4H Assist (ingame: /fh) helps coordinate raid positioning during the Four Horsemen encounter in Naxxramas Classic. Every player in the raid is assigned a role, which determines where in the boss room the player should currently be, based on the number of marks that have gone out.
Roles and positioning are based on the strategy described in the following video: https://youtu.be/kyGQzsXIB-Q?t=178. The positions follow a rotation that spans 12 marks, so e.g. your position after 13 marks is the same as your position after one mark. Eight tanks alternate between tanking a boss and waiting in the safe zone, four DPS groups alternate between DPSing a boss and waiting in the safe zone, and twelve healers rotate in a staggered fashion so that one moves from each corner on each mark.
Everyone in the raid gets assigned a role, which they can see in a map window (see screenshots). The window contains:
* A map of the boss room
* The number of marks that have gone out
* A progress bar until the next mark
* The player's current expected position in the room (as an orange skull)
* The player's upcoming positon in the room if it changes next mark (as a blue skull)
* The number of marks the player has for each boss
* The current (in green) and upcoming (in gray) tanks for each boss (and the boss's current target in orange if neither of these), along with their stack count for the mark of the corresponding boss
* A tombstone icon if the boss is dead
* A list of players who should be at the same position, colored red/green based on range (~20yd)
The raid's roles are assigned by a single person using the other main addon window (see screenshots). This window contains:
* A list of all forty raid slots, divided into eight subgroups. Each slot shows the player in that slot, the currently-assigned role, and an icon indicating sync status - whether that player has auto-confirmed the role they've been assigned.
* Buttons to unassign roles from the group or entire raid
* Buttons to smart-assign roles from the group or entire raid (see below)
* The status of each role, so you can see if your assignments are good to go
* Options (see below)
The addon is initially configured such that that groups 1-4 contain the tanks and healers, with two tanks and three healers per group, and groups 5-8 contain the DPS, but this layout can be updated and persisted to suit your raid's needs. Smart assignments help assign the specific roles in each group (mostly important for tanks/healers), since it's a pain to control the specific order of players in a group - just the proper people in the group, click "Smart Assign", and the roles will get shuffled around to properly match. Tanks are recognized from the "Main Tank" raid role in the default UI, and healers are hard-coded based on class (druid/priest/paladin/shaman). If you have any players of those classes that aren't healers, you can enter their names in the options section so they get considered as DPS instead. If you don't quite have eight tanks or twelve healers, you can assign any role to anyone by unchecking "Capped Assignments".
You use the addon via these steps:
1. One person opens the assignment window via "/fh start".
2. This person assigns everyone roles and then clicks "Sync".
3. On everyone's screen, the map window appears with their designated role.
4. The assigner repeats this process until satisfied.
5. The assigner clicks "Start" in the assignment window, which closes it and locks in the roles.
6. In practice mode, the assigner then controls the marks. In live mode, the addon looks at the combat log.
Only the assigner has to do any work - for everyone else, the map window auto-opens with the appropriate info and updates during the encounter.
The addon supports practicing everything, to help folks get a feel for the addon and the positioning. You can practice in three ways:
1. Just opening the map window yourself ("/fh show"), selecting a role, and manually advancing marks.
2. Opening the assignment window and practicing with your entire raid - you can choose to have marks advance manually or based on a timer.
3. Opening the assignment window when ungrouped - the addon supplies fake data for the other 39 people, so you can practice assignments yourself.
The addon integrates with DBM if installed:
* In practice mode, each new tick is announced.
* An alert will show when you're supposed to move on the next mark, and again when that mark goes out. There's also an alert if you get 4+ stacks of any mark.
Fantastic Addon, thanks a lot!
We noticed that healers on BL1, BR1, TL1 and TR1 do not get the text "Time to move!" after the first mark. It works after the 4th mark and later. This issue can be reproduced solo when using the simulator, too.
In reply to swmplng2:
Good catch, fixed for next version.
Where does the addons send dps after either Thane or Mograine has died? to the safe zone? to Zeliek if they are ranged and blaemeux if they are melee? can the addon recognize this?
I cant check any of these things beforehand. its got the ("/fh show"), selecting a role, and manually advancing marks. but doesnt allow to simulate with a horsemen dead. this is only available to see for the tank role
In reply to herudus19:
Once the bottom two are dead, it stops giving any positions at all to DPS. It's up to each individual player to figure out where to go. Top tanks continue their rotation, and healers as well, with their bottom positions just rerouted to the safe zone.
