoured to be as fair and objective as possible. Please do not take any negative criticisms against your preferred addon as an insult to you and your choice! Any nasty comments will be deleted. Feel free to disagree – but be constructive, please.


Note that I have edited the guide to remove some parts of my original posts that had no bearing on the comparison. I have also removed some old images that were too large, and probably won’t be missed anyway.

Menu

1.  Introduction
2.  About Grid
3.  Healbot – first impressions
4.  Healbot – in depth
5.  Final comparison



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1. Introduction     [return to top]



There are Grid lovers and Grid bashers. Healbot devotees and Healbot haters.


If you like your mod, you’ll likely advertise that fact, and defend it when other people announce that theirs is better. I’ve seen some pretty nasty Grid vs Healbot fights, and I know that I have been very strongly opposed to Healbot in the past. I’m not the kind of person to shove Grid in people’s faces and force them to use it, but I was always very vocal in my belief that it was the best option for raid frames (and I still believe that until fairly recently, there was no real competition).


But.. is that opinion justified now – or has Healbot improved to the point where it can do everything Grid can do?


It’s difficult to really know which mod is better on one hand you have people who are vehemently opposed to one or the other, or so passionate about their own mod being the best that they’re simply not willing to listen to reason about the other addon options out there. On the other hand there are players who have used their mod for so long that they simply don’t know the improvements that have been made to the other addons over time. They’ll say something like, “I’ve used Grid for 3 years and it’s the best because it can do X, Y, Z” but then a Healbot user will say, “Healbot can do X, Y, Z, too!”. Similarly, you have some players who tried Grid or Healbot years ago, hated it, and stuck with something else ever since – and aren’t willing to budge (not realising that the mods have come a long way since then).


Nobody seems to be comparing today’s Grid with today’s Healbot. At least not in a meaningful way that helps us directly compare the mods and help people to understand their different features and any limitations. They just say why they love the mod they have – with no actual, meaningful comparisons.


I’ve decided it’s time to inject some objectivity into this age-old debate.


I intend to rate the mods on various points such as ease of use, HoT display, buffs & debuffs, general aesthetics and readability, as well as point out any advantages or limitations compared to the others. I’d like to be able to present it in a tabular format so people can directly compare each of the features.


The questions I’ll be asking will be:

1. Can Healbot show me what Grid can show me?

2. Can it show me in the way I prefer, or at the very least, in a pleasing and easy to interpret way?
3. What really makes Healbot shine – what’s the major drawcard?
4. What are the major limitations?



The 64,000g question -


Finally, the big question: After all these years of loving Grid, could I happily disable it and raid effectively with Healbot in its stead?




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2. About Grid     [return to top]





There are features and modules that I don’t use but many people do, for example showing tanks, using dynamic layout, etc. I can’t possibly go through all the different options because it would take forever (and I would undoubtedly miss a bunch anyway), so instead I’ll be going through the common things that I personally need to see on my raid frames. I’ll assess the common things such as aesthetics, ease of use, HoT tracking, buffs. Obviously that means that this won’t be a comprehensive comparison of the mods, comparing every feature; but that would just be too massive a task. So I won’t be able to tell you everything that the mods can and can’t do, but hopefully I will be able to give you a decent comparison of how easy they are to set up and show the basics like buffs, debuffs, hots, and general layout, and how useful they are for a resto druid.


And once again, the final goal will be to be able to assess whether I could disable Grid and be satisfied to use one of the other frames instead.


Grid has been around since 2006, and was designed to present as much information that healers (and decursers) would need, while taking up minimal screen real estate. Grid is famous for its (somewhat overwhelming) abundance of display options and the fact that users can freely change the look of their frames to suit personal taste and available space. It is equally famous (or infamous) though for the fact that it isn’t particularly user-friendly “out of the box” as other raid frame mods are, and that is seen as a big negative for new users or for people who don’t want to invest much time in configuring their frames.


Here are some guides to setting up Grid:
Warcraft-news.com – Unkicking Butt – a Grid Story
Resto4Life – Grid – Thinking Within the Boxes


plus my own guides for copying my Grid layout or setting up HoT tracking.


Again, I can’t possibly go through every feature of the addon, but I will try to give a good overview of the features that I use on a daily basis and consider important (if not essential) for a resto druid raid frame display.



