Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Healbot: Not just for healing

When it comes to healing I have always liked healbot.  I first downloaded it when my priest was in her 30s and I was looking for a faster way to heal in battlegrounds.  Yes, my priest leveled through PvP.  It was a god send for me and I immediately fell in love with it.

As time went on I tried to find other uses for it.  Like any good Hunter I had macros for certain things like my Misdirection macro that would misdirect to my focus (the tank) and if I had no focus it would misdirect to my pet. 

As I did more content in the game I found that sometimes I needed to misdirect to someone different on occasion.  Be it the offtank or my pet while my focus was still alive and well.  That is where I had come up with the idea that I could use healbot for misdirect as well.  Just set it up to left click on the name of the person I wanted to misdirect to.  It saved me a move of targeting the person.  Any second saved is a second you do something better by.

I also had a macro set up for masters call which I used for arena to get me out of things.  The beauty of masters call is that it can be used on anyone.  So right click became masters call.  Now I can use it on other people as well with just a simple click.

This was a great way to use healbot outside of the normal way most use it for.  Not many people think that a non healer would have use for a healing addon but I think they need to open their eyes a bit and see that not everything is as it seems sometimes.

I've set it up for my mage as its own version of decursive.  Why have another addon just for that when I already have healbot installed?  One click and it will have this curse removed.  I also set it up to show me when someone is missing my buff in the group so I can rebuff.  I also had it set to remind me when my armor is down so I can activate it again.  I have a habit of forgetting it sometimes because I do not play my mage often.

There are a lot of uses that DPS can use it for.  A rogue can set up tricks on it too.  A warlock for their dark intent, soulstone, etc.

So it has the obvious use for healers and of course a utility use for the DPS characters I mentioned but what about tanking?  Well I am glad you asked because it works for tanking as well.  A paladin can set up all their hands on it for easy access as well as lay on hands and there is no better place to have righteous defense because being it is healing addon it is automatically set up to show who is taking damage.

For my warrior I have my vigilance set up on it because I often forget to place it on someone but now with a click of the mouse I can put it on whomever I need to without even needing to target them and nothing is better for reapplying it to someone else should your target that had it die.  It is also pretty much the perfect place to put intervene.

Healbot had a lot of uses outside of healing and I think using it for those things that most people do not think about has helped me in many ways to become a better player.  Even if all you ever do is use it as a reason to not download decursive, it is saving you having one additional add on.

Healbot has taken targeting a party member out of the equation.  Set up to click on the person and save a step.  Think of how many times you need to use something in game where you need to target someone first and then realize how much faster it would be if you did not need to target the person before you did it.

It is either create mouse over macros or use healbot.  I prefer, for the most part, healbot.  The reason for that being there are a ton of things I would need to create mouse over macros for and I am lazy, healbot is not only for curing curses and diseases, it also cures laziness. 

One click to do something, no need to write a macro, save a keybind that can now be used on something else, it is all good.

Healbot is not just for healing.  Use your addons to their fullest potential.

2 comments:

  1. I agree with this completely, though I've found that if you only really want to bind one or two abilities to clicks, there are usually smaller addons for that which won't hog as many resources as Healbot does. Since I don't pvp on my hunter for example I only need MD to be easily accessible, so I simply bound that with Clique.

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  2. I noticed that Healbot didn't work with /cast Misdirection. Instead I now use:
    /cast [@mouseover] Misdirection
    and just click on the name in Healbot.
    Now it works!

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