Foreverything Warlock

Soul shard cap. Buff upkeep bar. Summon queue. Wand and crowd control timers. A level 1 speedrun guide with a direction arrow.

A Warlock addon for World of Warcraft: Forever, built and measured against that realm's client rather than ported from retail.

Everything it does

It is silent by default, does nothing at all on other classes, and speaks only when it has something you asked for to say. If the parts you switch on turn out to say more than you want, /fw quiet on mutes everything it says on its own while still answering the commands you type.

There is a minimap button and a settings window with all of it on, so none of this depends on knowing that /fw exists.

The same things, in detail

Soul shards

• A cap you choose, or auto to use the size of your soul bag. Shards over the cap can be trimmed, and the trim is a button or a key press rather than something that happens behind your back, because this client refuses to destroy an item unless the press came from you.
• Tidying: loose shards are moved into your soul bag, where they cost you no space.
• A dry run, /fw test, which tells you exactly what would go before anything does.

Buff upkeep

A small bar that appears only when something is actually missing, with one icon per buff you can fix on the spot:

Every watch waits for the spell to be trained, so a fresh warlock sees none of them and each one turns up on the day you learn it. Any of them can be switched off on its own.

Timers

• Wand shot timer. A swing timer for your wand, for the levels where you are wanding between casts. It names which of its three sources it is using, because a timer that is confidently wrong is worse than one that admits it is guessing.
• Crowd control timers. Fear, Howl of Terror, Banish, Enslave Demon (your client may call it Subjugate Demon), Death Coil and the Succubus's Seduction, timed from your own casts. One timer per target, so two banished mobs are two timers. The names are read from your spellbook, and /fw cc lists every spell it tracks with whether your client has it.
• Level timer. How long each level from 2 to 60 took, with a tab that shows the whole run at once. On automatically while the speedrun helpers are.

The first few minutes: a speedrun guide

A step list in the shape RestedXP and Guidelime use. The current step is highlighted, the step that has something to press carries a button, and a direction arrow turns as you turn:

Speedrun                        1/9
  1. Find Hraug, the grimoire seller      [ Strip ] [ Mark ]
  2. Sell your starting kit for 10c
  3. Go to Nartok, your warlock trainer
  4. Train Immolate
  5. Kill Mottled Boars until you have 20c

• Nothing about your progress is stored. Every step is a question the client can already answer: is Immolate trained, is there a knife in your bags, is Skinning in your spellbook. So a new warlock starts at the beginning without being told to, and learning something outside the guide still advances it.
• It sells your starting kit for Immolate's price. The clothes you are wearing go first, cheapest of them first, and your bags are left alone so the food and the loot can pay for the skinning knife afterwards. It asks before selling and names every item.
• It trains Immolate for you at the trainer, learns Skinning at the skinning trainer, and buys the knife at any vendor that stocks one.
• It knows the starting zones it has been told about: Anvilmar, Deathknell, the Valley of Trials and Northshire, by NPC name, by position, and by what to kill for the first 20 copper. A zone nobody has sent in still works, because the addon records what it needs the first time you open each window, and /fw arrow export hands those numbers back so they can be added for everybody.
• Your action bar layout is account wide. Put Shadow Bolt on slot 3 once and every warlock you roll afterwards starts that way, with exactly one copy of each spell on your bars.

The summon queue

Somebody types 123 in party chat, you summon them, they arrive, the next person types

1. The hard part was never the summoning. It is remembering who asked and in what order while five more lines of chat go past, and then typing a name that may have a space in it without looking at it.

Summons                    3 waiting  [Clear] [X]
  1. Zaraki          123
  2. Mira Dawnsong   123
  3. Kael            summon

• Click the name to summon them. The row is a secure button, so the press is yours and the client does the rest: target, announce, cast.
• The entry clears when the summon goes through, not when the cast starts. A ritual you begin and interrupt has summoned nobody, and losing their place for it is the one thing the list exists to prevent.
• Party, raid and whispers only, including a dungeon finder group's own channel. Somebody typing 123 in trade chat is not asking you.
• The words are yours, matched as whole words so 123456 is not 123. A phrase works as well as a word.
• Right drag to move it, the bottom right corner to resize it. Clear empties the list, and closing it empties the list too.

Macros and announcements

• Ritual of Summoning announcements, telling the group it is up while the cast runs and whispering the person being summoned.
• Demonic Sacrifice guard, which warns before a summon throws away a two hour buff.
• A Eureka! macro that fires the proc, your off cooldown racials and a nuke of your choosing in one press.
• A Healthstone macro that shouts for a taker and then makes the stone, in that order, because finding somebody takes longer than the cast does. What it shouts is yours.

Commands

/fw on its own prints the version and the full list. The ones worth knowing:

Built for Forever

Interface 16001, client 1.60.1, which is a retail based client. The addon uses the modern API throughout and nothing from the Classic branch.

A good deal of it exists because of what that client does rather than because of anything in the game:

• it will not destroy an item from a timer, so trimming is a button;
• raid target icons appear to need a party, so "mark this NPC" also drops a map pin;
• a refused call is usually silent, so the addon reads back what it asked for and says when the answer never arrived.

Until recently it also kept its settings inside macro bodies, because the client wrote its SavedVariables file and never read it back. That is fixed on the current client, so settings live in the normal place and the addon deletes the macros it used to need. /fw macros says which of the two is happening, and /fw macros clean removes the leftovers from every character at once.

Reporting something

/fw speedrun, /fw errors and /fw macros each print the facts a decision was made from rather than the decision itself. Pasting one of those is worth far more than a description, because almost every bug in this addon has turned out to be a client answer nobody expected.