1. Aesthetics


When you first start it up, Grid looks terrible. I’m not afraid to admit that. The boxes are tiny, drab squares that only display part of the player’s name, eek. It’s hard to think where to start to turn it into the frames you really want to see.





I think Grid’s creators should perhaps consider having Grid install with more of a horizontal, bar-shape, so that it’s not such of a shock when you fire it up and you’re looking at these tiny grey squares. But honestly, if you can get past the initial bewilderment, and spend some time setting Grid up, you will end up with an extremely powerful frame mod that will show you anything you want to see, and in any way you want to see it.


Default Grid settings are probably fine if you’re a dps class and you just want to see who has your buff and who has aggro, but for a healer, it’s not very good “out of the box”, and this is what turns many Grid-newbies away – the scary prospect of having to take those tiny grey squares and turn them into something that you can actually read and use.


However, if you take the time to set it up, Grid has incredible flexibility in terms of appearance. You can change the squares to be bar-style (by changing width and scale), change fonts, font size and text lengths, change the colours and assign custom colours to different classes, use different gradients, backgrounds and borders to taste. When it comes to displaying buffs, debuffs and other visuals, you can choose between text indicators, border colours, corner squares (in various colours), center icons, frame color, and opacity. With additional modules you can add extra corner squares, texts, and icons – to display any number and combination of buffs and debuffs as you see fit.


You can also use Grid as your 5 man party frames; I have mine set to only show one row of frames when I’m in a 5 man; in a 10 man it grows upwards to become two rows, and in a raid it grows upwards further to be 25+pets or 40 (for BGs). This is something that I really value because I don’t like using standard party frames for small groups and then switching to raid frames for larger groups.


The ability to change the overall look of the frames is by far one of Grid’s biggest selling points, and a major complaint against the other raid frame mods in the past.



2. HoTs and HoT tracking


HoT counters are not built into the standard Grid addon. You can assign your HoTs to corners and assign them colours (for example, I use purple for Rejuv, green for Regrowth, and yellow for WG), but this will display a corner square if that target has any druid’s HoTs on them, not just your own. While it is helpful to see if there is any HoT on your target, it’s much more important to know when your own HoTs are up so you know when to refresh.


Installing the GridStatusHots module (and GridStatusLifebloom if you prefer), plus the GridIndicatorCornerText module will allow you to put HoT counters in the corners of your Grid frames. Personally I like to have Rejuv and Regrowth in the top left and right corners, with Lifebloom as my Center Text 2 (bottom middle). Apologies for recycling this image for the third time, but this shows how great GSHoTs, GSLifebloom and the indicator corner text addons are:


Setting up HoT tracking is one of the more complicated tasks in Grid, and may cause you some frustration if you’re new to the mod – but it is definitely very valuable to have actual counters and not just an icon or dot telling you that there is a HoT on your target or not.



3. Buffs and debuffs


Although buffs such as Mark/Gift and Thorns are not set up by default, they are very easy to assign to corners and color them appropriately (I use pink/purple for Mark and brown for Thorns). Grid’s menus can be a little confusing and it takes a little while to get used to the fact that you need to first assign the buff to a corner under Frame and then choose the appropriate color under Status > Auras. It would be good if you could instead configure everything inside the Auras area; set the color, set where/how you want it to display, the priority, etc. Aside from being ugly out of the box, Grid’s menus are definitely one of its big drawbacks, even for experienced users.


You can also set up custom debuffs that you want to track (but will not necessarily be able to remove). For example, I used to have Felmyst’s Encapsulate set to colour the frame bright pink, so I would know in an instant who was encapsulated, and to either heal them fast, or if it was my group, run. The ability to set up these custom debuffs is something I find extremely valuable and would not want to give up. The fact that I can set them up as a frame colour means that I don’t have to watch for dots or icons; instead I can keep healing and as soon as something turns bright pink, I can react without thinking. This is extremely valuable to me.



4. Other


There’s not much to say about these other items that I like to have on my frames, aside from the fact that if you want mana/rage/energy bars to show, you’ll need to install the GridManaBars module. The rez monitor also requires an additional module.


