Benecast

Benecast provides a row of healing and buff icons for yourself, party members and other friendly targets to facilitate casting buffs and heals.

You can set it up to cast lower-level heals based on the amount of HP that needs to be restored for a given target. This can save a considerable amount of valuable mana since it reduces the number of "overheals" that are made. You can also configure which buffs to display as well as specifying "overheal" settings, etc. An absolutely vital tool for healers.

Classes
These classes which can benefit from BeneCast are: Druid, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Shaman, Warlock and Warrior.

Development history
Benecast was originally developed by Skurel. He ceased development after v1.152 (April 1, 2005). Development was then picked up by Kring, who initially provided German language support, but has added useful extra features and fixes too. Other additional features were developed by Unknownium.

Skurel has picked up the original at a certain point, disregarding the improvements that were made by the other developers. He released 2.0.2 beta (January 10, 2006) for patch 1.9, but completely stopped development after this version.

After a while a developer named Wintrow picked up where Skurel left and continued development of this useful addon. The development torch was then taken over by Shimavak until she passed away on November 19, 2006 after being hit by a drunk driver. Wintrow has picked up development again in the honour of Shimavak.

Some time ago Wintrow had begun development on a BeneCast 9 rebuilt from the ground up using the Ace-libraries. Due to time-restraints he was cöoperating with a fan named Gibmanmtl to further development past the state at that time.

October 15 2008 a new project was created on http://www.wowace.com/projects/benecast/ by Wintrow named BeneCast 10. Wintrow has restarted the development after a long hiatus. The addon is currently in an alpha state nearing it's first beta.

Latest version
The current release version is BeneCast 2.1.2 beta Wintrow 8.42. It has not been updated for patch 2.1 but it still works fine for most players (confirmed to still work on 2.4.3 and on an early WotLK beta build).

Links

 * Current version
 * all developer files including old versions and beta versions of latest developments
 * BeneCast 10 on wowace New version in development