Interrupt rotation assignments by raid marker, for World of Warcraft: Midnight (12.x).
Decide who covers which markers, share it with the group, and everyone gets a small board telling them whose turn it is.
Midnight closed most combat state off to addons:
COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTEREDerrors on registration;GetRaidTargetIndexis restricted for enemy units — an addon cannot read which markers exist;- creature names, GUIDs and enemy cast spell IDs are secret values inside an
instance, and a secret cannot be compared:
if marker == 8raises a Lua error rather than evaluating to false.
So KickBaton never sees the skull, and never knows it is casting. It will not tell you to press your interrupt. The division of labour is:
| Who | What |
|---|---|
| Your eyes | "There is a skull and it is casting" — the default nameplate already shows both |
| KickBaton | "On the skull it is Marco's turn now, not Luca's" |
KickBaton does not replace the eye. It replaces the memory and the voice call, which is the part that actually cost effort.
Drop the KickBaton folder into World of Warcraft\_retail_\Interface\AddOns\, so that
AddOns\KickBaton\KickBaton.toc exists. /reload, then /kickbaton status to confirm.
Everyone in the group needs it: both the assignment sync and the kick detection only work between clients that have it.
A squad is a set of markers, an ordered list of players, and one shared turn.
Squad 1 — [Skull][Star] — Luca » Marco
Squad 2 — [Cross] — Anna » Giulio
When Luca kicks, the turn passes to Marco across both of that squad's markers.
This is what removes the ambiguity. The addon cannot know which mob Luca kicked — that information is off limits — but it does not need to. It only needs to know that Luca kicked, and who comes after him.
Two invariants, enforced by the editor:
- a player belongs to at most one squad;
- a marker belongs to at most one squad.
The first is load-bearing. If a player sat in two squads, an incoming kick would be impossible to attribute, and the ambiguity would be unresolvable rather than merely awkward.
The classic "two people on one marker" is just a squad with a single marker.
/kickbaton, or right-click the board.
New squad, then Add from group for members. Use that button rather than typing
names: assignments are stored as Name-Realm, and the button takes the realm from the
group. Typed by hand across realms, names will not match and the rotation never fires.
Member order is turn order. Then click the markers that squad covers; markers already taken by another squad are disabled.
🔴🟣 » Marco | Anna 12
- the squad's markers on the left
»and a full class colour — up now- a dimmed name — ready, but not their turn
- a grey name with a number — on cooldown, seconds remaining
- a highlighted row — your squad
Drag it anywhere. /kickbaton scale 1.5 to resize (0.5 to 3.0).
Two channels for two different moments:
| Push (addon message) | Export/import (string) | |
|---|---|---|
| When | Live, group assembled | Beforehand, out of game |
| Who acts | Only the sender | Both ends |
| Needs a group | Yes | No |
| Needs lead | Yes | No |
| Carries the profile name | No | Yes |
Push keeps an assembled group in step. Swap markers between pulls, someone changes character, someone joins mid-session — one click and everyone updates. Two cases are automatic: the leader re-pushes on roster changes, and a joining client requests a sync.
Export/import gets the assignments to people in the first place. You do not paste strings mid-key.
Push does not carry the profile name — squads land in the receiver's active profile. The export string does, and recreates the profile on the other side.
/kickbaton macro picks your marker (defaulting to your squad's first) and generates:
#showtooltip
/focus [@mouseover,harm,exists][]
/tm [@focus] ~3
/tm [@focus] 0
/clearfocus
The choice is saved per character. Anyone in a party can mark; a raid needs lead or assist.
/run SetRaidTarget(...) no longer works. SetRaidTarget became Protected in
12.0 — secure code only, so not from /run — and GetRaidTargetIndex on enemies is
restricted, so the familiar
/run if not GetRaidTargetIndex('focus') then SetRaidTarget('focus',1) end
fails at both the read and the write.
The replacement is native and better: /tm takes secure command options, and a ~
prefix means apply this marker unless someone else already marked the unit — exactly
the condition that line was hand-rolling.
Order matters when clearing: /tm [@focus] 0 must come before /clearfocus, or
@focus no longer resolves and the marker stays on the mob.
KickBaton only ever shows this text. RunMacroText is as protected as SetRaidTarget,
and pretending otherwise would only move the error into the dungeon.