Other things such as aggro alert, low mana, offline warning etc are all enabled by default and will show up out of the box (but you might want to pretty them up a little from the default settings).



Overall


I’ll go into better detail when I put the mods side by side, but for now, my super brief summary would be that Grid:



• is definitely ugly and overwhelming when you first open it (where on earth do I start changing things??)

• doesn’t show mana by default, which is annoying, but it’s easy enough to install.
• has FANTASTIC HoT display options but you’ll need a couple of extra modules first.
• has great options for size, bar orientation, display, colours, etc – meaning you have tonnes of flexibility to change the look of your frames to suit your UI – but this will take you a while to set up and perfect.


Overall, Grid basically shows you every buff, debuff, HoT or state that you ever want to see on a raid frame, you just need to put in a bit of work to arrange them just-so. It will take you probably an hour or two to get running, from scratch, but the results are well worth it. I’m really looking forward to putting the others to the test to see how they measure up.




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3. Healbot – first impressions     [return to top]



Well, so far I’m impressed with Healbot out of the box.


I wanted to approach it without reading any instructions, how-tos, or anything. A complete Healbot newbie. I wanted to see how easy it was for me to set it up considering that I have never touched the mod before – so I could see through the eyes of someone who is new to UIs and may be looking for advice on which mod to use.


Some things I like so far:



• very simple menus; everything is in front of you on tabs, rather than in dropdown/hierarchy lists, which can be a pain to remember and navigate

• detailed tooltips at your cursor tell you exactly which heals are assigned to your buttons
• the entire frame can be displayed as one column (as many old school raiders prefer), or in as many columns as you prefer. Grid is not as flexible in this way (I believe you need an extra addon, if this is even possible). I prefer a grid, but I know lots of people prefer to have one vertical column of health bars on the side of their screen, so it’s good to have that option.
• it’s also extremely easy to swap between traditional “green health bar” style frames and by-class colouring (I prefer the latter). By using a few slider boxes and checking a couple of buttons, I made my Healbot’s basic bar layout look just like Grid (ignore the HoTs!):





I would estimate that making Grid look like that, if you hadn’t played with the mod before, would probably take close to an hour to find the right options and then get everything done by trial and error. Most of the time would be taken trying to find which of the menus to go to for each option (again, though, this is mostly related to the huge number of options Grid gives you). The ability to immediately find and change the look of Healbot really impressed me.


At first glance it seems that my assumptions (and what I’ve heard) were correct – the level of customisation isn’t as great as with Grid. I can tell that immediately; all of the basics are there (and that’s all that a beginner would need), but I can tell that I wouldn’t get anywhere near the customisation options. The tradeoff, though, is that you can virtually use this mod immediately (after you assign your heals and cleanses). This would make it extremely easy for a complete UI beginner to use.


I’m also not sold on Healbot’s HoT display; to a beginner it is probably great, but to me it is inflexible (I can’t choose to separate them to different corners) and cluttered. So far though, I’m pretty impressed.




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4. Healbot – in depth     [return to top]



So many people ask, on a weekly basis, “Which is better, Grid or Healbot?” The answers given are often incorrect (due to people not understanding the capabilities of the other mod) or simply, “Try them both and see which one you like best” which is actually probably an excellent answer, but not what a lot of people want to hear.


Remember – the final goal will be to be able to assess whether I could disable Grid and be satisfied to use Healbot instead. That, as a druid, Healbot can show me all the things I need to see in a raid, in a way that is both easy to interpret, and aesthetically pleasing.




healbot -noun 1. a bar-style raid frame addon displaying target health, buffs, debuffs and other information. 2. Informal. a healer who follows his/her target around and acts as their personal healer: Keeva is my healbot for PvP. -verb 3. Informal. to act as a personal healer: Keeva healbots me in PvP.



Old Healbot

Healbot has been around since vanilla WoW; unfortunately, while being very useful, it gained a bit of a negative reputation because it would actually choose the “correct” rank of spell according to how much health your target was missing. This was obviously quite handy, but it did give the mod a bit of a bad name for “playing the game for you” – which is why I never used it. I don’t like mods that make decisions (such as spell ranks) for me. Your opinion on this may vary.



