Matticus Channels Cosmo, And I’m A Helper

Challenge accepted, Matticus, challenge accepted. Today’s topic, drawing from a headline of the Cosmopolitan issue you had featured in your blog:

“Little Mouse Moves to Make Encounters ‘HoT’ter!”

Don’t look at me like that, you started this.

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One of the things most overlooked by players is their mouse. O humble mouse, without you how would I ping the minimap? Deprived of your company, must I resort to tab-targetting? What a debt we owe you, o Mouse, and how useful can you be? Let me count the ways…Fun Things To Do With Your Mouse:Movement. If you’re using your keyboard to turn then, I’m sorry, but you’re doing it wrong. You can use the mouse to whip around a 270 degree turn in the time it takes the ‘turn’ keys to go through 45 degrees. You have much more control. The default is that a right-click and hold, combined with left and right motions of the mouse, position your character. Don’t keyboard turn. It makes healers cry. You don’t want to make healers cry, do you? Do you?

Push My Buttons, Baby:

I find that a lot of people don’t use macros. This makes me really sad, because these same people fill their screen with eighteen frillion buttons until you cannot see the game. Here’s another idea. Let’s say you want to cast Innervate, you want to cast Mark of the Wild, and you want to cast Thorns. All three of these are fairly commonly used, and because of the ten-minute duration on it, you’re going to be casting Thorns, like… a lot.
Type ‘/m’ and press the enter key.
Create a new macro. Name it what you like, pick any button you want for it.
Into the text field, copy-and-paste the following:

/cast [button:1] Mark of the Wild; [button:2] Thorns; [button:3] Innervate;

Drag the button to your buttonbar and close the Macro window.

So… what was the point of all this? Easy- a left-click on this button casts Mark of the Wild. A right-click casts Thorns. A middle-click casts Innervate. Bam, your three most-frequently-cast buffs in one button’s-worth of real estate.

Give Your Game Some Mouseover Action

On the subject of macros, there’s a command that is really quite handy:

/cast [target=mouseover] ‘Spell Name Here’

What does this do? If you use a keybind to push this button while holding the mouse over someone’s unit frame (and possibly even their overhead health bar if you use those), you’ll cast ‘Spell Name Here’ on that target. There’s an add-on, one I highly recommend, called Clique; it lets you easily build this sort of functionality into target frames using your mouse.

What does this mean? It means I can simply click on my raid frames to heal someone. A slightly different click- shift-left-click instead of just a left-click- and a different spell is cast. As far as I can tell, this is similar to the behavior of the addon Healbot, with the tasty advantage that Clique lets me define seperate spells to use if the target is hostile, and lets me cast using my target frame, focus frame, target of target frame… the list goes on.

Whether you use a target=mouseover macro, or whether you use Clique, or Healbot, this is a tecnique that can save you a lot of time, and thereby keep your group alive. It also helps keep your interface uncluttered, something I value.

It Really Is the Size that Counts

And by ’size’, I mean ‘number of buttons’. I play WoW with a Logitech MX-310. It’s a five-button mouse. (In theory, it’s a six-button mouse, but the sixth button continues to baffle me). I could not play without it.

Click-casting gets easier if you have more buttons, and at this point the spells I have bound on Llanion are reflexive.

Single target damage! Left click on friendly to Lifebloom.
Single target LARGE damage- shift-left-click, Regrowth!
Hostile beast-type add! Hover mouse over my target frame, shift-thumbbutton, Hibernate that sucker!

Some Like It Wild — Tips For the Druids Out There

Here’s a nice macro for my fellow nature freaks:

/cast [button:4,nocombat,flyable,noswimming,nomodifier] Swift Flight Form; [button:4,noswimming]Travel Form; [button:4,swimming]Aquatic Form; [button:1]Dire Bear Form; [button:2]Cat Form; [button:5]Moonkin Form;
/cancelform [button:3];

Note that this is all two lines, one /cast and one /cancelform.
This macro gives you a one-touch shift button. Feel free to modify it as you see fit, but as displayed above it does the following:

• Left-click: Dire Bear Form.
• Right-click: Cat Form.
• Button 4 (on my mouse, under my thumb):

1. Swift Flight Form if it’s available (in Outlands, not in combat, not swimming)
2. Travel Form if that’s more appropriate (in combat, or in Azeroth, but not swimming)
3. Aquatic Form if that’s your best choice (I.E. if you’re swimming at the time)
4. If you want to override this behavior and get Travel Form (in Ogri’la, for example, where it can be dangerous to take to the air), hold down shift as you click with button 4 and it overrides Swift Flight to drop into Travel Form.

