Download Comix

I used to have a work supervisor who was fond of logging into City of Heroes over lunch and saying "Baff, baff, baff, baff!" under his breath as his body-armored and caped id-creature would pound the ungodly snot out of onscreen baddies. Apparently this is some sort of universal desire among a certain type of MMORPG player; one which has been initially addressed for World of Warcraft by Maido, and subsequently taken over by Si63, in Comix.

Comix is an addon th at adds sound effects and visuals to certain in-game events. Although inspired by comic books’ highly visual handling of battle noises, it also draws from other sources such as the late-sixties Batman TV show and other video games. The main feature of Comix is playing additional sounds and popping words like "CRACK!" and "SHONK!" (I haven’t spotted "FLRBBBBB!" as of this writing) on screen for certain events like hit, critical hit, battle or demoralizing shout, death, resurrection requests and more — Comix will also shake the screen for a particularly good critical hit. One of Comix’s most low-key and endearing features is the "sproing" sound it plays when jumping. One of the loudest features is the Mortal Kombat/wrestling announcer-ish voice that says "finish him" once an enemy reaches low health; even louder is the voice that makes up new name for kill types if you dish out more damage than required to make the dead mob dead in the heroic but ultimately losing battle to thin out spawns (I started calling him Mr. Ludicrous Kill as he seemed to enjoy saying "ludicrous" a lot). If you can, try hooking Comix up on an AoE caster with a warrior in the group for maximum laughs, and overall screen clutter. Comix also tracks minor statistics like how many jumps a character has done, and the number of hug a character has given (both of which can easily be reset, which would presumably be useful if suddenly faced with a spacebar clown or Goldshire intervention).

Although Comix is fundamentally a gag addon, there are a few surprisingly useful features. The play sound on zone lets me know when to snap open the world map to check for area fog when exploring zones. The "finish him" sound that plays when a mob hits low life is a useful audio cue to unleash a finishing cast or move (however, the sound also fired off on targeted mobs that aren’t tagged to the character). Having Mr. Ludicrous Kill voice is kind of like having a personal cheerleader or yes man, which is somewhat annoying for someone who can’t take a compliment, but it also makes repetitive mob-smacking a little less solitary. The Q*bert-like word balloon of comic-book expletives on death are oddly cathartic. The ability to track a character’s number of jumps also gives spacebar clowns some much-needed measure of epeen.

Comix has a quite robust range of options to customize things like animation speed, frequency, crit threshold and screen shake intensity and enabling/disabling various sounds; although the sound effects added by Comix are also noticeably louder than the game is on my setup, and an addon-specific overall volume slider would be a terrific addition here. The best part of Comix’s options panel is that every item on it is explained by a tooltip, and most of them even make sense. Comix is a hefty addon that will slow down gameplay, so those on high-population servers might want to get a laugh in less populated zones and disable it for srsbsnss; and anyone hurting for memory or graphics processing power should probably just use a series of Post-Its instead. When landing decent crits the screen can get quite packed, so it’s probably advisable to play around with the settings or disable Comix altogether when high situational awareness is required. For those who care about such things, although most of the content in the add-on is G-rated, there is an obvious expletive in one of the sounds that plays on crit.

I’ve been playing with Comix for a few weeks and the novelty hasn’t worn off yet. It is nice to have an addon make the "Baff, baff, baff, baff!" sounds so I wouldn’t have to, if I were one of those types of players. However, I still have to make "vroom vroom" noises every time I summon my mount, because I am one of those other types of players.

Download Comix

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"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
Gil Stern

Well worry no more.

There’s an addon called Blood Queen which manages all that stuff for you. For raid leaders, it becomes a big asset because the process doesn’t have to be micro-managed.

Features

• Auto-assigned bite targets
• Automatic raid icons set
• Takes into account deaths, disconnects, mis-bites and mind control’s

The priority list only needs to be built once and it revolves around your guild members. Keep in mind that this addon will only work if you are the raid leader.

