Healer Macros to target by roles

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

If you heal a lot you might see how always moving your mouse pointer to frames using healer addons like Clique works, but there is a better way. And too, what about when using your mouse to move at the same time as when healing a lot? Doing the two simultaneously gets complicated sometimes. The needs of the two conflict with each other at times. That is, you want to heal someone while moving, simultaneously, for example, but cant do both with one mouse.

Hence, you might come around to thinking the only solution for this is to target your party members and then hit keys healing them with keybinds–that is, for example, flash of light, with your “A” key as a keybound cast. That solves the problem beautifully.

However, if you try this method then every time you join a dungeon you have to go to the trouble of remaking targetting macros with each member’s name, and people simply do not wait for you to do that. It is also a very laborious hassle if you pug dungeons a lot. And maybe you have also tried addons like Sortgroup and Targetrole and spent hours and hours and hours trying to simply get them to target party members in a logical way.

In my case I like my dungeon frames organized so that the tank is at the top, then me, the healer, and then the three dps, but I have found no solution. Is there an easy way to simply target the tank, like this (and so that they match your frames with the tank and healer at the top):

/target (@tank)

and

/target (@dps1)
/target (@dps2)
/target (@dps3)

No. There is not: or the reason for this post–is there a way? The addon Sort group will do something to help by putting your group members in the order of you at the top, but the tank will then be in a random spot. I believe you can use it to make macros as follows:

/target [@party1]
/target [@party2]

and so on, but you have no idea which one the tank is going to be. You can, for example, in the Blizzard UI, have the group sorted by role, but this addon overrides that setting and puts the tank in the party order.

This problem is very very frustrating. I’d also add that the healer, Moadmoad, who streams seems to do exactly what I want to do–that is, order the group by role and also have them targetable with macros that dont require the laborious process of copying names, deleting old names and then replacing them (and with that tiny macro font), but I have no idea how he does it–unless he makes name macros–but he does not.

If anyone has figured out how to do this please help.

2

If you’re going to do all that setup why not just use mouseover macros?

Also raid-style party frames sound like what you want without overcomplicating things.

3

More like pvp frames. In pvp you can make macros that target frames. Not sure how common that is anymore, but it’s def doable. Sounds like a nightmare in a raid environment.

Default keys are F1-5.

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4

What exactly are mouseover macros? I have used Clique and Grid/Grid2 since vanilla–which is basically the same set up (except for the particulars) as Healbot. You move your mouse pointer to the frame of the toon you want to heal and then hit your left or right mouse button or whatever and the heal is cast. But I dont want to heal with my mouse at all, and would like to do it all from keys by targeting with keys, such as 1, 2, 3, 4 and then hitting keybound spells like Holy Light or Shadow Mend. It is faster and does not cause conflicts between moving and moving your mouse to heal.

Really the only problem is getting the frames in the correct order with the tank in the second spot below you, the healer. There is an addon that puts you at the top frame and allows you to target party members–it’s called SortGroup. It also puts you, the healer in the top frame, but the tank will always be in a random spot which is a problem.

Maybe there is a script or something that allows you to do this, but I am not sure.

5

Mouseover macros are really easy to set up.

You create macros for your healing spells in this form:

#showtooltipSpellName
(optionally do other stuff, I like to put trinkets here)
/cast [@mouseover, help, nodead] SpellName

Put that on your bars. Use the standard frames (raid-style party frames are succinct and don’t take up much space on the screen)

Now to heal someone, you point at their frame and press the button. I like them because they allow me to keep enemies targeted the entire time, which makes switching between healing and DPS fluid and seamless.

I have a fancy MMO mouse and I have all my healing abilities on my keyboard and all my DPS abilities on my mouse but that’s just my personal preference.

I use them on my tank alt too (he hit 2K mythic rating today for anyone who cares) and I can’t imagine being able to dispel people and throw out offheals in any other way simply because I’d have to switch my target which would disrupt my normal tanking rhythm.

6

It’s virtually identical. Exception being that mouseovers take up bar space.

1 Like
7

The @mouseover modifier will target the spell at the entity your mouse cursor is currently over. This could be the person’s frame on any bar (e.g. you can mouseover on a raid bar, on a focus bar, on a boss bar), or the person’s in-game model in the world, although the latter would be fairly unreliable.

So instead of Clique where you click/right click on the frame of the person, you can instead move your mouse cursor over the frame, and then use your regular keybinds, without being reliant on click events, or configuring different click events.

If you genuinely don’t want to use your mouse at all, there is no reliable way that I can think of that will work for all or even most situations you can have, and I think you’d be setting yourself up for failure. There’s no such thing as spells you want to always only cast on the tank, or healer, and micromanaging the order of party slots every group you’re in sounds both exhausting, and still unreliable. MAYBE you could set up action bar paging such that each bar is made to target different party members, but that also sounds inefficient, since to do something to the tank, you’d need a bind to switch to the right bar, e.g. (Ctrl-1), then another bind to cast your spell. Your reaction times would be terrible. We had a Shadow Priest who tried stuff like that one time back in WotLK, and he ended up not even being able to handle keeping dots up.

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8

You can set clique to any bind. My LoH is set to R through clique. Flash is set to X. Hell, freedom is set to 2.

9

I’m aware, my point was more that you don’t have to configure those events/binds as part of the Clique tab or config GUI or whatever it is nowadays. For example, not that it’s a common occurrence once you’ve gotten the feel down, but worst come to worst, if you want to swap 2 buttons in combat because you feel that’s a better bind for you, you can just move them on the action bar - but last I checked the Blizz API doesn’t let you alter Clique bindings in combat.

