Can we get a window added to see heal over times?

Ive played a Warrior since this game came out and started to fiddle with a cleric for the first time recently and im kinda blown away by the fact that I can't see the status of my heal over times and or if someone else has casted one because this spell goes into the song window. Can a window be added kinda like the extended target window but one for heal over times or sometimes to solve this issue? It seems like a flaw and or bad design by this point to not have something for this.

You can at least filter Spells => Heals (You) to another window, or set up an audio trigger (or timer) for specific spells. I would doubt there's any in-game mechanism currently that specifically flags HoT to make any more granular control on that.

Good lord, you can't keep track of it yourself? The amount of requests for handholding mechanisms is truly insane. Why not ask for a change to auto-recast the HoT as needed?

If you don't have anything to say, don't.

You're in luck then, because I do have something to say. The continual whining for changes to further dumb down the game has driven off many, and definitely deserves pushback. Few people actually want to play a single toon any more, because oversimplified mechanics and in-game aids mean it requires so litlte attention. Do you really want even more of the same?

I set up a GINA timer for this, way better then short buff window. Lets me know before it fades so I can refresh the HoT myself or it will refresh if someone else puts one on me and visually have a count down bar to see timer.

Two points:
1. If you're on live EQ, heal over time spells are not useful enough for you to worry about.
2. The way I've addressed the need tracking buff uptimes is using GINA triggers. I have multiple categories of buffs I track, they are located on the left side of the warrior's screen in the below vid.

Does GINA let you know if the toon has HoT on it cast from another player?

It can be set up for that. There are different emotes when a spell lands on you or another, just need to set up the emotes. It will track a hot cast by anyone on you, or if someone close enough to you gets a hot it will track. Length of hot varies so need to set up to end emotes or time, been awhile since I set mine up but seem to remember it taking awhile to get end of hot on someone else to work right. I had my cleric box hitting the tank and track the hot on my main character. Need to have your chat to set up to others spells.

You seem to be imagining some mythical time in which EverQuest was somehow so fast-paced and complicated it wouldn't have been possible to play more than one character. On the contrary, the game has gotten more complicated over time. It's so complex it would be hard to even teach someone the game mechanics to be new to the game. And playing basically requires making a UI with an in-game UI editor, functionally.

It's true I have not experienced the group game in group gear since 2003, however on the raid side of things insanity like Gates of Discord, Underfoot, and The Burning Lands has been the exception. That's not even the same thing as asking about UI features though.

It seems pretty clear to me the original poster simply did not know how to arrange their UI windows to more easily see these things.

This is what my buff windows look like. The default isn't nearly so clear.
(Yes I know to click off the "Shadow of" buffs, but it at least demonstrates what the window looks like.)

So #1, you are absolutely correct there should be a built in method to easily see whether or not your target already has a HoT on it.

As a workaround, I set up my HoT cast hotkey to also /inspectbuffs on the target, and set up GINA to match any current era HoT's on the target. So the moment you start casting a HoT, GINA will read out "x HoT already on target, y seconds remaining" (or it will do nothing if the target has no HoTs on it). This does require researching what HoTs other classes may be using and setting up triggers to match, but it's a nice workaround and it does work very well.

GINA timer displays like Troutfest suggested for every single HoT are just too much for me in raids. In group content they are fine, and I toggle those timers on/off depending on if in a raid or not.

Talk about being out-of-touch with reality. If I put some actual thought into it, I could produce a list of over a thousand changes, most of which are trivial individually, but collectively add up to the removal of about 60 points from the required player IQ .

In early EQ:

