Arena Kill Order

Here’s the deal, I have been getting pretty bored at work lately because I am in between projects. I have been toying with the idea of adding onto a mod I currently use, Arena Live Frames (ALF). I’m writing this post almost to help me get my thoughts in order on what it would take to do this. Using ALF = upon mouse over of an enemy this add-on builds a box on your screen that shows the classes, hp% of the opposing team, and which target each of your team members are clicked on. When the arena starts our chats begin as we try to decide a kill order, and being new together it seems like we don’t decide fast enough leaving the enemy to get the first hit. I’m sitting here thinking now, how great would it be that besides the classes/hp of the enemy team it also shows a kill order? Picture you’re against a team of Hunter, Mage, Priest, Warrior, Shaman, when you’re ALF loads up your kill order is already there for you, no discussion needed.
Hunter – 100% - 4
Mage– 100% - 2
Priest– 100% - 1
Warrior– 100% - 5
Shaman – 100% - 3
I just looked over the code for ALF and it doesn’t seem like adding an extra box with a kill order in it to the graphical interface would be hard. The hard part is figuring out the kill order, not only do I have to take into account classes but also the specs. To take every possible combination for a 5v5 arena team there are 59,049 possibilities and that’s only dealing with the classes! Yes I know that doesn’t seem possible but it is (9 different classes and five different team slots = 9x9x9x9x9). Now take that number and add on two (I used two because some classes found in arena’s are specced one of two ways, holy priest or shadow priest, fire mage or frost mage, etc) different possibilities for specs for each class. That 59049 number blows up again to 1,889,568(9 classes, 2 specs each, five team slots). Now what if you have two of the same class same spec on the team, which do you kill first? I guess you would try to kill down the guy with lowest hit points, so that’s more code that would have to be written. Wow, I’ve pretty much talked myself out of this already.
*10 minute break passes at this point while I was writing this *
I just spoke with Krawl (I work with him in RL at a software development company) and I was going about figuring out my kill order totally wrong. This could be done much easier by giving each class/spec a set number amount. For example, let’s say no matter what combination of classes I am against if there is a priest and he isn’t shadow I want to always kill him first. So we assign the priest the number 1. If we detect that he is shadow spec (he runs out in shadow form) we assign him a number 5. Why 5? Because in between a holy priest and a shadow priest you might want to give a resto shaman the number 2, a resto druid the number 3, and a paladin the number 4. Now building our kill order map( ill call it KOM) it looks like this so far. Priest (Any Priest not in shadow form) – 1
Resto Shaman (Resto because he cast earth shield on someone) – 2
Paladin (Hard to tell his spec and also do we care?) – 3
Druid (I don’t think we can tell if he is resto or not?) – 4
Shadow Priest (in shadow form) – 5
Mage (If he is not frost) – 6
Warlock (do we care about his spec?)– 7
Frost Mage (we could tell from his frost shield) – 8
Rogue (Does his spec matter?) – 9
Shaman (Any spec not resto) - 10
Hunter (Does his spec matter?) - 11
Warrior (Does his spec matter?) - 12
(There is a lot of reworking that had to be done on this, this is just used for my example). So what if you go against a team that is rogue, paladin, druid, hunter, and warrior. You would have
Rogue – 9
Druid – 4
Paladin – 3
Hunter – 12
Warrior – 13
Reordering this list by lowest number first the kill order would be.
Paladin – 1
Druid – 2
Rogue – 3
Hunter – 4
Warrior – 5
As I said the KOM needs a lot of work and the mod would have to watch for who is healing, because what if the druid is resto and the pally is only DPS? We’d have to switch the kill order by healing done? Would you want to switch the kill order after the fight has even started? I don’t know I’m not a big arena buff yet and don’t know all the secrets.
I think I’ll start picking apart the mod the next few days and see if the work needed to do this would be worth it. Even trying to think about it with the KOM approach the amount of work here seems daunting, so my first thoughts on this are; My current rating doesn’t seem so bad =P, but it would be a very handly tool to have. *edit 10/24/07 15 mins after post --- would i even need to show the kill order, maybe just put a big arrow pointing to the guy who should be killed first, then an arrow on the next guy after the first one is dead? All the KOM math would still have to happen but a pointing arrow seems cleaner*