Two priority modes

There are two ways to generate priority lists: From the raid or from the guild. The actual assigning of players can also be done in two ways. 

Normal mode: Bites are assigned according to a pre-set list or damage meter data from Recount or Skada. There are check boxes along the bottom.

Dual priority: Two lists are set up based on melee players and ranged players.

Note: It is also possible to set up opposite DPS priorities. For example, if a ranged player gets it, the addon can instruct them to target a melee player or vice versa. Very useful for tactical DPS reasons to spread the bite chain among the ranged players and the melee players. Check the Reverse first Bite box on the lower left.

Download it now!

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"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
Gil Stern

While you’re there, check out Llyra’s posts on:

• Leatrix, a Latency-fixing script
• Adding Custom Debuffs to Healbot

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"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
Gil Stern

Managing your Runes is probably the most important part of playing a Death Knight well. Once you’ve got that down, with whatever mod you’ve chosen to use, the next step is to find a good addon for tracking your diseases. Many of these addons include timers for your cooldowns or can be customized to do so. There are many out there, some Death Knight-specific and some work for any class. Often unit frame mods (such as X-Perl) come packaged with a way to see your DoTs on your target. I’m going to try to look at a diverse bunch of addons, all of which can be used for disease timers and some of which have other bonus features.

First up is ForteXorcist, originally a Warlock addon but with features for every class. When you first load it up, it looks quite daunting, with a lot of weird Warlock-related things popping up on your screen. To get rid of them (or modify the options of any other bar) the default way to bring up the options menu is simply to right click on the bar on your screen. Here’s what the disease timers look like, with a handy cooldown bar underneath (which functions as a rune timer in addition to tracking other cooldowns). ForteXorcist also tracks your buffs, which is useful when using things like Dancing Rune Weapon. It can also track debuffs on multiple targets at once.

One of the neat features of the disease timers is that you can see when the next tick of damage will occur. This is indicated by the highlighted lines in the bar (see where the red arrow points to). The options menu in ForteXorcist is probably one of the best I’ve ever seen. Here are the options relevant to the disease timers. At the bottom of the menu are buttons that take you to other sections of the options menu, which is startlingly large and covers almost everything you could want to fiddle with. For an all-in-one kind of addon, ForteXorcist is fantastic, especially if you’re the kind of person who likes playing around with settings to get something working perfectly.

If you’re looking for something a bit simpler and much easier to set up, you can use the built-in debuff timers in X-Perl Unit Frames. With one simple step, as shown here (under the “Target” menu):

you can see a visible countdown of your diseases/other debuffs over the target’s unit frame. The downside of using X-Perl to track diseases is that I find a countdown on an icon harder to keep track of compared to a bar that shrinks as the disease runs out. If you’re a more casual player, or have limited screen space for bulkier timer addons, then this might be the way to go.

Next I’m going to look at Classtimers, another addon that works for any class. It can track buffs and debuffs on your target, focus and character. Classtimers is easy to configure – as soon as you log in it detects your class and sets up a number of default timers. For Death Knights this includes diseases, Lichborne, Horn of Winter, and a number of others. You can add as many buffs and debuffs as you want (except Power Word: Shield, which it doesn’t like for some reason – I’m guessing the colon makes it angry). Here’s a look at what you can configure the bars to look like (you can change things like scale, width, height, colour) along with my testing Tauren, Addonsyay:

A well-known but often underused mod that can track diseases is Power Auras Classic. It can be a bit time consuming to set up, but it has the benefit of being able to produce very visible indicators and timers as well as adding sounds to individual timers. Here’s what the options menu looks like (can be accessed through the /powa command) with all the options needed to see an icon when diseases are up on your target ticked.