• Button 5 (on my mouse, under my ring finger): Moonkin Form.

Obviously, this macro needs changing to suit circumstances (Not all of you will have stayed up ’til 1:30 AM last night to finally claim your Swift Flight Form, for example), but it’s a very handy resource to have a one-touch shifting button.

Paladins could use this for auras, in a modified form; Hunters for aspects, warriors for Stances- the possibilities are there.

Keep Your Partner Lively- The #1 Mouse Tip For Druids Who Need a Quick (Battlerez)

Hypothetical Situation Time!

You’re three minutes into a boss-fight, paying attention to the health bars like a good little druid, maintaining your own situational awareness, when the aggro-happy rogue pulls aggro from one of the boss’ adds and dies.

You know three things:

1. He’s somewhere in the 220 degrees of room behind the area you were monitoring.
2. You have to keep healing the tanks.
3. The order just went out to drop a battle-rez on him.

Unless you’re much better-coordinated than I am, or have a naturally much more sunny disposition, this is your cue to start cursing frantically under your breath.
Rebirth, you see, has a fascinating targetting mechanic- you have to target the corpse manually, either before or after casting the spell. Those of us- myself included- who use click-casting add-ons (I use Clique & Grid, but I know others like Healbot) find that we have to disrupt our nice shiny routine, often for a full ten seconds of searching as we mutter imprecations under our breath and try to convince the rogue (who, given how he died, is probably not paying a lot of attention) to just bloody PING HIMSELF on the minimap so we can find his soggy corpse and drag it back into action.

….Yes, this situation does frustrate me.

Well. Did frustrate me.

Then I built a nice macro. Here it is below:

/target mouseover
/script local spell = UnitCastingInfo(“player”); if (spell == “Rebirth”) then SendChatMessage(‘Rebirth headed out to ‘ .. UnitName(“playertarget”) .. ‘!’, “SAY”); end
/cast [help,dead] Rebirth;
/targetlasttarget

Note that this is four lines in your macro window- one starts with /target, one starts with /script, one starts with /cast and the last line in its entirety is the word ‘/targetlasttarget’.

What does it do? How do you use it?
If you click-cast, like myself, bind this macro to execute when you click a friendly userframe (or shift-click, or right-click, or alt-shift-click, or whatever. I have it bound to CTRL+leftclick).

If you don’t click-cast, put that macro on a button bound to a key. To use it, hover your mouse pointer over the stiff’s unit-frame and peg the key.

Now, whether you use click-casting or the key+hover method, you need to peg the macro twice in quick succession. What will happen is this:

First Push: Presumably you’re still targetting someone else, either a living friendly or a living hostile. The macro targets your stiff. The macro skips the line that starts with /script because you don’t meet its conditions (trust me on this). Rebirth starts casting.

Second Push: Rebirth is already casting, so the /script command goes off. It’s a touch complex, but essentially what it does is says, in /say: “Rebirth headed out to X!” where X is the name of the sap who needs to wake up and smell the ichor. It will say this if, and only if, you are actively casting Rebirth at the time. Thus the spammage. If you throw Nature’s Swiftness into the mix for really fast casting, the announcement just… won’t work. I’m still prodding at it. Regardless, you end up targetting your original target, with scarce a flicker of targetting frames to tell you that you were ever targetting somewhere else.

There You Have It!With these Little Mouse Moves, you can make all your enounters HoT ones. Have fun!

Caveat Emptor: The version of the Quick Rebirth macro presented in this article is modified from the last known working version. It SHOULD work perfectly- I haven’t tested it yet as I have no WoW access for a couple more hours.

Edited to add: I tried to get fancy and add Innervate to the QR macro to be used on living targets. Too bad that pushed it over the character limit. Oops. The version shown above is the canonical authorized version.