-- You couldn't speak to players or NPCS of different races until you spent a few minutes learning their language. Too tough for most people.
-- You actually had to learn a zone to navigate through it, rather than follow the handy-dandy satellite GPS map dot or glowing rope.
-- If you wanted to follow someone, you did it manually. There was no auto-following 6-boxes.
-- Mobs ran faster than you, not the other way around. Not being able to run off your aggro? Too tough for people.
-- If you wanted to know if a particular weapon or armor piece helped out, you tried it out in combat. You weren't instantly shown a numerical breakdown on its effects on your stats, much less have the system automatically compare it against to your existing gear.
-- If you attacked a red NPC in a city zone, they'd destroy you. Too many idiots did that though, and came here to whine about how unfair it was.
-- If you put your items in a bank vault in one city, they weren't magically available throughout the entire universe. Too tough.
-- If you wanted to cast four different spells, you clicked four spell gems. No one-button macros.
-- If you forgot a light source, or it burnt out, you were effectively blind at night or in dungeons.
-- If you forgot to carry food and water, you'd die (changed to be immobile). Too tough.
-- If you loaded yourself down with too much coin, you'd be immobile. Now even the weakest gnome can carry 60 tons of plat without trouble.
-- You had to track what buffs and debuffs you cast, and when they expired. Too tough for some people.
-- If you wanted to know what buffs or debuffs another player had cast, you had to actually ask them. Too tough for most people.
-- The only way to see if a mob was aggro on you was to pay attention and see if it was chasing or attacking you. Now, ext target does that for you.
-- When you died, you lost your items. To get them back, you had to retrieve your corpse. Way, WAY too tough.
-- When you died, you lost exp equivalent to several hours of grinding, even if ressed. Too tough.
-- You needed the help of a caster to bind you. Too tough.
-- Casters were blind when meditating. And when sitting, you were far more vulnerable than today's casters. Try to solo in a KOS area and the first time you tried to med was likely your last.
-- If you were caster and a blue or higher mob was pounding on you, channeling through that was a minor miracle, not something to be taken for granted.
-- For a caster, managing your aggro meant far more than simply "don't chain nuke from start to finish".
-- You needed a druid or wizard to port you, or you ran. And you had to trust them not to port you somewhere dangerous. Again, too tough.
-- If you wanted to return to your home city, you ran there. No origin.
-- Bards had to actually play their songs, not turn them on and walk away.
-- Enchanters had to actually remember what they mezed, and how long ago. And they had to communicate with their group if they wanted to stay alive.
-- If you wanted to reach most dungeon camps, you fought your way there. Invis was far more unreliable, and most mobs saw through it anyway. Oh, and there was no COtH.
-- With no indoor sow and pacify, with FD being less reliable, and with mobs having larger frenzy and aggro radii, dungeon camps required crowd control. Or you wiped.
-- Epic quests were epic. Completed only a few, not a god-given right.
-- If you wanted to complete ANY quest, you did it yourself. You didn't send out overseer agents to do them for you.

But all this pales to nothingness compared to the countless "tuning" of spells, skills, gear, and abilities, overpowering players to the point that even the most blundering group of semi-AFK buffoons can take on and easily defeat the toughest group content in the game.

This guy

Yeah early EQ qol sucked, because they had like 3-4 competitors most of which were dying or nearly doa so didn't have to have a perfect product, just good enough. That lasted less than 2-3 years before they started fixing stuff to get rid of horrible decisions based around paying per hour rather than per month, and gear bought from vendors or taken from crushbone mobs vs hard farmed raid gear, etc. Being hard to play and enjoy didn't make it a better game, it was all clueless (due to there being no cadre of experienced MMO designers) devs throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what worked, and fixing their failures over time.

Well, we've gone from the absurd "EQ is harder now" to the slightly-more accurate "EQ is much easier now, and that's a good thing". Progress of sorts.

To correct a few errors in your historical narrative:

1. EQ succeeded because it was the first MMO to require cooperative play for progress. Player interaction in those "dying competitors" such as UO consisted primarily of being nuked to ashes the second you set foot outside of town.
2.That first "2-3 year" period was by far EQ's most successful period. Then they began trying to copy WoW's EZ-mode model, and started to hemmorhage players. The changes lost them all those people who wanted a competitive game, while the EZ-mode crowd was never satisfied. Twenty years later, they're still here begging to further dumb things down.
3. "QoL" is a term invented by casual players to justify their desire to feel uber with little to no time commitment. The purpose of any game is to consume time. Early EQ never forced anyone to play a certain amount of hours. Back then, not even the hardest of hardcore players got all the best items and finished all the major quests in-era. Today, even casual players do so -- then max out a second, third, and fourth character. Or more. Total time spent: exactly as much as you wish to each month, just as it was before the so-called "qol" changes.

So wrong. UO had already introduced Trammel in 2000 for the same reasons EQ tried to improve QOL, being a crappy painful game doesn't pay the rent, retaining "disgusting filthy casuals" who pay money does. They tried desperately to copy WOW's success at pulling casuals because it was pulling their clientele away, and they survived mainly because they did. You must not have been playing EQ back then if you don't remember every guild in the game losing tons of people to WOW.

