This is a guest post by Cclemon.

Food before flowers is a direct translation of the Japanese proverb, hana yori dango, which means putting practical concerns before aesthetic ones. Cclemon is here to share insights into practical addons and maximizing their use.

Last time I looked at Clique, and I explained how clique helped me play better by taking better advantage of the mouse to let me select a target and select which spell to cast with a single hand, freeing the other one to focus solely on movement and cooldowns. I also looked at Clique’s intuitive but non-standard configuration panel.

If you haven’t heard of Clique before let me recommend my introduction to it, but I’ll summarize here as well. Clique is an addon that lets you assign arbitrary actions, including spells, macros, menus, targeting and more, to mouse clicks in the same way the default UI and many other addons assign such actions to keys. By using the mouse to do more I was able to simplify my gameplay. I no longer needed to move my hand between the keyboard and mouse or play "Twister" with my fingers as often happened in complex fights requiring motion, rapid targeting, and use of a wide variety of your character’s skills.

Since I started using Clique I have found a few advanced tricks for it’s use that I thought I would share.

The first trick is actually more of a cautionary tale. After using Clique with my raiding toon and loving it I started using it on alts I was leveling. I started using Clique at around level 30 on my restoration and balance hybrid build druid. For the most part I soloed and used the keyboard to cast balance spells and would from time to time group up and use Clique and grid for healing. By the time I reached outland I decided to start running instances as a full restoration druid and respecced. On my first run or two I found I was having a lot of trouble keeping up with the damage. I thought that perhaps I was undergeared or (being less familiar with druid healing than shaman healing) that this was what it felt like to heal with HoTs. We barely made it through Ramparts on our runs with the multiple DKs often helping cushion the damage on larger trash pulls by splitting aggro and offtanking so that at the end of each fight each would be close to death and I nearly out of mana. Searching for a reason for the problem I discovered that the changes to spell ranks made in the game had made me lazy. Most action bar buttons automatically upgrade to the new rank when you get it. Clique doesn’t. I healed through Ramparts using the spell ranks of my healing spells that I had received around level 30. Deleting the current settings and selecting the new levels of the spells I ran again and kept everyone over 90% health the entire run.

Moral: If you are leveling and using Clique don’t forget to reassign clicks after learning new ranks. Alternatively, instead of assigning the spell by clicking on it in the spellbook, click "Custom" on the Clique settings panel and assign the click to a macro along the lines of "/cast [target=mouseover] Rejuvenation" that will cast your highest rank by default. Don’t forget to include the "[target=mouseover]" part or it will cast on your target instead of the frame you are clicking on.

Another thing probably everyone notices the first time they configure Clique, is the unintended consequences of assigning new actions to clicks on unit frames. By overriding the default, it doesn’t only apply to clicking on Grid or other raid frames as I had first intended, but by default it also applies to party frames or the player frame as well. In my introduction I warned about this and explained a couple workarounds. One of these was to open the "Frames" panel on the Clique configuration window and disable or enable clique for specific frames. Some of my tricks take advantage of the places you can click by enabling more frames in that panel.

Many fights feature taunt trading between tanks. As a healer I need to keep up with which tank the boss is targeting and ensure that the correct one is getting heals. By targeting the boss you can always heal the right tank by clicking on the "target of target" frame.  

Clique also works with hostile frames, and allows you to set different actions for when you click on hostile frames and friendly frames. If your raid uses a "main assist" to focus dps you can assign your various attacks to clique and click on the "target of target" with the main assist selected to ensure that you are on the right target for fights involving target switching or dps coordination such as the Snaplasher and friends wave of Freya’s adds. I would be really happy if Clique allowed you to click on the target of focus frame. Currently that is not an option so target of target is what you are limited to in this regard. (I assign macros to clicks as a workaround for the cases I would prefer to target my focus’ target.)

You can also take advantage of harmful actions on fights involving mind control. As a healer when running Yogg-saron before they nerfed phase one, the adds did a mind control that as a shaman I needed to use purge on. Since they were still in the raid frame I could just click on their name in grid to remove the mind control effect. Because the unit was hostile I could easily assign the purge as a "hostile action." Obviously removing debuffs in decursive would have been more natural, but grid and clique proved to be more easy to customize.

 

And what about PvP: well, If you use arena unit frames you can click on these as well. This provides fairly obvious benefit. In particular, for classes with special PvP abilities that benefit from use on rapidly changing targets other than your focus fire target, such as snares, interrupts, crowd control measures, and so on, you might bind these abilities to Clique and use your normal targeting measures for your damage abilities. When healing in PvP, targeting an opponent and clicking on the target of target frame will ensure that you are healing the teammate that is taking (or is soon to be taking) a beating. Because of the proximity of the target and target of target frames in the default UI, this also you to switch between healing and dpsing with very little mouse movement (unless your alternative UI has these separated).

You can also assign "default actions" that take effect whether you click on a friend or foe. You might use this in combination with modifiers for your PvP trinket or certain other kinds of beneficial spells (so you don’t have to move your mouse anywhere to enable them). I use this setting for my restoration Druid’s Wild Growth too, because it heals the people that need it most close to any given target (including enemies).

These are just a few of the interesting possibilities that Clique opens up beyond the more normal healer’s use with raid frames. Please share any of your tricks and tips in the comments below.

– Cclemon