Healbot: Simple, beautiful
But, that nasty business aside, Healbot is well-known for being simple to use “out of the box”, meaning that as soon as you load it up, you can pretty much run with it. This makes it perfect for people who want a solid raid UI but perhaps don’t know much about customising UIs – with Healbot you can just install and run, with minimal tweaking.





Healbot does have some pretty nifty bells and whistles, but its biggest sell point, I believe, is this simplicity – that you can use it immediately with almost no knowledge of addons or UI customisation. If you want to load a raid UI mod and run, Healbot is definitely a great choice.


Alright, let’s get started on the nitty gritty.



1. Aesthetics



So, how is Healbot when you first fire it up? Pretty darn… well, pretty. The bars are a fairly good size, text is good.. and it has a really cool tooltip that shows you what your buttons are bound to, and what your heals should land for (how cool is that – especially if you’re like me and don’t run with any spell buttons on your UI).





So if you wanted to walk into a raid right that second, your frames would be a decent size, legible, and attractive, even without tweaking them or personalising them to taste.


There’s really not much to fault here. In terms of basic aesthetics, Healbot is excellent, and it is excellent with very little initial tweaking.


Despite its simplicity, Healbot does have a lot of options for changing its appearance. For example, some people prefer the green bars (that change colour gradually according to health deficit). I personally prefer my bars to be coloured by class, so at a glance I can see the class of person taking damage, and make split-second decisions – ie, triage.


Contrary to popular belief, Healbot doesn’t have to be green bars and only green bars – you can set it up to be coloured by class (like Grid), if you want to, although I think many Healbot users will call me a heathen for doing this





You can also change the size of the bars, number of columns (something you can’t do in Grid), font type and size, border, background, group headers (and customise those as well). When it comes to displaying buffs and debuffs, you can choose between border and frame colours as well as the standard icons. Not as many options as Grid, but whether this matters to you will depend on the number of things you need to display on your frames at any given time. And.. I think we should pay attention to Mr Confucius’ wisdom above – keeping things simple isn’t a bad thing.


Healbot can show you 5, 10, 25 and 40 man groups. It shows pets, although I am disappointed that you can’t force it to show pets coloured by owner type. I like to see hunter pets as green, warlock pets as purple, for example, so that I can prioritise healing. That is not a huge problem, only a slight niggle.


Another small problem is that there is no background to the individual frames (perhaps this is something I missed). Grid allows you to set a customised background colour (eg red or black) to make health deficits easier to see. If you use the green bars on Healbot this is not a problem, because the bar will change to red as the person loses health; but if you are like me and prefer class coloured frames, this isn’t the case. I like to have a colour behind the bar to show me more easily how much health is missing. But – this is more a personal preference than anything.



2. HoTs and HoT tracking


HoT counters are now built into Healbot. They are shown as numbers on top of HoT icons on the target’s bar. Very attractive and simple. My main gripe here is that the counter doesn’t show up until the time remaining has dropped under double digits (ie, 9 seconds or less). This annoys me because I prefer to see exactly how much time is remaining, so that I know how many other things I can do before I need to refresh my Regrowth, for example.


I also found that the counters are quite cluttered on the icons; in order to make the counters legible, I had to increase the size of the icon and text, and this obscures the person’s frame, meaning that if they have a health deficit, it can be difficult to see. This would not be an issue for someone who chooses to display the HoTs off to one side (not on the frame itself) but as I prefer to have my HoT counters inside the frame, it is a problem for me. I found that having several HoTs on a target made things very cluttered.




Left: Healbot, set up to my preferred frame size, and showing all four HoTs. Disclaimer: different frame configurations will make your HoTs easier to see; this is merely to demonstrate that on my chosen frame layout, the HoTs are quite cluttered.

I don’t like that there isn’t a set position for each HoT; they are just put up in order of casting.


The Lifebloom counter also doesn’t count down with a decimal place; it only counts in whole seconds. If this is what you are used to, you will probably be quite efficient, regardless; but having fractions of a second display can make your Lifebloom rotations much cleaner and tighter.


As a druid, I think that the HoT display is possibly the most important thing on our UI, and as such, this is what I really focused on when I was looking at Healbot. I will go into this more in my comparison of the two mods.



