So I’ve decided to dust off this priest and level him up and try my hand at healing.
I’ve seen a couple of healing addons (HealBot and VuhDu) mentioned. Do you feel one or both of those is required to be a good healer, or can I do just as well with mouse-over macros and keybindings?
I like a challenge, so I’m planning to give Disc a try, and reading guides/watching videos and so forth. Is Icy-Veins still considered the go-to guide for wow?
Thanks!
Personally I hate vuhdu’s UI, so I just used mouseover macros.
Though, I do use a unit frame addon (I’ve used elvui’s unit frames as well as grid) and I customize my unit frames and use weakauras to help notify me of things.
As far as icy-veins, yes and no. Usually guide websites update once each patch and their info can become a little outdated - it’s usually a very solid start - and the playstyle advice is good. But exact BiS items or talents can change due to balance shifts, or just as people push higher they start using different talents.
The current icy-veins guide is pretty good when I glance it over. They recommend a pretty damage heavy M+ build in the class tree. It’s definitely one of the meta builds - but I think the easier (and also meta) build right now is to drop weal+woe and Blaze of Light + pain and suffering and grab exaltation and Aegis of Wrath. IE: https://www.wowhead.com/talent-calc/priest/discipline/DAAANVUVVBVERkSChBCRA
Granted, their talent build is still good and usable. Just note that you might find this one a bit easier.
The playstyle changes with that build mostly comes down to valuing PW:S off cooldown more, and using rapture as a real CD. But otherwise you play the same.
The way I heal is I am always targeting an enemy so I can use offensive abilities easily, and use mouseover macros for all of my heals.
I use Clique to assign mouse-over macro keys and heal with just those because it’s more efficient for DPS because you don’t need to be constantly detargeting and retargeting. Disc heals mainly through atonement which comes from using dps abilities.
I use WoWhead, Icy-Veins, and even look at builds at what top players use in keys to get a feel for how best to play a spec.
Healbot, I really like it and use several plugins for it as well, it also works nicely for my pally tank too.
For casual pve/low keys/random BGs - nah not really
For Raid/Rated PvP - yep, I need VuhDo due to the demand on response time, and quickly knowing who is within range around me and if they have debuffs that need dispelling.
Same - you can do a LOT with the default UI (obviously resized and placed more center) plus mouseovers plus the WeakAura for priest and priority notifications - and it’s more flexible and reliable than the other add-ons and less likely to break on whatever new hotfixes and updates they do.
Haha, I guess I don’t trust UI replacements… too many “this action has been disallowed” or whatever warnings when it matters and too many breaks on updates to trust it.
I agree with the doggy. Vuhdo is quite amazing. There’s other methods that can perform similarly based on preference, but the features from a properly set up Vuhdo are helpful. I have used Vuhdo for years and it excels everywhere except arena because arena is a whole other monster of its own - less players allows you to keybind all your targeting to reduce on reaction speed delay and in arena reaction speed is king. Also movement is more difficult to perform smoothly while doing mouseover or using click addons, which can shoot you in the foot in arena.
You still need to keybind a LOT of stuff. Like all your damage and your CDs along with other macros and such. Vuhdo/mouseover is for your targeted heals and CDs. I don’t know about disc priest guides. It’s always been somewhat intimidating spec to me because I didn’t like the damage weaving playstyle.
I don’t think they are “Required” to be good but a well-set VuhDu profile will definitely improve your gameplay… There are other ways to achieve similar things (weakauras for example) so you can go that route too.
I personally really like VuhDo because it provides some nice features like I can set a bundle to track defensive CDs, or frames changing color based on certain debuffs.
For mouseover casting specifically I don’t do it trough VuhDo… I just enable mouseover casting for the action-bars in my Bartender addon (for the action bars that I want to have mouseover casting enabled) and that takes care of it, any spell I put on those action bars will automatically have mouseover casting enabled so I’ll only write a macro if a spell needs some extra logic beyond that.
I personally just use macros, the addons always come with extra junk I don’t care about.
Not only should you use mouse over macros but target of target macros can be really handy as well. For example let’s say you have your tank targeted in a dungeon fight and an add spawns that needs to die quickly, you can manually click on it to change targets or try and get lucky with tab target swaps but with a target of target macro you could simply press your damage abilities and they would cast at the tanks target, meaning the tank does all the hard work of target swapping while you just sit there smashing your damage abilities to help kill. The nice part about target of target macros is that if you do have an enemy targeted the macro will work just like your normal ability would work.
I only use mouseover casting, it feels more natural to press my keyboard for abilities instead of mouse clicks. But a lot of people use click based add-ons like mentioned above. For some reason I got used to right click + shift for my dispells, I use clique for that.
The main goal is to cut the need to target your healing first. Where you mouseover or use click frames, it’s up to your preference.
Mouseover macros, any day.
I’ve been able to achieve Cutting Edge and Keystone Hero using regular raidframes and mouseover macros. I prefer it this way. No need to constantly update addons. No need to deal with lua errors.
Target macros like Moad. This is what I’ve been doing recent weeks and have been loving it.
Realistically though, this is not the place to start healing. I still have Clique and Grid 2 set up and use that set up as well at times. But the macros are best.
I’ve tried mouseover and used to only use Clique/Grid 2 only but you also move with your mouse–or most do–and with tricky mechanics you are using your mouse hand to both move and move your mouse to heal. While practice makes perfect, healing with targetting frees up your mouse hand for moving exclusively.
I just enabled the mouseover cast in the UI settings itself and went with that and just mouseover party frames and healed that way.