Leveraging Mouseover (Hover-) Casting

Several of my macros, in particular healing, cleansing and taunting, include the conditional [target=mouseover].

Provided you did bind the macros containing it to a hotkey, you can now do so-called hover-casting - basically just move your mouse pointer so it hovers above whoever you want to use the macro on and hit the shortcut key. To use hover-casting, you either hover over a visible unit, or its unitframe.

There are several different unitframes add-ons available out there - first and foremost of course the Blizzard default party UI, the default raid UI, and the plethora of others out there. CT Raid Assist, still the most popular raid management add-on, provides these, and its many competitors do too.

For the readers who started playing after patch 2.0 got released in December 2006, which basically introduced, before TBC’s release, all the major changes in the way the interface can be used (and abused), you will have missed one of the more fundamental forced changes Blizzard has brought to the table. Fundamentally, when that patch went live, a whole lot of spell automation which used to be available prior got removed.

The most notable impact was on healing and cleansing. Up until December 5th, there was a host of add-ons out there which would basically allow cleansing your party / raid buddies with the click of one single button. Or, even further, healing assist addons which would automate so much that by a single keypress, they would, by themselves, select which player to heal, what heal type to apply, and what rank of a spell to use - all you had to do was set a couple of rules in the configuration menu, and off you went keeping your raid alive hitting one single lone button for three to four hours.
Most prominently, one add-on, Decursive, was so popular amongst the cleansing classes that Blizzard had actually designed raid encounters taking into account that raiders were using it, making raiding without it a lot harder.
Unsurprisingly, after two years, Blizzard decided that designing an encounter so that it pretty much required a third-party add-on was silly and so they removed any kind of client-side automation possibilities from combat, and further limited what kind of frames you could actually interact with in combat.

In the ensuing brainstorming on how to still make healing and cleansing more friendly than what the default UI was offering, two methods emerged: click-casting where you bind spells to the mouse and the combination of several modifiers will cast a different spell, and hovercasting, where you press a key instead of clicking the mouse.

In both cases, the use of legit unitframes will help the task at hand, and the ideal set of unitframes should allow you to see, at-a-glance, the health of your teammates and what debuffs they are suffering from.

To me, the best party / raidframes add-on out there is Grid. In a relatively small rectangle (resizeable), the healer / cleanser will see, at-a-glance:

• Every player’s shortened name, in a square coloured by class
• The Health deficit, displayed both visually by the player’s square getting depleted from top to bottom
• Past a certain threshold a number in thousand HP giving more information about the deficit
• Debuffs I can cure, by their icon
• Who has aggro (small red dot at the top left of a player’s square)
• Who is currently getting a heal (requires some form of synchronization of information from other healers, provided either by Grid’s libraries or raid management add-ons), represented by the green dot on the bottom left of a player’s square
• And, if needed, much more.

Grid is fully compatible with both click-casting and hover-casting. As the squares are all placed close to each other, mousing over to the next target is fast and allows even a relatively old player with lessened reflexes like me to keep people alive.
You can sort the squares by groups or by classes, and lay them out horizontally or vertically. Additional extensions made by other developpers further enable to set out a separate column for the main tanks, and player pets.

While there are other unitframes or raidframes out there, Grid is the most convenient for me, and if you’re just discovering the joy of overcasting, I recommend you give it a try. Grid is Ace2 and comes with a FuBar plugin for simpler configuration. It has certainly helped a lot in my transformation from a player limited to DPS classes because the responsibility of keeping a group alive was scaring me witless (thanks FFXI, that’s your doing) into a mediocrely-geared healer still contending for top healer in BGs.

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