Scrolling Combat Text for Hunters
The WoW built-in scrolling combat text is nice, but the Scrolling Combat Text and SCT Damage addons give us a much greater flexibility in displaying in-combat information. People have asked how we setup our SCT/SCTD, so let’s do that.
There are two addons we need, Scrolling Combat Text and Scrolling Combat Text – Damage, and they are not the same. You must download and install each of them separately. Grab ‘em and install, restart and type “/sct menu” to bring up the GUI interface.
The first thing we want to define are our SCT Frames. Frames define where and how combat text appears on our screen. We have three frames: SCT, SCT2, and SCT Message. You can position them independently, make the text travel in different directions, etc. When one clicks the Frame 1 button, one configures the SCT frame.
When one clicks the Frame 2 button, one configures the SCT2 frame. Notice how the SCT2 text in the screenshot is yellow now.
When once clicks the Messages button, one configures the SCT Message frame. “SCT Message” is now yellow.
Next, we wish to define the Events and in which Frames they shall appear. In the SCT Events options, we can select which Events we wish to see, the color of the Event text, and in which event Frame we wish to see the Event text. If we want Misses to show up in the SCT2 frame, we’d change the radio button for Misses from the left to the middle. If we want Buffs to show up in the SCT frame, we’d change the radio button for Buffs from the right to the left. If we want Parries to show up in the Messages frame, we’d change the radio button for Parries from the left to the right.
Notice none of this is really about damage yet? We’re getting there, just hold on. But for now, let’s set some alarms in case our health and mana get low. We’ve got those options on the Animation options. The Text Options are not for damage-crits, but every other kind of crits. If your bandage crits, that’s handled here.
Spell Colors defines the colors of the classes: nature, shadow, fire, etc. Casters may wish to mess with this, we don’t. Nature damage is colored green by default, so our Serpent Sting damage will always be green-text. It works just fine, we’ve never changed it.
Now let’s talk about damage, ’cause that’s our bag, foshizzle! What we want is for our damage to be color-coded so we can see at a glance what is inflicting damage and what isn’t. Notice how we don’t color our crits? We want to be able to see the crits and identify their source, and if we change a crit’s color, we’ll know it’s a crit, but not what family it’s from. This feature is used for more than just epeening, although seeing our pet crit for 2k certainly does send a warm feeling throughout our body.
Now we can customize what the damage-text specifically says, like the spell name. We like to shorten the name, as we don’t want too much text flying by if at all possible. Disabling the WoW combat text seems to be smart, or you’ll just have a screen chock-full of flying numbers.
Just like the SCT frames, their is an SCT Damage frame as well, and it appears where the yellow “SCTD” text is on the screenshot below. From here, you can make the text go up or down, in angles, rainbows, and all other bizarre combinations of directions and curves. There is only one SCT Damage frame, so we don’t have to assign events to specific frames like we did with SCT.
And that’s how one configures Scrolling Combat Text and Scrolling Combat Text – Damage. Be sure to click on the pictures so you can more easily see our specific settings if you want to copy our setup.
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and that is why we love BRK
TEJ would say “easily configurable by yourself, RTFM”.
TSLEJ says “Filtering out autoshot damage and 500 damage/healing/managain threshold” reduces number spam on the screen almost to a tolerable margin in 25mans.
We much prefer Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text. It works very similar to SCT/SCDT but in one more configurable mod.
Does my pet get my armor pen?
I use Parrot. Seems pretty easy to config and pretty much works right out of the box.
Awesome article BRK
Seconding Teldra and Oni’s recommendation of MSBT. It even does stuff that SCTD doesn’t, like compressing your Volleys down into one report. (i.e. Volley: 10750 [10 hits]).
Thanks BRK,
now that I see that SCT has “tabs” for the frames things are now falling into place.
Will also now get SCTD. you might want to consider dropping a note to those two devs. so that they can steal your article and put it into there help / documents.
Thanks again.
DR
I’m with a few other folk on swearing by MSBT.
I think that one also (though it maybe another mod or blizzard default UI…) pops up a big warning saying when Kill Shot is available. (or other “on event” strikes. Like strikes available after parry, dodge, block, etc)
And by default it shows all damage on the right (compressed for multishot and volleys and such)
(And all that is without configuration. Out of the box settings are pretty good for most classes)
MSBT is a much better damage scroller in many different ways. Its more configurable, less memory, and it always a bit of fun when you start to really play with it.
