Leaf-head

How to heal with mouseover macros

It came to my attention earlier today that my guildmate & fellow healer, Gnochi, was laboring under some surprising misapprehensions about how mouseover macros work. He seemed to think you waved your mouse over people’s avatars in game and pressed buttons to heal. Which you can do, but is not in fact how mouseover healing works. You use unitframes, just like you do with click-casting.

Here’s how to do it.

This is a basic mouseover macro:

#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover,help][help][@focus,help][@player] Spellname

There are variations you can make to this basic template. You might, for instance, want to omit the attempt to cast on your focus. Or you might want to do something else if a modifier key is pressed. And you can also elaborate on this to do exciting things if you have an enemy targeted (Smite, perhaps?). I wrote an ultra-terse guide a while back on how to write the macros. That post has more variations. This macro is a good start, so let’s run with it.

You bind this to a key, or you put it on your action bars and bind the button to a key. Hover your mouse over a unit frame for your desired target. Press the button. The spell is cast.

How this differs from click-to-cast: Instead of hovering and clicking your mouse, you hover and press a keybind.

Not so wild, huh?

Advantages of mouseover macros:

• Mouseovers can be used with any unit frames. You can alter your UI drastically and not affect your healing flow.
• Mouseovers don’t require any healing-specific mods to work, and are therefore resilient to patch-day breakage.
• Castable items are limited by keyboard keys, not the number of buttons your mouse has. This gives you more binding options before you’re forced to use modifier keys.
• The mouseover is a flexible friendly-target casting technique that can be used in other contexts. Paladin Hand spells, for instance. Dispels.
• You can combine them with click-casting to good effect. For instance, I use Clique to click-cast cleansing spells, but use mouseovers for all the healing spells.
• You can still cast spells on your current target just as normal, by simply moving the mouse to a spot that isn’t over a unit frame.
• Which key does what is explicit & visible, because the macros are on action bars. Clicks are hidden. You need to dig into your mod config to figure out which click does what.

Disadvantages of mouseover macros:

• You need to do all the setup yourself. The best of the healing mods work out of the box.
• You can fill up your available macro slots quickly. This is particularly true for paladins, who have lots of friendly-target spells to macro.
• Wrong-target spellcasts are somewhat easier to trigger than with click-casting.

Advantages shared by both methods:

• No need to change targets to change who you’re healing.
• You can easily act on a unit that is not your target. For instance, paladins judging on cooldown for mana can keep the boss targeted while healing their party.

You can use Clique for a hybrid approach. Clique will let you set up both click-casting and hover-casting in a nice way. Clique doesn’t use action bar spots or slots in your official macro bank, so it’s a good compromise. Try this if you’d like to experiment with mouseovers without making a radical change to how you heal.

Does this force you to move with the keyboard instead of the mouse? This was the surprising opinion of a WOW Insider writer today. Answer: uh, no. O.O I mouse-look like the FPS player I am. However, I live in the best of all possible worlds there: I have back/forward/strafe bound to the thumb joystick on my Logitech G13. When I’m raid healing, I have my right hand on my mouse and my left on my G13 at all times. I make a game out of healing on the run, in fact. I do it running back from wipes to keep myself in practice.

I had been using click-casting before a friend convinced me to give mouseovers a try. It took me one raid to get used to it and I never looked back. I use them heavily now on all characters, though especially the healers. I also deeply appreciate not being tied to any specific healing mod or set of unit frames. But really, it’s all about your personal style. Just so long as you are doing something to avoid having click to change targets every time you switch who you’re healing.