We would advise against doing this without explicit knowledge of the systems involved. This video is a proof of concept and will likely be made into a full addon if nothing changes.
This proof of concept was made by Harreks, our Restoration Shaman Writer and Voulk, our Restoration Druid and Preservation Evoker writer.
What's the Problem
One of the biggest problems for healers and raid frames in the Midnight Pre-Patch is the lack of buff filtering -- the lack of a whitelist or blacklist. As a most basic case, friendly buffs (for example: HoTs) are usually cast on your party members and tracking them is very important so you know when to reapply them. When these buffs are in a sea of other buffs, and with no way to filter them, this can make it very difficult for healers to track important buffs and know when to reapply or consume them. For Preservation Evokers, knowing who has your Echo is important so you know where your healing spells are going to duplicate to.
Find the Echo symbol
The lack of buff filtering makes important buffs hard to see, as they are shown in the exact same fashion as buffs that you don't want to see. Not all buffs are equal priority for healers, and there are always some spells that are more important than the others. Does a Preservation Evoker need to see who has the Temporal Anomaly shield?
What's the Solution (Base UI)
There is no solution in the base UI.
The current raid frames (and enemy debuffs but that's a different story) have absolutely no filtering whatsoever meaning a lot of players will have to just deal with this. This is a massive change from addons where people could customize the exact buffs and debuffs they wanted to see, and nothing else.
The Terrible Workaround
Harreks and Voulk have found a "terrible solution" to the problem, and it involves destroying the base UI to make this work and making it look very awful. Every person will need to decide whether or not this tradeoff is worth it.
The main tradeoffs are:
A way to track buff and filter buffs using colors.
However, it removes the icons of every ability that applies a buff onto your raid frames that you need to filter out.
We advise people not to do this without explicit knowledge of the systems involved as there may not be a way to undo this easily.
For this to work, Harreks and Voulk have found that you need to remove and replace all the spell icons of abilities that apply a buff to a transparent icon that you don't want to see. This will make it so that these icons will just be hidden on your raid frames, as a soft filtering option. This will make the icons on your bars and the Cooldown Manager completely transparent as well -- a pretty nasty tradeoff. You can then apply a colored texture that you want to the spell(s) that you want to track to make it easier to see. This colored texture can take up the entire health bar, or a small colored square as well. You can see some of these examples in Harrek's video below, but he's also provided some more examples below.
Harreks is looking to turn this into an addon in the future if no functionality is changed. It doesn't look great, but if healers want buff tracking, this is one way that currently works.
Raid Frame Example 1
In this example, Dream Breath is a Green Square and Echo is a Red Square.
Raid Frame Example 2
In this example, Echo turns the entire health bar orange when they have it as it is a very important buff to track for healers.
