Hold on to your butts because we finally have a decent way to track hots and shields in SWTOR.

Step 1: Install Starparse.  You should have this already, but if you don’t, we’ll look the other way.

Step 2: Turn on logging.  You can do this within Starparse.  If you do not turn on logging, there will be much swearing.  Not that I ever did that.

Step 3: Set up your hot overlays.

This is a little hard to grasp.  Imagine you are putting a raid frame on top of your raid frames.  Therefore you want the overlay to be the same size as your boxes.  First thing is to resize the raid box.  You need to unlock your overlays to see the box, and then you drag the bottom right corner to resize the boxes.  Grab the right side of the overlay and drag if you need additional columns for a 16-person run.

You got the size how you want it?  OK, now register the names.  The names will fill from top to bottom and left to right.  You register the names by hotting/shielding every member of your party.  Protip: lock the overlay frames first, then heal/shield to register the names.  You can’t target raid members THROUGH the unlocked overlay.

If you hot/shield everyone in the order of top to bottom, left to right, they will all be in the correct positions.  Go, look at your overlay (unlock it) when you’ve tagged everyone.  You should see a raid box on top of each raid box with the group member’s name on it.

But, haha, it’s never that simple, is it?  Your raid leader moves the position of raid members.  Someone is out of range and doesn’t get registered in order.  In that case, register everyone anyway and then drag the boxes into the right spots.

If someone leaves the raid, you can get rid of their overlay by clicking the box in the top right corner above the name on the overlay.  Move everyone else as needed.  If you add a new person, the name may register ON TOP of the last person registered (bottom right frame).  That’s ok.  Just drag the new name out.  The old name is still under there.  Play musical chairs with the names until they line up again.

Until you get quick at it, ask your raid leader to hang on a second until you set it up.  Trust me, they want you to see these statuses.  If you are pugging and they ignore you and rush in and die, well that’s their problem.

Step 4: Profit.