Shadow Priest

A helper addon built for one spec, on one client: shadow priest on the Burning Crusade Anniversary realms.

Shadow Priest is not another UI suite. It does not draw your unit frames, it does not re-skin your bags, and it has no options for classes it will never support. It sits on top of Shadowed Unit Frames and adds only what a shadow priest actually needs while playing: the timers, bars and buttons that decide whether the next Mind Flay is worth casting.

Every feature is its own switchable module. The spell bars that replace the hidden Blizzard action bars, the aggro warnings, the cast bars, the DoT, priest-debuff and cooldown rows, the cooldown alerts, the consumable bar, the buff bars, the Shadowform button, the mount button, the experience bar, and the system bar that replaces the hidden micro menu. Turn off what you do not want; nothing else notices.

Requirements

The dependency is not optional and not interchangeable. Shadow Priest reads and extends Shadowed Unit Frames internals, so it requires that specific fork — Shadowed Unit Frames (TBC Anniversary), Curse project 1432720. Upstream Shadowed Unit Frames, the retail build or any other fork will load and then behave in ways this addon cannot support.

Shadow Priest checks this at login by the fork's own project ID, not just its version number. If the wrong build is installed you get one clear message in chat telling you what was found and where to get the right one, and every feature that depends on Shadowed Unit Frames stays switched off instead of half-working.

What is in this release

• Spell bars. Three bars of buttons — Shadow, Holy and Discipline — in place of the Blizzard action bars this addon hides. There is no list to fill in: each bar follows a page of your spellbook and takes every spell on it at the highest rank you know, so a freshly trained spell turns up by itself and a respec drops what it removed. A little badge marks a spell your trainer has a new rank of. Drag a button to move it, or open one list and drag the whole order into shape; every button takes a key binding of its own. Only the Shadow bar is on to begin with — /sp bars switches on the other two, moves all three at once, lines them up and spaces them evenly.
• Cast bars. One for you, one for your target, one for your focus, each placed and sized on its own. A cast fills, a channel drains, Mind Flay is marked off at every tick, and the time a hit knocked off the end is drawn in red at the tail of the bar, so you can see what the pushback cost you. Your own bar carries a latency strip at the end, and a tick hands the job of the Shadowed Unit Frames or Blizzard cast bar over to this one. /sp cast.
• DoT timers. Three rows of icons: your DoTs — clickable, counting down, and going dark the moment one falls off — the debuffs your talents put on the target, and your cooldowns. There is no list to maintain: the rows learn what you cast and remember it. /sp dots.
• Cooldown alerts. The moment a cooldown comes back, its icon appears big in the middle of the screen — animated in, named, glowing, with a sound if you want one — and can stay there faded for as long as the spell is still ready. It goes where you are already looking instead of where you would have to glance. Which cooldowns get one is yours to tick: they are learned as you cast them and arrive switched off, so nothing shouts at you uninvited. /sp ready.
• Aggro warnings. Two levels, in words across the screen and as a red band around its edges: one as your threat closes on the tank's, a louder and thicker one the moment the mob actually turns on you. Both levels have their own words, font, size, colour, sound and band, so the second one can look nothing like the first. Solo it does nothing at all. /sp aggro, and /sp warn places the message.
• Buff bars. Power Word: Fortitude, Inner Fire and Shadow Protection come off the spell bars and become clickable icons that count down, going dark with a pulsing border the moment one drops. The group buffs get a second row under them: Prayer of Fortitude and Prayer of Shadow Protection, each showing how many people in your party or raid have not got it and how many casts your reagents are good for — and saying so out loud when somebody is missing one. Anyone carrying the single-target version counts as buffed; anyone offline, dead or out of range is not counted against you. Nothing to maintain: any buff you keep up that lasts five minutes or more joins a row by itself. /sp buffs.
• Consumable bar. One button per kind of consumable — healing potions, mana potions, food, drink, first aid, other potions, flasks, and elixirs if you want them — each showing the best one you are carrying, the number left and the cooldown sweeping over it. Only your best food and your best water, not the leftovers behind them — and when the client's idea of best is not yours, hover the button and the rest of that group opens as a row you can click straight from. Untick an item to keep it off the bar, or pin one to hold the slot while it lasts. Nothing to maintain: it reads your bags and follows what is in them. /sp cons.
• Shadowform button. The one spell that has to be up gets a button to itself, off the Shadow bar and wherever you actually look. While you are not in the form it fades and a red border pulses around it; it can disappear entirely once the form is up. Its own key binding, its own size and opacity, and nothing at all until you have learned the spell. /sp form.
• Mount button. One button with a key binding of its own, carrying whatever mount you drop on it — drag it out of your bags, or pick the item up and click the button, or choose it from the list in the options window. Which mount you ride is the one thing here the addon will not decide for you, so an empty button stays on screen faded until you have filled it. /sp mount.
• System bar. The client's own panels as one row of buttons, in place of the micro menu this addon hides: the game menu, your character sheet, the spellbook, talents, the quest log, social, the map, the help request form and the key ring, plus your latency as a number that turns yellow and then red as it climbs. Every button's tooltip tells you which key does the same job. /sp system.
• Experience bar. A bar you can put anywhere, in place of the Blizzard one this addon hides, with your rested experience running ahead of the fill as a lighter strip. Pick what it writes on itself and what it says under the mouse, from the bare percentage to the full count; the tooltip adds your level, how much rest you have banked, how long you have played on this level and in total, and an estimate of how much longer the next one will take. /sp xp.
• One shared warning area. Aggro, an expiring DoT and a missing group buff all say so in the same place, so there is one thing to position rather than a banner per feature. The loudest message wins the top slot. /sp warn.
• Drag to reorder, everywhere. Every list here that has an order — the spells on each bar, the DoT and cooldown rows, both buff rows, the consumable groups, the system bar's buttons — opens the same window: what the bar really draws, numbered, saying where each entry will land, dragged into place with the bar following along as you let go.
• Module framework. Every feature is a separate, independently switchable module. Turn off what you do not want; nothing else notices.
• One configuration window for the whole addon: movable, resizable, with a tree down the left carrying every module and a page per bar, unit and row. /sp opens it, and every per-feature command opens it on that feature's own page. It still appears under Game Menu → Options → AddOns → Shadow Priest, but that entry is only a way in — settings do not live in two places.
• Your fonts, textures and sounds. Anything that draws text, a bar or plays an alert reads the shared media list, so whatever SharedMedia addons you already run turns up in the dropdowns.
• Per-character-account settings saved between sessions.
• Chat commands for everything, so you never have to open a panel mid-raid.
• Combat safety. Modules that touch protected frames queue their work and apply it the moment you leave combat, instead of throwing errors at you.