3. Buffs and debuffs


Healbot shows missing buffs, rather than showing everyone who has a buff. You can choose a colour to display when someone is missing a buff, for example, red for someone who is missing Thorns. You can tell it who to check for these buffs – by class, by type such as ‘healers’ or ‘ranged’, and of course, the tanks. This is brilliant. Basically, you set it up to tell you when the tanks are missing thorns, and if they are, it turns them red. When they get their buff, they go back to normal.


And on top of that, you can have Healbot play a warning sound as well – in case you missed them changing colours.


I definitely give Healbot an 11/10 for “missing buffs display”.


However if you want to display who has particular buffs, then it falls down a little. Again, this is personal preference – some people like to be able to see if there is a renew on the tank, or weakened soul, etc – not necessarily their own pre-combat buffs. A minor issue for most, but probably something that some people don’t want to do without.


Custom debuffs, another important part of my UI, are also handled fine with Healbot. You can enter your own debuffs, such as Frost Blast, and have it display in a special colour (and again, a warning sound if you like!). The colour can be set to the border, icon or frame colour (but not to corners as with Grid). The only minor problem is that you can only choose one colour for all custom debuffs; if you want two different debuffs to display as different colours, you can’t do that.



4. Other


Most of these things are built in and turned on by default (or require a quick check mark or slider bar adjustment). I can’t find the low mana alert (if there is one) or feign death warning. Death is shown as an empty bar (zero health), but I prefer DEAD to show on the frame.



Overall


I’ll go into better detail when I write the final installment comparing the two mods, but for now, my super brief summary would be that Healbot:



• is really attractive out of the box, has plenty of great features and requires little tweaking.

• has pretty good HoT display options built-in (no need for extra modules).
• has quite a lot of options for changing the appearance of the mod – and would probably surprise a lot of die-hard Grid fans. Still not as flexible and customisable as Grid, but it honestly has all the main stuff that most people would need.
• would be good for UI newbies and seasoned healers alike.


Overall, Healbot shows you a lot of buff, debuff, HoT and healing information as soon as you load it. If you want to spend a little more time on it, you can pretty it up even more, but if you don’t have that time, you’ll still have just about everything you need as soon as you start.




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5. Final comparison     [return to top]


“Out of the box” functionality
WINNER: Healbot


Out of the box functionality – meaning how quickly after installing the mod you can jump into healing with it – is a huge factor for many people when deciding between different addons. Many people are happy to spend hours tweaking their UI to be perfect, but others prefer to hit the ground running with addons that are ready to go as soon as they are installed. You can have the most super awesome mod in the universe, but if the default looks terrible and it’s difficult to set up, then many people will steer clear.


It’s very cut and dried between the two addons in this case: for a healer, Grid has limited functionality out of the box – at the very least you will need to change the size of the boxes to be able to fit names properly and see health information. Fine for DPS/cleansing classes, but not good for healers. In fact, I think the addon would benefit greatly if the author was to add a couple of pre-packaged layout frameworks, one for DPS (similar to the current default) and one for healers, with the bar-like format that many healers prefer. This would make it much easier for healers to use “out of the box”, and prevent a lot of people from being scared off by Grid’s overwhelming customisation options.





On the other hand, Healbot comes out of the box looking pretty darn shiny; and while there are a bunch of things that I personally would want to adjust to suit my own personal style (can’t stand the way it fades bars – I only like faded bars for people who are out of range), I could easily use Healbot in its default state and do a respectable job. I wouldn’t be able to do the same with Grid in its default state.







Customisation
WINNER: Grid


Grid wins in this category, but not by as great a margin as most diehard Grid users might think.


Grid does have options that Healbot doesn’t, for example corner dot indicators, extra icons, extra texts, and of course the flexibility to change the placement, size and colours of each. Healbot really has everything you need to build a good frame display, it’s just that Grid goes further and gives you many more options so that you can truly customise the display to suit your own personal taste.


However, for many of these options, you will need to install additional Grid modules. While this makes for a far more customisable set of frames, the downside to this, obviously, is the need to find and install the modules you need, and keep them updated. As Healbot’s options are all built-in, you only ever have to keep one addon up to date to have them working.





