SeaCat Echo Tracker

An Echo tracker for Preservation Evoker that still works in World of Warcraft 12.1 (Midnight).

A fork of EchoTracker by Lazoro (MIT). The UI is largely his; the tracking mechanism has been rewritten, because the original approach stopped working entirely in 12.1.

Why this fork exists

Patch 12.1 made aura data secret whenever combat, encounter, Mythic+, or PvP restrictions are active. Quoting the official API notes: all UnitAura APIs now "either return full secrets or nil" to addons, and "AuraData structs are now always fully secret."

The original addon scanned the raid every 0.1s and read expirationTime off each Echo. In 12.1 that fails in two stages:

There is no alternative aura API that gets around this; it is the explicit intent of the restriction.

How it works instead

Nothing about Echo is read from auras. State is inferred from your own cast sequence, which is legal and plain-valued because a unit's cast info is only secret when that unit is not the player or their pet.

Echo / Temporal Anomaly   →  push an expiry
a consuming heal          →  clear them all
Emerald Blossom           →  bank an extra-target stack

Echo's real duration is calibrated out of combat, where auras are still readable, and cached. Talent 376240 (+15% per point) is therefore picked up automatically rather than hardcoded.

See DESIGN.md for the full design, the spell tables, and a record of the approaches that were tried and rejected.

Accuracy

Being honest about this matters, because the two numbers have opposite error directions:

The timer is accurate and errs conservative. Every known error source makes it look like the Echo expires sooner than it really does, which is the safe side for deciding whether to re-apply.

The count is an estimate that errs high, and is hidden outside raids by default. Temporal Anomaly hits up to 5 allies without telling the addon who, so a later Echo on one of those same allies is a refresh that gets counted as new. In a 20-man raid the flat 5 holds up well; in a 5-man group the orb often clips fewer, which is why you have to opt in via Also show count outside raids.

Note that Mythic+ reports as party, not raid, so the count is hidden there under default settings.

Commands

/seacatecho and /et are equivalent aliases; the latter is there for muscle memory from the original addon.

The settings are also listed under ESC → Options → AddOns, if you would rather not remember a slash command at all. The entry there opens the same window: it is deliberately a separate movable window rather than embedded in the options canvas, so you can drag it aside and watch the tracker update live while you adjust sizes and colors.

/sce spells is worth running once after any class patch: it resolves every configured spell ID to its live name, so a renumbered spell shows up immediately instead of silently breaking the tracker.

Installation

Drop the SeaCatEchoTracker folder into World of Warcraft\_retail_\Interface\AddOns\.

Coming from the original EchoTracker

Globals and SavedVariables were renamed so both addons can be installed at once without fighting over settings. That rename means your old layout does not carry over automatically in the general case, because WoW stores saved variables per addon folder: yours live in SavedVariables\EchoTracker.lua, and this addon reads SavedVariables\SeaCatEchoTracker.lua.

Two ways to keep your settings:

• Run both addons enabled once. With the original still installed and enabled, its EchoTrackerDB is in scope, and this addon imports it on first load. Then disable or remove the original.
• Copy the file by hand. With the game closed, copy WTF\Account<id>\SavedVariables\EchoTracker.lua to SeaCatEchoTracker.lua in the same folder and rename EchoTrackerDB to SeaCatEchoTrackerDB inside it. Starting fresh is also fine — there are only a handful of settings.

License

MIT. The original copyright notice is retained as required — see LICENSE.