HarcodeCastBars

Hardcore Cast Bars

World of Warcraft Classic Era / Hardcore · Interface 11509

A survival-focused, fully customizable cast-bar replacement built specifically for World of Warcraft Classic Era / Hardcore, with Self, Pet, Party, Target, Enemy, and Boss cast bars; dangerous-cast intelligence; latency visualization; channel awareness; profiles; presets; and a polished in-game Test Mode.

Hardcore Cast Awareness

Six Cast-Bar Groups: Configure dedicated cast bars for Self, Pet, Party, Target, Enemy, and Boss units. Party, Enemy, and Boss presentations use detached stacks designed for clear combat visibility rather than being visually attached to unit frames or nameplates.

Dangerous Cast Intelligence: Classify casts as Normal, Important, Dangerous, or Critical and use that priority for color, borders, alerts, sorting, filtering, scale, and warning emphasis.

Cast Target Awareness: Hostile casts can show the caster, target, YOU, and party-target information. The same physical cast shown in multiple contexts is deduplicated so it does not produce repeated audible alerts.

Spell School Presentation: Where spell school is known or curated, bars and borders may use Fire, Frost, Shadow, Nature, Arcane, Holy, Physical, or Unknown presentation independently from cast priority.

Lifecycle Awareness: Interrupted, Failed, Cancelled, Channel Ended, and Completed states can receive their own presentation without inventing a cause that the Classic client does not actually expose.

Accuracy is prioritized over fabricated precision. Unknown casts are not automatically treated as harmless, but they are also not falsely promoted to Dangerous or Critical unless a rule exists.

Self Cast & Latency Tools

The Self cast bar includes additional casting tools for latency-sensitive play:

latency safe-zone visualization;

Home, World, or Higher-of-Home/World latency source;

configurable safety allowance;

numeric latency value;

independent latency text positioning;

measured, effective, or formula display modes;

milliseconds or seconds;

configurable decimal precision;

channel direction control;

channel tick markers where timing is actually known;

completion-edge marker.

The latency safe zone is proportional to total cast duration and follows the actual cast-completion edge according to fill direction.

Channels

Channels are first-class casts across Self, Pet, Party, Target, Enemy, and Boss contexts.

Hardcore Cast Bars distinguishes between true channel ticks and progress divisions. Equal visual divisions are never presented as known spell ticks unless the user explicitly chooses progress divisions.

Classic Era can report a confirmed non-player channel start without exposing a total duration. In that case Hardcore Cast Bars keeps the channel visible, avoids fabricating countdowns or tick positions, and waits for authoritative channel-stop information.

Test Mode

Open Hardcore Cast Bars with /hcb and enter Test Mode to configure bars directly on the game screen.

Test Mode supports:

live dragging;

unified Party, Enemy, and Boss stack movement;

edge and corner resizing;

gold resize highlighting;

normalized user-facing width and height values;

exact position persistence;

Snap-to-grid;

configurable grid size;

screen-center snapping;

snapping to other cast bars;

gold alignment guides;

Shift to temporarily bypass snapping;

1-pixel nudging;

larger Shift-assisted nudging;

Center Horizontally;

Center Vertically;

Reset Position;

per-group locks;

bounded Undo / Redo;

movable spell, timer, caster, target, and latency text.

The adjustment panel automatically chooses a safe location around the selected bar so it does not cover the element being edited.

Profiles & Presets

Hardcore Cast Bars supports named profiles that can be created, duplicated, renamed, deleted, assigned, and switched without requiring a reload when secure restrictions allow it.

Profile-specific configuration may include:

cast-bar layout;

positions and dimensions;

typography;

colors;

stack presentation;

visibility;

latency presentation;

Test Mode configuration;

accessibility and presentation settings.

Account-wide spell intelligence, custom spell rules, channel timing knowledge, presets, and observation data remain separate from visual profiles so profile switching does not destroy intelligence data.

Built-in and custom presets support reusable appearance styles, and style copy/paste can transfer selected visual scopes between bar groups without unexpectedly moving unrelated bars.

Performance

Hardcore Cast Bars is designed around an event-driven, bounded runtime rather than broad permanent polling.

Continuous update work exists only while active bars actually need timing or animation updates. Hidden and inactive elements stop unnecessary work, and one bounded scheduler services active bars rather than creating repeating timers for every unit.

Runtime design includes:

event-driven cast lifecycle handling;

GUID-aware Enemy tracking;

recycled-nameplate cleanup;

stale terminal-event protection;

conditional updater shutdown when idle;

deduplicated alerts;

bounded diagnostic counters;

targeted stack reflow.

Import & Export

Supported transfer scopes include:

PROFILE: Complete profile configuration APPEARANCE: Visual styling LAYOUT: Geometry and positioning INTELLIGENCE: Spell and channel intelligence

Imported configuration text is parsed strictly as data and is never executed as Lua.

Imports validate format, schema, size, nesting depth, field count, types, numeric ranges, layout integrity, and spell-rule integrity. Recovery backups are retained for destructive replacement where appropriate.

Commands

/hcb · /hcb test · /hcb profile · /hcb diagnostics · /hcb status · /hcb debug · /hcb readiness · /hcb find <text> · /hcb undo · /hcb redo

Built for Classic Hardcore

Hardcore Cast Bars is designed specifically for World of Warcraft Classic Era / Hardcore and targets the Classic client's APIs and restrictions.

The addon respects protected actions, secure-frame rules, combat lockdown, and Blizzard's UI security model. Blizzard cast-bar suppression is handled defensively and must never take priority over secure gameplay behavior.

Independent Development

Hardcore Cast Bars is independently developed.

No source code, artwork, textures, assets, or documentation from other World of Warcraft addons are included or redistributed without appropriate rights.

World of Warcraft and related trademarks are property of Blizzard Entertainment.

Hardcore Cast Bars is an independent addon and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Blizzard Entertainment.

Artwork Disclosure

Promotional branding artwork used on the project page may be AI-generated and illustrative.

Promotional artwork is not presented as an exact in-game screenshot unless specifically identified as one. Actual cast-bar appearance is controlled by the addon's in-game configuration and Test Mode.

License

All Rights Reserved.