[Healing] Introduction to Mouseover healing

[Nariaki]

Introduction to mouse-over healing - since Storm hinted at this, I thought I'd give it a shot, seeing as this is how I've got my priest set up.

I'm going to start from the very basics here. When you start playing WoW, things work like this: You click to select a target, and then you click a button to use an ability on that target.

AS you can see, this is a slow and inefficient method of dealing with things. As healers, we find ourselves called on to react both swiftly and effectively when things go to hell in a handbasket (technically speaking, we tend to call that moment "the pull"). Mouseover healing is one way of improving things there, by cutting down on the amount of time you spend moving the mouse around per heal.

What you need for mouse-over work:
1) target macros, so you can specific "mouse-over" as your target
2) Raid/party frames so you have something to mouse-over in the first place
3) The ability to use keybinds instead of clicking buttons

As a healer, you should have raid-frames set up. If you don't, you're doing it wrong. Raid frame set-up is a fairly personal thing - some people absolutely adore Grid, f'rinstance, whereas I didn't like it at all and went straight back to my Pitbull raidframes. As such, I'll save "how to set up raid-frames" for a seperate guide, and simply assume you have some sort of set-up such that you can see all of the raid's health, in a fashion that works for you.

OK, so we've got everyone's health bars, ideally in one place for quick viewing.

This is where target=mouseover macroes come into play. Instead of stopping to click and select a target, I have a mouseover macro. I just hover the mouse over the frame for the player I want to toss a heal on, and hit the appropriate macro. For dispensing a rain of insta-casts across a raid, this is awesome

OK, now for the technical bit. You'll need to write some - fairly simple - macroes for this, as the basic toolbar button just gives you "push to cast on target".

/cast [target=mouseover, exists][] YOUR_SPELL_NAME_GOES_HERE


If you don't want to mess around with the massive icon list, slap the following in as an opening line.
/showtooltip YOUR_SPELL_NAME_GOES_HERE

Now drop this macro on your actionbar. Keybind said macro to whatever suits you (1-0,-,= is the default keybind set for action bar 1. Again, work out what feels right for you - I have all mine keybound to numpad these days because that works for me).

And now you are ready to start mouseover healing. Instead of "move mouse, click target, move mouse, click button", simply move mouse to the target frame and hit your hotkey.

Once you're used to that, and your hotkeys - voila, you've just become a faster, more responsive healer.



Technical footnotes: I'm not a macro guru, but this is the general syntax for a mouseover job. The cast priority order for a macro set up like this is:

Mouseover target
Actual selected target
You

in descending order of priority. So, if I've got Kamira targetted, and hover my curser over Stormhammer's party frame, this macro would cast on Storm. If I had the boss targetted and hit this, I'd cast on myself.

[Secretz]

I've been having loads of problems healing lately in 25 man - used to do things the old way - click target (from UI or GRID). then press a heal button (bound to keyboard ofc) . I was using mouse 4 and 5 as my main heal buttons, and these don't work while you are still mouse-over your target Icon, so it was click, move mouse off icon, press heal button. Additionally sometimes my click was somehow selecting another target, resulting in the wrong person being healed. In short, a nightmare.

I've now completely redefined my setup using mouse over healing as suggested by Nariaki, and am now using a logitech G13 instead of my normal keyboard. (This is a combined joystick/ keypad for those that don't know - joystick sits under your thumb so you can move with that leaving your fingers free to hit the buttons).

Initial testing in heroics has been very impressive - healing the right people certainly got a lot easier. Bit of work to set up all the macros, but it does work like a charm. I'm only using simple mouse over /  self macros (not the targeted as well variant Nariaki mentioned) - I wanted to break the heal-target habit completely. My Macros look like this :

(in this example i'm proc'ing my spellpower trink if its up as well as casting penance)

/use talisman of resurgence
/cast [target=mouseover,exists,help,nodead] Penance;  [target=player] Penance

(The "help" bit can be replaced with "harm" to have a completely different spell cast on hostiles  - lots of possibilities there, but i wanted to keep things simple for now)

Healing feels really effortless now - mouse over and 1 button press, rather than mouse over, click, move mouse away, second click. It leaves a lot more time to think while your spells are casting - so you can be on to the next cast much faster. I really recommend trying this out.

In short, I'm a convert. Thanks Nariaki

[Nariaki]

We aim to please

Re-reading that, one additional note. "Mouseover" works in the actual game window too. Frames are floating in a seperate layer above the actual "view of the world". Mouseover a frame works just fine. What I forgot to mention - mouseover a character, that works fine too.

Relevance? Infrequent. I tend to watch my unitframes for spotting things, mostly because while I can see, for example, Kamira standing there whaling on the boss, I need to look at a Kamira unitframe to see what's going on with his health and buffs/debuffs.

Occasionally though, I may see something like Rotface - oh look, there's someone running out to the kite tanks. Sometimes it's faster/easier to slap my pointer on the fleeing character and hit PW:S rather than play "hunt the player" in a 5x5 frame block.

And occasionally I'll get in a dispute with WoW about where a frame border is. Every now and then you'll see me drop PW:S or prayer of mending on someone completely random in the raid just before we pull, because the client decided the mouse wasn't actually hovering over a raidframe in my view window.