After you’ve got this part set up, the rest is fairly self explanatory. You can choose from a list of images (there’s also the option to input text and use that) and sounds as well as being able to change the size, colour and position of the images. Here’s what the finished product looked like, with Blood Plague on the left and Frost Fever on the right. Power Auras can also be used to track cooldowns, buffs, basically anything that you need a timer mod to check. My one gripe with Power Auras is the time it takes to set up each individual timers – it doesn’t detect your class and put in some basic settings to begin with like Classtimers and ForteXorcist do.

The last mod I want to look at in detail is DoTimer. It works right out of the box (if you want to change anything, the options menu can be accessed by the /dotimer command), and like ForteXorcist, it can detect DoTs on more than just your target and focus. Here’s what it looks like with two mobs, both of which have diseases ticking on them. DoTimer also includes a cooldown timer, which looks like another set of bars just like the one below.

While the multiple-target tracking can be useful, it can also be a problem and a waste of space. For example, if you Pestilence two diseases during Freya’s Detonating Lasher phase, your screen would explode with frames for each mob and it wouldn’t be very helpful at all. This functionality is more suited to classes like Warlocks and Mages, who are unlikely to be able to DoT enough mobs to create a problem with screen space. DoTimer, however, has the advantage of functioning very well right out of the box.

I want to give an honorable mention to Quartz, which is not only my favourite casting bar addon but also has the ability to track debuffs, buffs, and other miscellaneous things like the amount of time you have left to accept a summon.

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"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
Gil Stern

Death Knights can be a complicated class to raid with. As a DPS or tank, you need to be constantly aware of your 6 separate rune cooldowns in addition to monitoring runic power. The default user interface simply shows small icons for each rune. When you use a rune, it goes dark and slowly lights up, like skills on your action bar. As you can see in the picture below, the default rune interface simply attaches to your character frame, and runic power is displayed directly above the runes.

The functionality and visibility of the default rune interface is, in my opinion, pretty limited. Luckily there are a lot of other options out there, and I’m going to start off with my favourite, Magicrunes. Magicrunes (which comes with an option to hide the Blizzard rune panel) is an addon that can monitor your diseases, rune timers and runic power. It’s usable straight out of the box, but its best feature is its customizability. Below on the left is what it looks like freshly installed, and on the right is freshly installed Magicrunes in action.

The space at the top with the text "Runes" disappears when you lock the bars in place. There are many different ways you can change the look of Magicrunes. First off, there are a number of presets to choose from that come with the mod.

As an example I chose the option "Vertical animated icons." Since in the preset the runes are quite clumped together and as a result hard to understand, let’s look at the options available to change that. In this next image I made the icons smaller (lowered icon scaling) and raised the spacing between the bars.

Another popular runewatch mod is DeathKnight.info Runes. Where Magicrunes is the king of customization and efficiency in terms of screen real estate, DK.info Runes is a bit flashier and more colourful. This is what it looks like (disease and rune timers) with a fresh install.

There are are far fewer ways to customize DK.info Runes relative to Magicrunes. It’s a bit more attractive right out of the box but that’s really all you get with this mod. As you can see from the options menu, there’s not much you can fiddle with.

Last but not least of the popular rune mods is Runewatch:

While Runewatch only comes packaged with two presets, the default and a more compact version that wraps the runes around the circle in the above picture, it has a few advantages. First off, It has a timer for Horn of Winter seen above the rune mod, which neither DK.info Runes nor Magicrunes has. The options interface also comes with helpful explanations (that Magicrunes lacks) as well as an neat feature that allows the mod to fade out when out of combat. You can see the options for that below.

Of the three, I believe Magicrunes is the best option for a raider with limited space on screen for addons. It also takes a lot more work to configure Magicrunes the way you want as not all the options and menus are labelled in the most helpful manner possible. The other two addons can be a bit more visually interesting, depending on what kind of UI you have. Their downside is that they take up more room and are somewhat limited regarding customization.

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"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
Gil Stern

My arch nemesis?

The Theramore portal mage.

Yes, at the end of every fight, these wiley mages play portal roulette and create portals to far away capital cities or towns that you don’t need to go to.

