WowAce

The current unit formation sorting options do not allow melee and ranged damage dealers to be sorted separately. It would also be nice to be able to combine sorting methods (i.e. sort by role, then by class).

Additional Information:

Currently in Group -> General tab - Unit group: Raid -> Unit formation tab, the only sorting options for 'by role' are "Tank, Damage, Healer". If this could be changed to "Tank, Melee Damage, Ranged Damage, Healer" it would be a great help. The ability to combine sorting methods would be icing on the cake.

This sorting allows me to more easily determine when to cast healing spells with positioning requirements, and which clumps of players to cast them on (i.e. holy paladin's Light of Dawn, spells with ground-target indicators such as Holy Word: Sanctify or Efflorescence). For aesthetics, it is also nice to sort by class within each of the above roles. With the current design, the only way I can get ideal sorting is to use index/group sorting and move players around as a raid leader or assistant, which is often not an option.

Also, is there a reason that Unit group: Party only allows sorting by index or name? I would like to use the same role sorting in 5-man parties as well (1. Tank 2. Melee 3. Ranged 4. Healer).

Sorting and filtering are restricted by Blizzard, sorry. Here is a subset of the attributes you can use to give you an idea of why the options are what they are:

nameList = [STRING] -- a comma separated list of player names (not used if 'groupFilter' is set)
groupFilter = [1-8, STRING] -- a comma seperated list of raid group numbers and/or uppercase class names and/or uppercase roles
roleFilter = [STRING] -- a comma seperated list of MT/MA/Tank/Healer/DPS role strings
sortMethod = ["INDEX", "NAME", "NAMELIST"] -- defines how the group is sorted (Default: "INDEX")
sortDir = ["ASC", "DESC"] -- defines the sort order (Default: "ASC")
groupBy = [nil, "GROUP", "CLASS", "ROLE", "ASSIGNEDROLE"] - specifies a "grouping" type to apply before regular sorting (Default: nil)
groupingOrder = [STRING] - specifies the order of the groupings (ie. "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8")

For parties, if you are in an instance group, index is role sorted (tank, healer, dps). I'm not sure why I didn't add role as a party option when implementing it for raid groups, but it's probably because the default ui didn't use it for parties.

They can only be sorted based on those attributes, but could we draw each unit frame at any x,y coordinates we choose, independent of the official sorting order?

It sounds like it would require a more significant rewrite than anyone may be willing to do, but would it be theoretically possible to take the default sorting order and offset each unit frame's x/y coordinates by an appropriate amount to create the desired sorting order?

Yes, the downside being you can't update attributes or move frames while in combat. You could come close with just class+role filters if you wanted to to put your groups in columns or rows and not list them in one contiguous group.