Short alias: /kbt.
| Command | Effect |
|---|---|
/kickbaton |
Open the squad editor |
/kickbaton help |
List commands |
/kickbaton status |
Report what the addon can and cannot do here |
/kickbaton macro |
Focus and marking macros |
/kickbaton push |
Send squads to the group (lead/assist only) |
/kickbaton export / import |
Share squads as a string |
/kickbaton profile <name> |
Switch profile (creates it if new) |
/kickbaton profile delete <name> |
Delete a profile you are not using |
/kickbaton next |
Advance your squad's turn manually |
/kickbaton show / hide |
Toggle the board |
/kickbaton lock / unlock |
Stop or allow dragging |
/kickbaton scale <0.5-3.0> |
Resize the board |
/kickbaton reset |
Recentre the board |
Three keybindings under Options → Keybindings → KickBaton. Options (scale, lock, sound, flash, automatic detection) under Options → AddOns → KickBaton.
Profiles are account-wide and each holds its own squads. Switching to a new one creates it empty; switch back and your squads return. To duplicate one, export and import under a different name.
Two principles hold everywhere in the code:
1. Never read another player's or an enemy's state. Each client watches only
itself — RegisterUnitEvent scoped to player and pet — and tells the group about
its own kick. Nobody reads anyone else's cooldown; they declare it. This sidesteps the
12.1 change that disabled friendly cooldown tracking, and it is more accurate as a side
effect, since only you can know your own real cooldown.
2. The marker never enters the logic. It is never read, inferred or compared: it is a label the user configures and the addon draws. Rotation runs entirely on the sender of an addon message, which is unprotected data.
A|BEGIN|<revision>|<squadCount>|<force>
A|S|<index>|<markers csv>|<members csv>
A|END|<revision>
K|<cooldownSeconds>
Q request a push from whoever leads
Prefix KICKBATON, 255 characters per message, 10-message burst with 1/second refill. A
full push is two framing messages plus one per squad: at most 10, so it never queues.
Squad lines accumulate in a per-sender buffer and are committed only on a well-formed
END, so a truncated push leaves the local configuration untouched.
force separates the two kinds of push. Automatic ones defer to the revision counter
and cannot clobber newer data; a deliberate Push to group always wins — if someone
else takes lead their revision may well be lower than what is already circulating, and
a push that silently does nothing is worse than useless.
The kick message names neither marker nor squad: CHAT_MSG_ADDON already supplies the
sender, and the receiver resolves the squad with Squads:FindSquadOf(sender).
KickBaton:1:Mythic:2!1,8=Luca-Nemesis,Marco-Pozzo!7=Anna-Nemesis,Giulio-Pozzo
magic ^ver ^profile ^count ^ one chunk per squad, markers=members
Plain text rather than serialise+compress+base64: the payload is a handful of names, so compression buys nothing, and a format you can read at a glance is one you can debug from a pasted message.
The squad count in the header exists to catch truncation — a chat client that clips a long string would otherwise yield a smaller but perfectly valid assignment set, and import it silently. Import also re-checks both invariants, because a string from outside has never been through the editor. If any check fails, nothing is written.
npm install # once
npm run verify # before every syncnpm run check parses every Lua file as Lua 5.1, the version WoW runs — this catches
the class of mistake that otherwise only shows up as "the addon does not load".
npm test runs Core/Transfer.lua and Core/Squads.lua inside a real Lua VM against
stubs for the WoW API: export/import round trip, line-wrapped paste, unknown format,
truncation, duplicate marker, duplicate member, out-of-range marker, and that a
rejected import writes nothing.
The rest touches too much of the WoW API to test outside the game; there the safety net
is the parser plus /kickbaton status. For runtime errors, BugSack and !BugGrabber.
sync.ps1 copies the addon into your AddOns folder, locating it automatically. Pass
-Target or set WOW_ADDONS to override.
## Interfacein the.toc— currently120007, 120100. Confirm with/dump select(4, GetBuildInfo()).- Interrupt spell IDs in
Core/Data.lua— confirm with/dump C_Spell.GetSpellInfo(<id>), and check the live watch list with/kickbaton status.
Self-report may be hit by future restrictions. The mitigation is structural rather than
reactive: SelfReport disables itself inside a pcall if registration fails, leaving
the manual keybinding and the board, neither of which depends on anything protected.
The test that protects the project is turning automatic detection off and confirming
everything else still works.
Blizzard has also relaxed some restrictions and introduced spell whitelists, so the picture is not moving in one direction only.
GPL-3.0-or-later — see LICENSE.
You are free to use, modify and redistribute it. If you distribute a modified version, it has to stay open under the same licence.