Well never again thanks to ToolBuster! Not only that, but check out what else it does:

• Squeals on those who drop Toy Trains
• Brings up a Mole Machine
• Uses a Piccolo of the Flaming Fire

How’s that for information supremacy?

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"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
Gil Stern

I started using keybindings from Day 1, Level 1. My first character was a Priest and he started with Lesser Heal and Smite. I quickly realized that I could right-click on a mob to attack, so I removed the Attack button from my bar and rearranged my spells so that my Lesser Heal was on "1" and my Smite was on "2". As I learned new spells and spell ranks, I would try and organize them so that when I switched action bar pages, they would be in similar positions and I could hit the same number for my HoTs, fast heals, nuke heals, DoTs, etc.

As I leveled, gaining more spells than my default UI could handle, I had a tumultuous string of love affairs with different action bar addons. Expansions came and went, leaving various addons broken and my UI in shambles, and I realized that I was only using the addons to bind my spells and abilities to specific keys. That’s when I discovered Spellbinder.

Spellbinder

Download Spellbinder

It’s an ugly Ace2 addon (according to the author), but it’s simplicity is beautiful. It has an understandable dropdown-box interface, can bind items and macros, and pops up a confirmation dialog if you are about to overwrite an already existing keybinding. Which is useful in case you accidentally bind the Esc key to your mount and lose access to the main game menu. It used to be perfect, but unfortunately it has not kept up with the new dual-spec feature introduced by Blizzard. The lack of configurable profiles means that if you switch between one set of talents and gear to another, your bindings won’t apply.

Pros:

• simple dropdown based interface
• confirmation dialog prevents accidental overwriting of keybindscan bind items and macros

Cons:

• no profiles
• no dual-spec support

Assessment:

Perfect for anyone who is leveling or doesn’t bother with multiple talent specs.

mBindings

Download mBindings

I briefly experimented with mbindings. It’s got robust profile support and you can bind more than just items, spells, and macros. However, there are too many frustrating usability problems to make it a perfect solution. The complete lack of instructions combined with the poor error-checking and user-proofing mean even the most hearty of UI geeks will quickly get frustrated with the addon.

Pros:

• very easy to bind anything to any key
• robust profile system

Cons:

• very easy to accidentally overwrite important bindings
• only first two keybindings are displayed in the addon–additional bindings can be set but won’t be displayed
• no error checking or user-proofing
• complete lack of instructions, directions, help, explanationsmenu unintuitive

Assessment:

Even if you had the patience to take great advantage of what the addon offers, you’re better off using another option that can do the same thing with less hassle.

qUserKey

Download qUserKey

The author has put a lot of effort into qUserKey and it shows. In addition to a robust feature set, the author has provided the code necessary for other addon authors to extend qUserKey by adding their own custom bindings and buttons. Also, unique to qUserKey is the ability auto-detect all your spells, mounts, critters, and consumables. There’s no need to type them in, select them from a menu, or drag/drop them in place. Just click on the appropriate spell or ability and hit the key and you’re done. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to mistakenly bind keys or overwrite previous bindings. There aren’t any profile options, so switching between specs can be problematic.

Pros:

• intuitive interface
• auto-detects anything that can be keybound
• easy to bind spells, abilities, macros
• also adds the ability to bind mounts, critters, and consumables in your inventory–will scan your character and inventory to add add’l options to the keybinding screen
• (caution: it uses macros in order to bind mounts and critters, so it will quickly consume macro slots if you get too bind-happy)
• addon author has provided code for other addon authors to add their own custom binding buttons specific to their addons

Cons:

• easy to mistakenly bind keys or overwrite previous bindings, there’s no "Set Bind" confirmation
• "reset all data" only empties the interface screen of scanned spells, abilities, etc… it doesn’t reset keybindings
• no profile options

Assessment:

A very good option with lots of potential. It just needs some more time to reach that potential.