The big benefit here is that if you have some kind of catastrophic UI failure (we’ve all been there), you’re more likely to be able to get back on the horse as a Healbot user, because you won’t have to spend time doing the simple things like changing the size of the bars to make the raid’s names visible. From running with Healbot users and listening to them, there seem to be a few random minor problems with the addon, whereas Grid seems to be more stable on a daily basis; but if you lost everything, it’s going to be much easier to recover Healbot than to recover Grid, particularly if you rely on a lot of the additional modules.


Basically, Grid gives you tonnes of display flexibility in exchange for a bit of hassle setting it up and keeping it running. Healbot gives you all of the basic things you need to see – health, buffs & debuffs, heals, HoTs, and so on – and you can customise these to a point – but you don’t get all of the extra bells and whistles that Grid gives you.


But Healbot has definitely come a long way and is surprisingly customisable. I think a lot of die-hard Grid fans would be shocked at what you can do with Healbot – it’s definitely not the clunky, boxy, rigid set of frames that I expected.



Navigation and ease of use
WINNER: Healbot


Ease of use ties in with the previous category, logically. Grid’s extensive customisation options mean you also have to navigate…. extensive menus. Depending on what you prefer, of course, I found Healbot’s tabbed windows to be much easier to navigate than Grid’s drop-down style. But then, I think this is due in part to the fact that some of Grid’s options (to me) seem to be put into the wrong categories, and I often wish I could get in there and rearrange things a little.


Once you’ve been using Grid for a while, you’ll know where to find each option in the menus; but even as a seasoned user, I still often find myself getting a little lost in the long list of options in each section. With so many options to customise, it’s only natural that there are lots of boxes to check and fields to fill in, but I do think that Grid’s menus may need a bit of a tidy up so they are less overwhelming. I’d love to see give tabbed menus a try. Whether or not they would be just as overwhelming if they tried to cover the same options, I’m not sure; but surely a whole tab devoted to say, HoTs, would be a nice logical way to customise your frames.



Aesthetics
WINNER: Grid


I feel that Grid wins this category because it just gives you so many more options to customise the look of your frames, meaning that you can have a really slick looking setup according to your tastes.


BUT Healbot has come a long way, and does have quite a few customisation options. It has a couple of options that Grid doesn’t: the ability to display your frames in a single column (old-school style on the left or right of your screen), and the ability to show health bars as green progressing through to red according to health deficit, as a slow colour change. Grid allows you to set thresholds for the health bar to change colour and warn you (eg 85% or below = yellow, 50% or below = red) but many Healbot users enjoy that gradual colour change.


Overall though, Grid just has more bells and whistles, more options to change fonts, colours, icons, indicators, and other layout elements, making it more flexible and giving it the potential to be as attractive as you want to make it.



Information display
WINNER: Grid


Both mods display their information nicely, but I think Grid edges ahead, both because of it’s level of customisation, and because it has the ability to present more information in the same space.


Grid can show various triggers as:



• frame colour

• border colour
• corner indicator (and with extra modules, extra indicators on the sides and more in the corners)
• icons (and with extra modules, extra corner icons and side icons)
• texts (up to 3 texts, I believe)


It also has a better custom debuff system but I will go into that later.


Healbot does frame and border colour, two texts, and icons, but doesn’t have any corner indicators or as many options for changing colours etc. As far as I’m aware it has no options for adding extra texts and icons.


I’d like to stress that both mods will show you everything you want to see; they both display all of the important information that you need. Grid just gives you more options to display it in a way that you want, meaning that if you react faster to colours, you can set it up so that colours are one of your main triggers. If you work better with icons, Grid has the standard center icons but also corner and side icons. Grid makes it very easy for you to set up your frames in the way that YOU will interpret the information fastest – which might be completely the opposite of how someone else likes to see information – but you get the flexibility to choose.



HoTs
WINNER: Grid


In the past, the general opinion that I heard about Healbot was “fantastic healing addon.. Although probably not so great for druids.” During my time experimenting with Healbot, I found this to be true, for one main reason – the most important thing that druids should look for in a UI, in my opinion – HoT tracking.


I have to say that if I had to list what was most important for me to see in a frame mod, the health bar/deficit would be first (obviously), and HoTs would be second.