[Faithless]

Yup thats how i was using my cleanse mouseover macro when i was add kiting - oh look theres someone running towards me - now they're out of range of the group, lets cleanse them so they can run straight to the big ooze.

[Kamira]

...
If you don't want to mess around with the massive icon list, slap the following in as an opening line.
/showtooltip YOUR_SPELL_NAME_GOES_HERE
...

it's
#showtooltip SPELLNAME

[Kamira]

...
/cast [target=mouseover, exists][] YOUR_SPELL_NAME_GOES_HERE
...

target= has been deprecated, the new preferred syntax is @:
/cast [@mouseover, exists][] YOURSPELLNAME

...
Technical footnotes: I'm not a macro guru, but this is the general syntax for a mouseover job. The cast priority order for a macro set up like this is:

Mouseover target
Actual selected target
You

in descending order of priority. So, if I've got Kamira targetted, and hover my curser over Stormhammer's party frame, this macro would cast on Storm. If I had the boss targetted and hit this, I'd cast on myself.

the way it works is sorta like this:
/cast [condition1][condition2]...[conditionX] spell1;[conditionA][conditionB]...[conditionY] spell2;...
if condition 1 is true, the spell1 is cast (on target given in condition 1 if given)
else if condition 2 is true, the spell1 is cast (on target given in condition 2 if given)
etc until condition X
if all X conditions for spell1 is false, then it starts checking conditionA and the rest of the conditions for spell2 etc

so to give a speculated function for a heal spell:
/cast [@mouseover, help, exists][@targettarget, help, exists][@focus, help, exists][] HEAL_SPELL_HERE

this will in the following order:
heal mouseover target if you have a friendly target under your mouse cursor
else it will heal your target's target if it is a friendly target and it has a target (good if you keep the boss targetted and want to heal a MT if you have no mouseover
else it will heal your focus target if you have a focus target
else it will work like a normal HEAL_SPELL_HERE on the current target or yourself if you have auto-self-cast enabled and no target

i tested this a bit on my pally and it seemed to work fine, but don't test run this in a raid which matter, test it in a pug or in a farm raid

edit:
the reason you add [] as an empty condition at the end of the condition list is because that always evaluates true, and this makes the spell work "as normal" if none of the other conditions match

[strucktwice]

right here are some mousover macro's im using on shalowend made my life a lot easyer =)

#showtooltip Circle of Healing(rank 7)
/cast [mod,target=player][target=mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][nogroup,target=player][target=targettarget,help,nodead]Circle of Healing(rank 7)

#showtooltip Power Word: Shield(rank 14)
/cast [mod,target=player][target=mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][nogroup,target=player][target=targettarget,help,nodead]Power Word: Shield(rank 14)

#showtooltip Prayer of Healing(rank 7)
/cast [mod,target=player][target=mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][nogroup,target=player][target=targettarget,help,nodead]Prayer of Healing(rank 7)

#showtooltip Circle of Healing(rank 7)
/cast [mod,target=player][target=mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][nogroup,target=player][target=targettarget,help,nodead]Circle of Healing(rank 7)

#showtooltip Flash Heal(rank 11)
/cast [mod,target=player][target=mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][nogroup,target=player][target=targettarget,help,nodead]Flash Heal(rank 11)

#showtooltip Greater Heal(rank 9)
/cast [mod,target=player][target=mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][nogroup,target=player][target=targettarget,help,nodead]Greater Heal(rank 9)

#showtooltip Prayer of Mending(rank 3)
/cast [mod,target=player][target=mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][nogroup,target=player][target=targettarget,help,nodead]Prayer of Mending(rank 3)

hope this is somewhat useful to any of you priest.....if you want other spels just replace names of the spel and change the rank lvl and youre set

ofc any other caster can use this i modified them for twigbender my shammy also and works a treat
and ofc for dps casting can be used too

[Kamira]

right here are some mousover macro's im using on shalowend made my life a lot easyer =)

#showtooltip SPELL(RANK)
/cast [mod,target=player][target=mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][nogroup,target=player][target=targettarget,help,nodead]Circle of Healing(rank 7)
...
hope this is somewhat useful to any of you priest.....if you want other spels just replace names of the spel and change the rank lvl and youre set

ofc any other caster can use this i modified them for twigbender my shammy also and works a treat
and ofc for dps casting can be used too

for those curious, here's the shortened version:
#showtooltip SPELL
/cast [mod,@player][@mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][nogroup,@player][@targettarget,help,nodead] SPELL

you don't need to provide the rank as the client always chooses the highest rank unless you specify one

what does this do:
if you hold a moderator key, it will heal the caster
else it will heal the target under the mouse cursor if it is friendly and it is not dead
else it will heal your current target if not dead
if you are not in a group it heals the player (not sure why this is in the middle)
else it will heal the target's target if it is friendly and not dead

there is a condition that's not covered by this:
if you are in a group and have no target and nothing under the mouse cursor, this won't heal anything (as far as i read the conditions), also if you are ungrouped and have a healable target without a target or a hostile target you won't cast a heal. you can fix this by adding empty brackets at the end like this:
/cast [mod,@player][@mouseover,help,nodead][help,nodead][nogroup,@player][@targettarget,help,nodead][] SPELL
what this does is when the list of specified tests all fail, the spell functions as if you clicked it in the spellbook