Bindpad

Download Bindpad

BindPad is what I currently use. It is the first addon I install after a reset and the first addon I configure. I heart it. It’s got all of the benefits, plus more, of any alternative option and none of the drawbacks. In fact, the only drawback is the limited number of bindings available: 126 per character, plus an additional 42 that are shared across all characters on a particular server. Binding abilities is straightforward–drag and drop from the spellbook, inventory, or macro page, click the dropped icon and hit the key you would like to bind. The confirmation dialog prevents accidentally overwriting important binds. One feature that sets it far apart from other keybinding addons is the ability to have 3 separate profiles per character (actually increasing the number of potential bindings from 126 to 378, so perhaps it’s not such a drawback after all). With the recent addition of the default Equipment Manager, switching from one spec to another takes less time than summoning a mount.

Pros:

• spell icon based interface
• can create and bind macros within bindpad (allowing for more macros than normal)
• can share binds and macros between characters
• can have up to three separate binding profiles per character
• confirmation dialog prevents accidental overwriting of keybinds
• easy to bind anything–drag/drop functionality

Cons:

• I’d really have to stretch to come up with something that’s actually negative.

Assessment:

Until something else comes along that can improve upon it, there’s no reason not to use BindPad for your keybinding addon.

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"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
Gil Stern

But you know, preparing all this stuff does take a while. I mean cooking food for 25? That doesn’t even include dessert! The diligent Chefs that have worked hard will have earned the right to wear the ultimate in head gear.

That’s right. The Chef’s Hat.

Not only will you be cooking in style, you will be invigorated to cook even faster!

But wait! Even better! We’re all forgetful at some point or another. Check out the aptly titled Iron Chef from Wikwocket.

What happens when you open your cooking window?

• Equips your Chef’s Hat
• Changes your current title to Chef (If you have the title)

Great for the players who have a hard time remembering (like me)!

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"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
Gil Stern

When I first started raiding it was on my DPS Death Knight and I saw a post by BigRedKitty on Power Auras Classic. At the time I was running an Unholy build and I first used the addon to help me track which diseases were on my target. And then I realized I could use it to help my bone shield and horn of winter uptime. And then I realized I could use it to track my raise ghoul CD so I knew how often I could sacrifice my ghoul to self heal and have it immediately available again. And then I figured out I could use it to put a more prominent and noticeable visual indicator of mutating injections on Grobbulus than the dbm/raid icon one. And then … well, basically I’m addicted to power auras. I use it for everything, and it’s made me a much better raider by making myself more situationally aware with less effort. I’d like to share with you some of the methods I’ve used with it to get me to where I am now.

Power Auras Classic is an addon that gives you prominent visual indicators based on conditions you set. It installs in the normal way and it is configured using the "/powa" command. Here’s the main panel:

Notice that there is a check box to turn it on and off at the top, which is useful for flame leviathan and other situations when your normal settings won’t apply and any notifications will get in the way. There are also groups of settings on the left and the settings themselves on the right. You can temporarily see what an aura will look like by double-clicking it and disable it with a shift click. I often disable and enable individual auras as I switch between my dual-specs and as we progress through different encounters. For example, on my shaman I have an aura to remind me to refresh my Earthliving weapon imbue when I am in Resto spec that I swap out for a separate Flametongue imbue aura setting in my elemental spec. On my paladin I have similar settings that I swap out based on spec or raid composition for my seals, judgments and auras. Depending on the specifics of your class and spec you might want to add ones for procs such as the Fire Mage’s Hot Streak, or to remind you when abilities on cooldowns become available such as a Rogues’ Tricks of the Trade or a Warlock’s Soul Stone.

Here’s the editor for configuring each aura. There are a lot of settings so that it might seem overwhelming at first, but in reality you’ll only need to start with a few main settings, and the other items are fairly self explanatory if you would like to try for a different effect. This is also encouraged as the effect is shown on the screen and changes dynamically as you adjust the settings.