Of course, there may be other reasons to use Clique on top of mouseovers, e.g. raid frame configurations, alerts, etc. I’ve played with healers that did just that. Up to anyone to find their working setup.

10

And macro slots. Are there addons that give you more macro slots?

Anyway, as Sackless pointed out, you can use the F1-F5 keys to target players in your party; though, they won’t be sorted by role. When I first learned to heal way back in TBC, that’s how I did it, but I had to unlearn that behavior because it’s not extensible to larger groups. I’d also get thrown off by random DCs or whatever that effectively resorted my group mid-run. It wasn’t a big deal back then, but in modern WoW, shifting your primary target is also going to cost you DPS. It’s not a very effective way to heal.

I don’t do this myself, so I can’t say with certainty, but I’m pretty sure that most healing frames have options to pull out the tanks specifically and/or sort by role if that’s really what you’re after.

11

There’s no addon to “create” more macro slots. There is this one, which at a glance works by allocating certain of the General slots, and managing a hot-swap within those slots when you do things like change spec.
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/mega-macro

There’s also another which I believe extends your macros past the existing character limit within them.

That said, I don’t use any of the macro addons and I’m not sure how anyone would genuinely be running out of macro space. It’s a little bit weird that there’s 18 “character” macro slots rn sure, but given the General macro slots are account wide, and that many macros are useful across all characters of a class (if you have multiple), I can’t fathom a world where someone is genuinely lacking for macro space. I even have all kinds of old macros which are no-longer necessary, like the Tainted Core macro from back in BC, and I still have maybe half my General macro slots available.

12

Hardly. /cast [@focus] Rebuke only works on a class that has rebuke. etc etc etc

just reread, you said characters of a class… as if that’s something that people commonly do as opposed to having 13 characters of different classes.

13

Plenty of people do that. I’m hard pressed to think of a single person I raided with spanning all the way back to BC who didn’t have an alt of the same class. For that matter, even people I didn’t play with had alts like that, there’s casual or semi-casual players who have both Alliance and Horde characters, level alts of specific races to unlock the Heritage armor, etc.

Anywho, for the sort of thing you described, you can very easily just make a macro called “Interrupt” like this:

/cast Rebuke
/cast Pummel

If you’re logged into a Paladin, it’ll do Rebuke. if you’re logged into a Warrior, it’ll skip line 1 because it’s invalid (more complicated but I’ll leave it there), so it’ll Pummel. I can’t think of many instances where you’re trying to do a shared purpose thing where they actually have overlapping spell names (e.g. it’s not like Warrior has a separate Rebuke spell to confuse the macro) …

14

Something existing and something being common are very different concepts. I have 2 paladins because I thought I’d have a need for Venthyr and wanted to try nightfae without tanking my prog on kyrian. That said, the guy with 5 mages is an anomaly. That guy who’s gameplay consists exclusively of leveling warriors as well (forget his name).

More on topic, you don’t get THAT many slots. All my skills use the shift macro to reduce the number of bars I need.

#showtooltip /cast [mod:shift] Hand of Justice; Judgment

All my characters have these to sever as a mod bar swap. 5-12 per character. Then you have the cancelauras, if you’re going to use @mousover/cursor/focus, set focus macro, any macro you might create for pugging (routing and skips that you’d have to type every time otherwise), /interrupt arena 1, 2 and 3, /equip slot macros, /use trinket macros.

In even the intermediately high level of the game, your macro slots are pretty thin.

15

Sure, and common is subjective. THat’s why I said “plenty of people”, not “most”, or “common”. It could and perhaps IS common, and I’d be surprised if it’s NOT common for at least one duplicate class character among people doing anything at 60, but that’s certainly not something either of us can collect stats on. I said nothing about people having “5 Mages” or “exclusively levelling Warriors”. I simply mentioned that many macros are useful across all characters of a class, making the General tab of the macros (as opposed to the character-specific one with 18 slots) a viable place to put those. Even if you have, say, one Prot Paladin and one Ret Paladin, you can put common spells in the General tab, and leave spec-specific spells in the Character one, as one way to optimise use of macro slots.

More on topic, you don’t get THAT many slots. All my skills use the shift macro to reduce the number of bars I need.
…
In even the intermediately high level of the game, your macro slots are pretty thin.

There are 120 global and 18 per-character slots. Many of the examples you listed there are things that can be global without any ill effect (and consolidated into one like in the case of cancelauras), and would potentially carry over to all characters. I have some macros in the general tab because the class-specific ones (Priest) weren’t enough for that character, absolutely, so I can totally see someone’s feedback on the macro UI being a bit dated, and I’d totally support it if they wanted to update it; WoW is a game that absolutely could benefit from any UI updates in general.

But there’s a huge difference between that and “macro slots being thin”. Any person’s macro setup works for them, so it’s up to them what works for them. There’s no good/bad setup when it comes to preference. All I can offer from my experience is that - having at least one of every class at 60, using mouseover macros for utility spells/healing specs, having plenty of macros in my spellbook that are literally useless and only still there for nostalgia purposes (Thaddius, Vashj, Will of the Emperor soak order, Rag Sons assignments x2, Ultraxion soak order x2, a macro to whisper “I love you” to all raid members from an inside joke like 13 years ago), or for specific achievements I already have, I probably have at least 40 slots still available in my General tab.

It’s certainly possible that someone is running out of macro space, and every macro they have is still something they use so none can be purged/obsolete, but I highly doubt many players are there, and for that is where I look up and mentioned that addons like https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/mega-macro do exist and may help. I can’t tell you how good or bad it is because I’ve never used it. If I had to commit to a guess, people having multiple of a class is probably much more common than people running out of macro slots rn.

16

jesus christ just use mouseovers