nugsCombatText

UPDATE - PROJECT ON HOLD!!!

Patch 12.0 closed COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED, and most floating combat text addons died with it. nugsCombatText is built on what 12.0 actually left open, and it is upfront about where that boundary sits.

Open the options with /nct, or from the nugsSuite launcher.

Your numbers, your way

• Ability icons and spell names — 10k with Crusader Strike's icon beside it, or 10k (Crusader Strike), or both. Per ability.
• Per-spell control, from your spellbook — every ability listed and grouped the way the spellbook groups it, each cycling always / crits only / off. No spell IDs to look up.
• Crit styling — its own size, its own colour, its own symbol, held on screen a little longer.
• Colour by damage school — physical, holy, fire, nature, frost, shadow, arcane, each its own colour. This one is exact, not inferred: the school arrives plain in every combat event.
• Damage taken and healing taken separately — with independent thresholds, because heal sizes and hit sizes don't live on the same scale.
• Fonts from LibSharedMedia when another addon has loaded it, previewed in the font itself.

Area damage, made readable

Every enemy nameplate is a source, so cleave and AoE are visible — and a single dungeon pull can produce six thousand hits. Numbers sharing a spell, crit state and direction inside a short window merge into one growing number with an x5, so a pack takes one readable number instead of eight unreadable fragments.

Where the numbers go

• Pinned to the mob's nameplate, or rising from two zones you place yourself.
• Straight up, arching outward, or holding still — the arch drifts sideways on a curve and alternates left and right, so a burst fans out.
• When a mob dies mid-flight its number freezes where it was rather than vanishing with the nameplate. The killing blow is the one worth reading.
• A live preview runs until you stop it, so you can drag a slider and watch the numbers change. With nameplate placement on it borrows your target's own nameplate, so you are looking at exactly where real damage will land. It stops itself when you close the window or enter combat.

What 12.0 means for this, honestly

The one live per-hit feed left to addons is UNIT_COMBAT, and it has two properties worth knowing before you install anything of this kind:

• It reports damage a unit takes, and carries no source. In a group, the numbers over a mob include everyone's damage, not just yours. Measured in a 5-man: about four times the player's own. No API can separate them, and any addon claiming otherwise is guessing.
• It carries no spell ID. Ability icons and names come from matching damage against your own cast timeline, within a window you control. That is accurate for direct abilities on your target — 196 of 198 hits in testing — and it cannot attribute melee swings, pet swings or periodic ticks at all, because no cast event exists for them.

Everything else is exact. Damage amounts arrive as plain numbers even inside a boss encounter, so thresholds, merging and abbreviation are real rather than approximated. The addon says all of this in the options window too, next to the settings it affects.

Commands

/nct                 open the options window
/nct on | off        master switch
/nct unlock | lock   place the zones
/nct test            start or stop the live preview
/nct aoe             area damage on or off
/nct icons           ability marks on or off
/nct merge           merging on or off
/nct debug           how many events arrived, how many were drawn,
                     and why the rest were not
/nct reset           clear the debug counters

Notes

• LibSharedMedia is used if another addon has loaded it, and is never required. Without it you get the four stock fonts.
• Blizzard's own floating combat text is switched off for you by default, because the engine draws those numbers in the world and an addon can only change their font and scale. That is reversible in the options.
• Area damage needs enemy nameplates on. With them off, or with area damage switched off, the addon reads your target instead.
• Recommended alongside nugsSuite, never required.