Firstly you’ll want to choose a visual appearance by choosing an aura and a color as appropriate.  After deciding what you want it to look like you select the conditions to show the aura at the bottom of the screen.

Let me share a few example settings from my restoration and elemental shaman settings and I think you’ll get a feel for how it works.

This one tells me when my shield comes off. Note the "Show when inactive" button. Also, if you’ll look at the name of the buff it’s looking for you’ll see I only typed "Shield" which will match any Water Shield, Lightning Shield, and Earth Shield.

These settings will warn me when my earthshield is not on my focus and needs refreshing (or requires communication with other resto shammies to prevent doubling up). This checks the focus (see the setting at the bottom), so I need to have the tank as my focus in order for this setting to work. If you regularly raid with the same tanks you could also add settings using their character’s names by checking the Unitname box.

When I see my m ana is below a certain percentage I know I’ll need to drop mana tide totem, down a pot, ask for innervate, get dps to down a saronite cloud or whatever. This way I can act preemptively rather than getting too focussed and then only realizing I’m out when it’s too late. I didn’t want the icon to be too big though, so I adjusted the size to 34% which is the slider on the top half that reaches across the whole length of the panel.

I’m normally set on raid heals, but it’s nice to have a reminder to give some health to the tank if the other person assigned has fallen behind. I’m sure there aren’t many tank healers that would complain about me "sniping" a heal when the tank is getting hit hard. This setting also requires me to have the tank as my focus.

For Elemental shamans keeping flame shock on the boss is not just another DoT effect, but it causes Lavaburst to crit every time. Keeping it up is the first priority of the dps rotation. I used the "Debuff" and "Enemy Target" settings.

Next priority is casting Lava Burst as soon as it becomes available. Note the "Action Available" setting. I use this same setting for auras to remind me when my cooldowns become available.

As you can see this addon helps my cover the maintenance areas of my class, informs me of things I need to pay attention to, and helps me work out my dps rotation.

If that was all I used it for it would still be a major addition to my raiding experience; but wait, there’s more! This addon also doubles as a much more visually prominent boss mod without the spam of textual information I don’t need to pay attention to (or don’t have time to read).  

I went through the description on Wowhead of each boss in Ulduar and made a power aura for each boss ability that affects my role in the encounter. To keep things consistent I used a yellow exclamation mark for every effect in the entire instance that requires me to call out my name on vent, such as the Slag Pot on Ignis (shown below), Kologarn’s Stone Grip, or pre-nerf mind control on Yogg-Saron phase one:

I also added a white skull every time if I need to move or double check my positioning including effects like Biting Cold stacks on Hodir, the hurricane on the trash in Freya’s room, moving in front of Auriaya’s Sonic Screech, or Mimiron’s pew pew lasers:

In order to get a warning for abilities that the boss uses that aren’t buffs or debuffs, you will need to target the boss in order for power auras to detect casts and cast bars.

I’ve additionally made settings for casting interrupts, dps burn phases, intense tank and raid healing phases, target switch warnings (using enemy target health percentage for things like Freya’s adds phase and Mimiron phase 4) and more, but rather than post all that ugly exported code or screenshots of each one I’ll leave it as an exercise to you, the reader, to decide which buffs, debuffs and spell casts you’d like to see information for. Remember to copy these boss fight settings to one of the global effects groups in the library panel to share them between all of your characters.

Let me finish up with a few action shots (please excuse the combat text clutter… I’m planning on tuning that down soon.):

Images below link to full size screenshots

Time to Lava Burst:

Refresh shield:

Get out of that rune! (and by the way your tank is under 50% health…)

Low Mana! (Good thing the boss is almost dead)

Stop Casting!

Hodir Frozen Blows. Healing is required.

Thanks for reading! I look forward to reading about your experience with this or similar addons in the comments below.

– Cclemon

PS: I’d like to thank my guild, Heimdall on US-Thrall, for letting me post shots of our raid.

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"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
Gil Stern

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

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