You can technically try it out ahead of time if you use "/fh start" - in manual/timer modes, you have the option of selecting which bosses are dead. I could see about adding that to the "/fh show" version as well, to make it a bit easier.
In reply to Xanido:
Thank you for answering. that makes it quite convenient on my end as raid leader. I rather tell them what to do at that stage, then possibly have the addon confuse them with different orders/routes
Is there a way to have the addon auto-start on encounter? We've had it happen where we forget to start it manually head of time even though we went over everything and it all assigned/etc. Maybe an option for auto-enable / auto-start?
In reply to DomDashSix:
That's a good idea, I'll add it for sure!
Our raid leader who manages the addon and starts pulls died before the first mark went out and we didn't get a warning for the first mark - is that expected normally or because he died or all wrong?
In reply to pioff:
In live mode, all marks are tracked locally from your combat log. What warning were you expecting that didn't show up? Only 4 healers (one in each corner) should get an alert telling them to move, and 4 others telling them to move on the next mark. The addon will show you a progress bar until the next expected tick, but no specific alert when it happens.
Note that in manual/timer modes, I do have a "Tick 1", "Tick 2" etc. alert, which is not present in live mode - I disabled it because DBM itself has alerts when marks go out and so I figured it'd be redundant. In live mode, the only alerts are the "move on next mark", "move now", and "too many marks" alerts (which is also redundant with DBM, but since it's a dangerous scenario I figured the extra yelling was ok).
Can this be run for only healers?
We use a very different strat- Nuke thane, split dps to mograin/blammo, then focus on zelig alone at the end
dps/tanks jobs are simple enough, but we have healers getting lost and killing themselves or letting a tank die every week
In reply to motherhugga:
That's what I added the "independent" role for - that role doesn't have any positional info associated with it, so you can assign it to all the non-healer slots if you'd like.
It would be great to be able to add characters ahead of time and their roles and save it without them being in raid to prepare ahead of time for the raid. Possible?
In reply to doctormidnight333:
I'm working on something that will let you accomplish that.
Is it possible to fix the Zeliek alerts? Currently it keeps pinging the healers to move before they have 3 marks
In reply to EngravedConfusion:
For Zeliek, the addon has three different positions for the healers in that corner, and each tick cycles the healer to the next one. This helps ensure his holy shock (I think) doesn't chain between healers, by keeping them spaced out. Open up the map and select a healer role to see for yourself.
In reply to EngravedConfusion:
I've decided to add an option in v0.9.0 to opt out of the staggered Zeliak positioning. The person performing the raid config needs to select it before syncing roles to everyone.
In reply to Xanido:
Awesome, thank you!
I use the Tems Naxx WA ( https://wago.io/EVej3dnM5 ) for Naxx, and it seems there's some sort of conflict / overlap between this addon and the WA as I get a Lua error for them. I reported the issue to Tems discord as well.
In reply to DomDashSix:
It looks like this is solely an issue with the Weak Aura - since 4H Assist is low in alphabetical sorting, my addon's copy of libraries is generally picked up, which is why you see 4H-Assist\Libs\AceTimer-3.0\AceTimer-3.0.lua in the call stack. But anything inside 4H-Assist\Libs is just generic code and my addon isn't really participating, it's just using this copy of the libraries.
Please let me know if the WA owners point the finger back at me :) but yeah I think there's nothing actionable for me here.
I kind of have to second that comment on perhaps not allowing people that are not RL/assist the ability to open the "/fh start" window as this just causes confusion.
Also, I was in the situation where I really wanted to have the option of using "/fh show" inside Naxx to see how the addon would tell our DPS to move. We were doing the strategy of using all dps to nuke down Thane first before 5 stacks and then rotating into the "normal" rotation. but I didnt want to use the Addon for this strategy as I didnt know how the addon would tell "DPS Start BL" to move throughout the fight.
If I could've opened /fh show I could quickly test out and see how each role would have been told to move.
Finally, i have no idea how hard it would be to incorporate this, but I found if impossible to set up this Addon for our Raid until after I was in the raid group. A lot of addons such as Exorsus Raid Tools (with their raid group window) allows you to drag and drop from a guild/raid list. It would be really useful to be able to set this up before the raid day or on an alt while conserving buffs and saving it as default.