A compact real-time readout for the shaman Earthen Bulwark on TurtleWoW / WoW 1.12.1 (Vanilla).
It answers one question at a glance: how big would a single incoming hit have to be to use up my buffer right now? — alongside how long the buffer still lasts and where the auto-attack swing stands. Three thin bars, nothing else. No dependencies beyond SuperWoW; adopts the pfUI look automatically when present.
- Aura-id edit boxes no longer accept 0.
0and negative values are now rejected like any unparsable entry instead of being written as a spell id. - Pool/expiry red and yellow thresholds can no longer cross. Dragging one past its partner now pulls the partner along instead of inverting the colour chain.
Version history — details in CHANGELOG.md:
- v0.3.1 (2026-08-31) — aura-id edit boxes reject
0; pool/expiry threshold sliders can no longer cross. - v0.3.0 (2026-08-30) — options-panel controls for every setting that had none.
- v0.2.0 (2026-08-15) — max health stays accurate through stamina buffs and level-ups,
"Combat only" no longer sticks off after a mid-fight reload,
/bulwark resetreally moves a frame stranded off-screen, and the update loop parks itself while idle.
| The readout | Options panel |
|---|---|
 |
 |
The two readouts show the same buffer answering different questions: 2875 / 6117 is the
largest single hit it would still swallow, 807 / 918 is how much damage it absorbs. On the
lower bar, 2.24 is the current attack speed and the white marker is the swing, riding the expiry
bar the way pfUI's mana tick rides the mana bar.
(Click any image for full size.)
The readout — three elements, no portrait, no name, no health or mana, no title:
- Hit threshold —
current / maximum, e.g.2875 / 6117. The bar's fill is the buffer's fill. One flat colour by threshold (red / yellow / green), no gradient. Switchable to max shield (807 / 918), which is the same buffer expressed as damage absorbed rather than as the hit that would drain it. - Expiry — remaining seconds as a number and as the bar's width, over the buffer's 8 second lifetime. Re-read five times a second, so it glides rather than steps.
- Swing timer — a marker riding the expiry bar (or its own 1–2 px line, if you prefer), with the current attack speed printed on the left. Deliberately subordinate.
How the buffer works (from the Elemental Weapons tooltip, verbatim): "Rockbiter: Physical damage builds up an earthen bulwark equal to 20% of damage dealt, tripled while wearing a shield. The bulwark absorbs 15% of incoming damage for 8 sec or until it mitigates enough damage. Its durability cannot exceed 20% of maximum health."
Note the asymmetry, because it is easy to get backwards: the pool is built only by physical damage you deal, but it absorbs incoming damage of any kind — spell damage included.
Measured, not guessed. The numbers the addon computes with were verified in game rather than taken from a wiki: the fill level is the stack count of aura 58127, a full pool is 20 % of max health, and the absorb rate at rank 3 is 15 % (median over 477 hits) — matching what the tooltip claims.
Honest about what it does not know. Where a value cannot be established — an unknown talent
rank, a missing aura — the frame shows -- rather than a number derived from a guess.
What it deliberately is not: no statistics, no combat reports, no graphs, no history. It is a live readout. Recording and analysis belong elsewhere.
Option A — download (simplest):
- Grab
BulwarkFrame-vX.Y.Z.zipfrom Releases. (Use the Release zip, not "Code → Download ZIP" — that names the folderBulwarkFrame-master, which WoW won't load.) - Extract the
BulwarkFramefolder intoInterface\AddOns\. - Restart the client.
Option B — git (auto-updatable):
cd Interface/AddOns
git clone https://github.com/ShempError/BulwarkFrame.git BulwarkFrame
master is the stable channel — git-based managers (GitAddonsManager, OctoWoW) stay current with
a git pull.
| Command | Does |
|---|---|
/bulwark or /bulwark options |
opens the options panel (also: left-click the minimap button) |
/bulwark demo |
runs the display off a synthetic 12 s cycle — judge colours and sizes without a fight (clears the manual hide, so the frame is actually on screen) |
/bulwark probe |
dumps the live aura / weapon / talent data to chat and, with SuperWoW, to imports\bulwark_probe.txt |
/bulwark lock |
locks or unlocks dragging |
/bulwark show |
pins the frame visible (clears the manual hide and turns off hide-when-idle and combat-only) |
/bulwark reset |
restores every setting to its default |
/bf works as a short form of all of them. Right-clicking the minimap button shows or hides the
readout.
Frame — lock, scale, width, per-bar heights, bar spacing, minimap button, hide-when-idle,
combat-only.
Elements — each of the three readouts and every text label individually (including the attack
-speed number); swing marker on the expiry bar or on its own line; max hit vs. max shield; expiry
bar opacity.
Colours — the three threshold colours, the swing marker, and the background (with its own
opacity slider), via the standard colour picker; the pool and expiry bars' red/yellow/green
threshold sliders.
Absorb model — talent rank (5 / 10 / 15 %), the set-bonus reading and its percentage, and
whether the swing marker is latency-adjusted, and by how much.
Aura IDs — the pool and time buff spell ids, editable in case TurtleWoW renumbers the custom
spell in a future patch (/bulwark probe finds the current one).
Every change applies immediately — an options panel whose effect only shows after /reload
teaches you to distrust it.
The threshold is in post-mitigation damage — the same numbers your combat log shows. The buffer sits behind armor, block, resist and Stoneskin, so it never sees a boss's raw swing. Compare the displayed value against the damage you actually take, not against a tooltip.
The bonus is documented as "+3 % absorption" and it is not established whether that means 15 → 18 or 15 × 1.03. Both readings are selectable and neither is assumed; the default is off.
SuperWoW is required. The addon stays inactive without it and says so once on login.
This is not a soft preference. The buffer's fill level is read from a specific aura by spell id, which needs SuperWoW; the fallback would be matching on the icon texture, which several unrelated auras share. That would produce a number that is confidently wrong rather than absent, and a wrong number on a defensive readout is worse than no readout.
The swing timer likewise resets on SuperWoW's UNIT_CASTEVENT, which is language independent and
fires on misses too — unlike parsing combat-log text.
Nothing else is required. No other addon, no client patch.
The calculation core is pure Lua with no WoW API, so it runs offline against a real Lua 5.0.3
interpreter — the same version the 1.12 client uses, which is what catches #table, str:find()
and string.match before they reach the game.
lua50 tools/luatests/test_calc.lua
lua50 tools/luatests/test_swing.lua
lua50 tools/luatests/test_env.lua
lua50 tools/luatests/test_config.lua
lua50 tools/luatests/test_slash.lua
lua50 tools/luatests/test_options.lua
test_slash.lua is the exception to "no WoW API offline": it drives the real slash commands and
the real options panel against a small widget stub. The questions it asks — which of the three
suppressors wins, and whether a command re-syncs an open panel — are pure control flow, and that
is reproducible without a client. Rendering, templates and event ordering are not, and stay
in-game work.
Looking at the UI without the game: node tools/uipreview/render.js draws the frame as a PNG
across six states (full → empty, including both colour steps) at 3× into tools/uipreview/out/.
Same geometry and colour buckets as the addon, so the look can be iterated without a client
restart per change.
Panel art: node tools/gen_panel_textures.js regenerates the options panel's background and
border textures. Zero dependencies, and it verifies its own TGA headers and tiling seams.
MIT.