QOL isn't a term invented by gamers at all, it was used by the WHO in 1948. It's a pretty good gauge of how happy people are to spend time and money on a game. Feels like pulling teeth with no significant progress? The sane ones will quit and play something more fun, or watch a movie, read a book, etc. Pro tip, if you need to suffer playing a game in order to feel better than other players who desire to suffer less, you probably need to stop playing to protect what's left of your mental health.

It was also just a different time. Entertainment options have radically improved in the last 22 years. A painful game loses to phone games, consoles, steam, streaming, etc, options that just didn't exist when EQ was planning to charge by the hour for people to stare at an open spellbook while medding. I bet you thought that was a great idea too, didn't you?

Most of that gigantic list has nothing to do with difficulty.

I think this is the first time I've ever seen someone talk as if the "effectively blind while medding" thing was ever a good idea.

Interesting about the banks if true. Wasn't EQ character data stored in plain text files on the servers originally, with hard-coded slots for every item and bag slot? I'm having trouble imagining how each bank having a separate inventory would work in such a system. I'm not claiming it's wrong, but it doesn't sound like something the game could do.

Losing a ton of xp from death sure adds difficulty. I mean I try some of the other HA's. Whoops overscaled, 4 deaths.

Back then that'd be a nearly a whole level loss. Doing HA's which are suppose to help you level.

Medding blind, I don't remember, but sounds like it adds realism to the game, just like having to get your stuff back from your corpse on death and corpses all over the zone.

Ex. Velks, I'd see a ton of corpses in the kobold pit, all over that zone was littered with corpses, adds realism that this place is dangerous.

As for the OP topic, sure theres always easier way and more improvements to UI that can be done.
Like DPS meter?

Pretty much every MMORPG has a very long thread (can we get ingame hardcoded DPS meter)

I asked for a UI change too, I got similar respones, "oh you can do that, just do these tedious steps"

Oh you can already see your HoT spells, don't you see the number by it?

So you want more windows littered all over the UI? Like Auras? You have the Aura window and the Aura already shows up in the song window.

I'm surprised no one asking for Aura's countdown timer, you can't see that, but you can see HoT countdown.

Aura countdown, aint in game.
Quest UI, Accept All quests listed, aint in the game.

btw thats a nice list of old EQ, unfortunately playing on TLP isn't any like that hence I haven't jumped on every single TLP since Mangler. All Mangler is, nothing like old EQ, its just forced in classic zones with NEW EQ UI and rules, and wait for expansions to unlock, not as nostalgic as I thought it would be, so back on Live.

EQ community is a weird one, I feel like people despise boxers, but when you got an issue, people come to mention weird stuff like GINA, what the heck is GINA? I look at the Youtube video and all I'm thinking, wow this is some big time boxer. People despise boxers, but boxers have all the solutions, and everyone seems to be doing it too, seeing all this GINA talk. very very weird EQ community if you ask me.

We all despise boxers and there boxer helper software.
On flip, you aint using GINA? Easy fix if you use GINA. Everybody is doing it!

No it doesn't. Dying doesn't increase difficulty. You died because of the current difficulty. It doesn't get harder each time you die. And rezzes have been around. They restored lost experience. Just like they do now. So you lose like what? 12% of a level when you die, and with a 96% rez you're really only losing .5% of a level? Wouldn't really call that "difficulty". Tedious sure, difficulty, nah.

Corpse runs did add a bit of difficulty though. That was a change. Kinda miss it honestly.

OPs suggestion is to allow a view on a game mechanic. It's odd that it's never been shown before, but yet again, I don't play healers because I dont understand/like the way it's done in this game. Your suggestion was you being lazy and needing to cut out 3 seconds per request. Big difference.

Here's a constructive suggestion.

Just ask for the "positive changes" you want instead of adding to the overall amount of complaining going on, or structure your arguments without attacking other players.

Tedium & bad design is not what I would define as complexity. Early EQ had bucket loads of tedium and bad design and it has fixed a ton of the things that made the game bad.
The only reason they did not seem so bad at the time was because there was next to no better examples to compare it to, that situation did not last.

I would say that the game in 2021 is incredibly more complex than it was in 1999, what "aids" the game provides are to assist with that increased complexity.

Playing through from Classic to ToV on Phinigel TLP I was happy to see the much greater complexity offered by later expansions than the incredibly simple gameplay of the earlier expansions.

As far as a "new Window" for Heal over time spells I am absolutely against that because the UI is already badly bloated with far too much stuff that eats up way too much viewing space already - if anything we need far fewer windows and a ratification of the information presented to players through the UI.

An all-encompassing overhaul of the UI is long overdue.