When I hit Bestial Wrath MSBT plays “I HAVE THE POWERRRRR!!!”
MSBT can play sounds? Oh man, now I wanna have an event when Kill Shot is ready and the target is below 20% that uses the sound effect from the second boss in Oculus.
Don’t do that Relgon. When you run Oculus, you’ll get confused.
Sorry Rilgon. Consider your botched name a typo on my part… and the lack of editing a real crapper. LOL
this was exactly what i needed…I was having trouble configuring and this post solved everything…thanks again
@Fahr + Bacon: I rarely, if ever, run the Oculus, so it won’t be that bad.
hmmm, ive always gone with sct/d…but i think im going to give msbt a try. when it plays “i have the power”, is it the actual he-man sound bite?
any chance for for a preconfigured downloadable version of the settings file for those of us to lazy to follow your screen shots
I imagine so, yes. Mine for Kill Shot (that I just configured) is the actual soundbyte from Varos Cloudstrider.
i think ill use the “FINISH HIM!” soundbyte from the original mortal combat…and maybe even “FATALITY!” for killing blows…
Once again BRK has made my life much easier.
Thanks for all the screenschots!!! Big Help
~Hunter Noob? BRK Fo’shizzle!
i haven’t really messed with this yet at home, but i was just wondering whether you can have it tell you when you have full mana, like you can if you have low mana? because that would be a nice reminder for the few times i still forget to switch out of viper…
@Elly – There’s an addon that does what you are looking for called ViperNotify
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/vipernotify.aspx
I have not figured out anything to give my tells when mana gets high and low both on SCT/D. …and I’m also really interested in looking into MSBT now.
Thanks everyone for the good info.
Dont know if anyone has said this yet today but….
BRK ROCKS
Parrot ftw. Nothing else really compares.
<<<<>>>>>
Um I downloaded them both from your links and the folders inside each one are the same names etc. they will only write over each other. ideas?
I’ve used MSBT, Parrot and SCT. And to be honest I think I’ve found Parrot to be the best of the 3. Mainly as I like to have my pets damage displayed on the left hand side of the HUD and mine on the Right. I haven’t yet found a way to do this in either MSBT or SCT.
The other advantage of parrot is that it allows you to define limitless new scroll areas complete with configuration of events to be used in each. The only gripe I have with parrot is I wish that they would implement a [Pet] keyword that would put my pets name in the output text. If anyone knows how to do this please let me know.
I’ve used MSBT ever since The Patch The Brought The Omen Updates Every Five Minutes (perhaps the one that opened Quel’Danas) and it looked like Parrot had…
… oh, what the hell, there is no resisting it …
…shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.
Got it all set up lovely now, eff tea double-you.
While SCT is great and I used it for a long time, I started using MSBT and like it better. It is so customizable I put thunder sounds for my lightning shield expiring, bubbles for if my water shield goes, dual wolves howling for spirit wolves cooldown being up, etc. It really made shaman a lot more fun =)
@Koth: It took a while to figure it out but you can make additional boxes to notify on the screen. I had one for heals going to me (Very spammy with spirit wolves, so put it in bottom left for myself, then combined the heals together (Spirit Heal +890 5 Ticks) or whatever).
You can pretty much make MSBT notify about anything, skills being ready, having full mana, make it ignore damage, etc..
It really is an awesome add on.
Is there a way to configure SCT to brodcasr a warning when my PETS helth I’d below a certain percentage? In fact if MSCT can do that i’d switch right now!
Also; BRK. You kick ass.
I downloaded MSBT and it’s great! it works well for my hunter but IMO it really shines for my Prot Paladin.
Fantastic suggestion. Thanks!
Thank you BRK, exactly what I requested.
This will help a lot, mine was setup all funky.
-Macnerd/Bigredkitty
Dunemaul US
SCT is ok, but seriously try out Miks scrolling battle text.
You wont use SCT again
Well, I went and downloaded MSBT, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be turning back any time soon
Configurable event notification! I’ll never miss a Lock and Load proc again!
Thanks BRK!
Also a very dedicated parrot user – it just works
can you separate your pets damage and heals to a different area than your own?