I'm specifically thinking of spells in Warcraft like the Druid spell "Wild Growth" or the Priest spell "Circle of Healing."

Both of these are group/raid-wide healing spells but they have a short cooldown associated with them (6 seconds).

At present, if you use the single target healing this will be somewhat sub-optimal since the application doesn't know that this spell has a cooldown.  So, it will try to cast this spell on a second target when it is still on cooldown.

If you use the group heal window for this type of spell , it might not be targeted at the ideal member for the spell to land on.

I suppose it might be kinda tricky to work out how best to approach this type of spell.

I did kind of a lousy job describing things, so let me try to do a better job. :)

This is the spell description for Wild Growth, and there are other spells that pose the same type of problem: "Heals up to 5 friendly party or raid members within 15 yards of the target for 1442 over 7 seconds (6 second cooldown)."

So, yes, it's a party heal (or raid heal if in a raid), but it's also a *targetted* heal -- it makes a difference who you target.

If I try and treat it like a regular single target heal with a cast time of six second, then I need to create X number of spells in the application where X is the number of people in my group or raid. 

The down side to that solution is that after the first cast of Wild Growth, it will try to cast Wild Growth on another damaged target since it doesn't know about the cooldown.

The alternative solution is to use the group heal mechanic and set the recast for that to six seconds.  The down side for that solution is that the application only has room for 1 type of group heal which means that it will only cast Wild Growth on 1 target, when really I want the ability to cast it on X number of targets.

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It might be unrealistic for me to imagine that it would be possible for the "health monitoring" aspect of the application to be separate from the "choice of spell to cast" part of the application.

At present, both of those things are combined in each line of the Heal Settings.  That is, each line will first take a look at the the health monitor and then push a predetermined key.  This works fabulous for single target heals and single target HOTs.

I guess the trouble (if it can be called trouble), is with these group spells that are targetted and have a short cooldown.

Perhaps there is some way for the application to have a list of which spells we would like to keep in our "repertoire" so to speak, and we would supply the information about each spell, name, cast time, cooldown, priority etc.

And then depending on the character we could provide which of those spells we want to be considered.

Thanks again for the great software and all your help.  I hope I was a little more clear this time, and if not let me know, and I can try to provide some more detail.

I hope I did a better job there, I'll try again to provide more details if it would be helpful.

I should say at the outset that all of these things that I'm talking about are just along the lines of making a great product better.

Back to Wild Growth -- I guess what I left out is that it has a 15 yard range, so only group members within 15 yards of the original targe get the effect.  So, it does make some difference as to who receives the spell in a 5 man dungeon.  And, as you mention, it would make more of a difference in a larger raid (10 or 25 man).

There are other spells that have some slightly different mechanics.  The priest spell, Prayer of Mending is one. 

This is an instant case spell that applies a buff on a group or raid member.  It doesn't heal when it lands.  BUT, when that group member with the buff is hit two things happen:

a) the player with the buff is healed

b) the buff expires on the original player, but then travels to the nearest other player who is also hurt, and this player can then benefit from the spell in the same way if they take a hit.

The buff travels around the group raid for a total of 5 (or 6, can't remember) charges, or if it sits on one group member for 30 seconds it will expire on its own.

Each priest can only have 1 Prayer of Mending spell activate at a time, but because the the spell behaves "smartly", it's an amazingly useful spell. 

The tricky thing (from a pcgametools perspective) is that you don't want to the priest to be recasting this thing all the time.  You want it to wait 30 seconds.

I guess part of the problem that I'm driving is this:

To use Prayer of Mending effectively -- and other spells like it, I have to identify 5 spots in the application for just that one spell, and those spots don't "communicate" with each other so to speak, so it's possible that the priest would just reapply this spell 5 times real quick, defeating the purpose of the spell since the spell works best when it is casted on a target taking damage and letting it bounce around damaged party members.

So, perhaps there would be some way for a cooldown to be shared amongst the single target spells, that might be a solution.

I know I'm getting a bit spoiled since the application is so good at doing a bunch of things, so I'm pusing for a bit more.

Thank you very much for all the reponses! :)