Division of labour

Shadowed Unit Frames owns the player, target and party frames, their auras and their cast bars — including hiding the Blizzard frames. Shadow Priest never duplicates any of that. If a shadow priest feature needs something the unit frames do not expose, the fix goes into the fork, not into a second copy of the same code here.

That is the whole design rule, and it is why the two addons are worth running together rather than fighting each other.

Chat commands

Every feature has a command of its own, which opens the configuration window on that feature's page:

Most of them take lock and unlock to drag the thing into place and test to see what it looks like without waiting for the fight that would show you, and each has a word of its own — status, scan, items, missing, debug — that prints what the game is telling the addon. That is what to paste into a bug report when something does not appear. /sp warn places the shared warning area (lock, unlock, reset, test), and /sp frames says which Blizzard frames were hidden.

/shadowpriest works as an alias for /sp.

Installation

1. Install the Shadowed Unit Frames TBC Anniversary fork (version 6.0.0) first.
2. Extract this zip so the folder lands here:

<WoW>/_anniversary_/Interface/AddOns/ShadowPriest

The folder must be named exactly ShadowPriest, or the client will ignore the addon.

Feedback

Bug reports and suggestions are welcome. Please include your client locale, your Shadowed Unit Frames version and what you expected to happen — and if you hit a Lua error, run /console scriptErrors 1 (or install BugSack) and paste the error text.