WowAce

Currently, Bars (Health, Power, XP etc) are all displayed in an ordered stack. When a Bar is visible, its full contents are visible. In the case of Bars that are only temporarily visible (Druid Mana Bar, Cast Bar), their appearance causes all other bars to be resized and shifted in order to accomodate the new Bar within the fixed confines of the unitframe. This can be visually unappealing, and can cause already minimally-sized Bars to become difficult to interpret.

The option to superimpose these transient Bars over more permanent Bars would be an ideal solution to this. Grid users should find this concept familiar, as this is the method in with incoming heals are often displayed. Each superimposed Bar has the following features:

• a selected "parent" Bar that it is anchored to, might also be able to anchor to the Frame itself
• configurable thickness independant of the thickness of the parent Bar
• can be anchored to either "long" edge of the parent Bar, as well as set to be displayed inside (overlapping existing content) or outside
• the 0% and 100% parts of both the heal bar and the health bar are aligned (unless the contents are reversed with existing checkboxes)
• possible options to move the 0% and 100% parts of the superimposed bar further in to accomodate existing Indicators on the parent Bar
• Bar transparency is already configurable with the colour controls provided

While this has obvious applications for transient or temporary Bars, this option should be available for all Bars. Players should feel free to experiment, and there are undoubtably some situations in which super-imposing a "permanent" Bar over another could be a suitable method for constructing a desired layout.

For example:

• combined with the Visual Heal Bar enhancement, players would be able to display incoming heals Grid-style
• this new functionality potentially addresses existing enhancement requests related to preventing a temporary Cast Bar from disturbing other Bars, as per tickets 351 and 429, maybe even 398; Cast Bars can be anchored to the outside edge of the frame itself, or conveniently tucked within another Bar as desired
• many new additional Bar types can be created and we would have the foundations in place for arranging them unobtrusively

Note: Ticket 609 ended up having too many separate ideas than I initially intended. This is why I have closed that ticket and replaced it with multiple specific ones.

I was going to fill a ticket for this, I'm just checking if pitbull4 can replace my own personal oUF layout that I have no more time to work on. What I'd like is to make the castbar an 'overlay' over my portrait bar as I'm currently doing in my oUF layout. that would be really really great.

Could help with this, too: http://www.wowace.com/addons/pitbull4/tickets/842-portraits-layered-over-health-bars-w-transparancy/