Grid’s HoT Trackers (GridStatusHoTs and GridStatusLifebloom) do a brilliant job. They allow you to put numerical, coloured counters in the center, sides or corners of the health bar, so that you can track each HoT. The timers can be a set colour, or can be assigned to change colour as the timer runs low; in the case of Lifebloom, you can also assign colours to stack numbers, so a single stack might be a red timer, and 3 stacks a green counter.


All of this information is displayed clearly, but does not obscure the rest of the information on the frame. This is where Healbot falls down in its HoT tracking; in my experience I found that trying to display the HoT icons on the bar meant that the name and health information was obscured. Making the icons smaller (to be able to see the bar) results in not being able to identify the spells very well (as the icons get smaller) and trouble reading the timers, as the texts of the counters are ultimately linked to the size of the icon. Similarly, if you increase the size of the font, it can also obscure the icon itself, making it hard to see if you’re looking at Regrowth or Rejuv, for example.





Healbot’s HoT icons look great. But in practice, they make the health information difficult to see (on a moderate sized UI), and scaling them down makes the HoT hard to see. You have to try to find the happy medium between icons that are large enough to see which spell they are (in turn allowing for decent sized timers), and still being able to see the person’s frame under those icons. With Regrowth, Rejuv, Lifebloom and Wild Growth all up on someone’s frame at once, I found it difficult to see the health bar, and this would make me very nervous in a raid. Grid’s timer information never obscures health information, so you can still make judgments on when to throw an extra emergency heal.





As you can see, Grid’s HoT timers do not obscure the rest of the information in the frame. I found Healbot’s timers to either be so big they obscure the frame, or too small to read the text. The alternative then is to increase the size of the frame to allow for good sized icons without obscuring the other information – but this ends up making your raid frame quite large. I like my frames to be neat and compact.


Also, Healbot lays down the HoT icons in the order cast, not in a specific placement, which means that you can’t even get used to Regrowth being say, the one on the left each time – you still need to rely on being able to see the icon properly, as the icons will be in random order on each person’s bar. I find that Grid’s layout, with set positions for HoTs (that you choose according to your own prefences) makes it easier to interpret timers because you can rely on each spell always appearing in a set position. You can use icons if you want, or simply use colored dots or texts, plus the option to have these colors change over time. You can use the standard green/yellow/red, or choose any colour you like; you can also choose the time thresholds for these color changes to occur, to allow for your own style. Healbot does not have this depth of customization.


If I had to pick one major fault (for druids) with Healbot, HoT tracking would be it. I can honestly say that I could manage swapping from Grid to Healbot if the HoT tracking was improved. It’s definitely on the right track, but needs some changes so that HoT information is better displayed. Because we have 4 different HoTs at our disposal, often on many people at once, we need to be able to view and interpret tracking and timer information extremely quickly, to be able to make snap decisions. If the icon is obscured, the display order is random, and the text is difficult to see, then this reaction time suffers. This is a big problem. You don’t want your HoT displays to slow down your reaction time.


Any HoT tracking is better than no HoT tracking; but I strongly feel that Grid’s tracking options give you a much clearer view of your spells at any given time, they don’t detract from the rest of the information, which allows you to process the information faster. A druid with no HoT timers can perform well; but a druid with great HoT displays can really maximise his/her output and fine-tune their timing down to miliseconds.


Basically – if you’re serious about excelling as a healer and you’re doing difficult content, then you need a really good HoT timer to streamline your performance and improve your reaction time. Healbot is almost there – but Grid just does it better.



Buffs
WINNER: Healbot


This is another category where both mods can show you what you want to see, but in this case, Healbot has some cool features that Grid doesn’t.


Both will show you buffs present and buffs missing, depending on what you prefer to see. For example, I prefer to see a pink dot on every frame, denoting Mark of the Wild, and if someone is missing a dot, they need the buff. It’s just what I’m used to seeing. Other people prefer to only have a dot showing on someone who is missing the buff, which you could argue is more logical, since it is easier to see one person out of 25 who has a bright pink dot, compared to one person with no dot, out of a sea of 25 people. It’s just personal preference.


But Healbot goes further and has alerts for when a buff is about to run out – including sounds. I thought that was a really cool little feature. Most of the time I buff by default, and don’t need a reminder, but perhaps there are shorter duration buffs like Thorns that you forget to rebuff. Or it’s a special fight and you need to remember to give people Amp Magic or Shadow Protection.


Of course, Grid does have a little more customisation in that you can assign buffs to corner icons and whatnot, but I don’t think this is particularly noteworthy in this case. If your frame can show you a buff (or a missing buff) it probably doesn’t matter too much how it does it.



Debuffs
WINNER: Tie


Standard debuffs (curses, poisons, magic etc) are basically identical in both mods, aside from (once again) a little more flexibility in display options with Grid. Both will show you debuffs as a centre icon, border, or frame colour. Grid goes a little further and lets you have corner/edge indicators and corner icons (with extra modules). But both mods will show standard debuffs fine.





Grid edges forward a little for me personally with its custom debuffs. Healbot still allows you to display custom debuffs (for example, by changing the frame colour or adding a border), but if you want to use frame colour as your indicator, you can only use one colour for ALL custom debuffs. Most people would probably say, “so what?” but this is something that I am particular about, so it stood out for me


I like to be able to colour particular custom debuffs particular things (and sometimes with a particular priority). This is especially important in fights where there may be multiple custom debuffs that I would like to track. For example on XT002, I might colour Gravity Bomb bright pink, and Light Bomb bright green. I need to know who has each, but I also need to be able to discern between the two very quickly. Of course, many people just use icons, but I ditched that method long ago when I found that some curse icons looked like poisons (and vice versa). I find it much easier to react to colours than pictures.


So really it is an extremely trivial and TINY edge that Grid has over Healbot – and it will ONLY matter to you if you like to use frame colour AND have separate colours for each debuff.


Apart from that it is basically a tie.



Mouseover macro/Clique compatibility
WINNER: Healbot


Both mods are compatible with click-casting and mouseover macros.


In the case of Grid, you will need to download and setup another addon, Clique, for this functionality. I have seen many Healbot users criticise this fact in the past. In reality though, many Grid users don’t use click-casting, so this doesn’t matter to them at all.


If you are a click-caster, then Healbot comes ready to go – with no extra modules or setup required; you simply have to assign your spells accordingly. Many people see this as a big plus.



Summary


Healbot was once considered by many to be an “ezmode” healing addon that chose ranks of spells for you, which earned it a bad name as a mod that created lazy healers. Things have changed. It is now a powerful, feature-packed frames mod that shows you all of the things that Grid can show you. It is far easier to use “out of the box”, has easy to follow menus, and is easier to keep up to date. Its main failing for druids is the clunky HoT display; but I am confident this will be improved over time.


Grid simply offers many more options for customising your frames, according to how you want your information to be displayed. It has far superior options for HoT tracking, which is essential for druid healers to excel in their healing. It requires some setting up before use, and quite a lot of tweaking to suit personal taste; adding more modules will also mean more and more extensive dropdown menus, but this is the tradeoff for seemingly limitless options for customising the look and layout of your frames.


I think one of the most common arguments against Grid is that “you need to install so many extra mods to go with it!”. In reality, I think I have 3 extra modules – which is hardly a big deal at all. You could potentially have hundreds of extra modules installed – which would be a bit of a nightmare to keep updated manually – but what non-Grid users need to keep in mind is that while it may seem like a pain to have to use addons for an addon, this is where Grid gets its massive level of customisation.


And on the flip side, I don’t want a whole lot of non-druid addons included by default. Why would I need totem timers, or rune tracking? That would just be bloat, and extra options in my menus that I don’t need to see. With Grid you can “build your own mod” by picking and choosing your addons accordingly.


Many non-Grid users see this as a negative. Grid users understand that it means that the mod only includes options that we choose to use.




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Really, I could write about these mods all day – I’ve barely scratched the surface of both. But I do hope I’ve given people a basic idea of some of the main features of each. The best way though is to give them a try and see what suits you. I believe more druids prefer Grid for their frames, but many use Healbot and swear by it.


If you want a mod that requires only minimal setup and shows you all of the information you need, with click-casting built in, Healbot is great.


If you prefer to tweak and customise your UI to exactly how you want it, including HoT timers, extra texts and icons, and custom debuff options, then Grid excels.


There is no right or wrong mod to use – it’s all about whatever helps you best.


Happy healing!