Nab Healing Guide - Setting up a good Grid enviorment

So it's about time I posted something somewhat half useful here, and I figured, why not share something that literally made me win the healing-meters by 20% in every single 25-pug, and carried me to 2,2k+ rating in hateful gear. (Some may say the class helped here aswell, but w/e).

So if you're an addon-newb, have a new healing-alt or just want to opt your healing even more, this might be worth a read and a tryout.

This caters mainly to Druids and Priests, but could also be useful for Paladins.

I recently read a thread on the declining site Arenajunkies names "How do you target your team-mates", with replies ranging all from f1-f5 to mouse-scroll to clicking.

Noone seemed to mention a nice grid-enviorment, so I really don't know how many actually knows about this.

Considering Serennias revealing blog about how every fan of him is a scrub, I guess there's at least someone who can pick up something useful from this.

So lets start... What addons do we need?
I used to run aroun with standard grid and dot-timers. It was horrible, especially in PvE. I could never keep track of my lifeblooms or reju's except on some MTs, and that kind of sucked.

So my homeboy Profila hooked me up with some info on how to only use Grid and Clique to control my hots on everyone.

Grid is a simple frame that keeps track of your team-mates health, seen below, and basicly offers one small frame for every team-mate, sorted in a nice way.

Clique allows you to change the way your mouse-click works on different frames. One the standard UI, a left-click on a frame targets that targets, and a right-click opens up the target-menu for other options. No modifiers available.




So what do we want to accomplish?
In the end we want to reach a frame-windows looking somewhat like the one above, with some minor changes/pesonal tweaks.

When we now click in this frame, we will cast different spells.
Ex:
Left-click: Target (We always want this)
Right-click: Nourish
Shift+Left-click: Lifebloom
Shift+Right-click: Rejavunation

Now I have no doubt I'll get some comments from people calling me a clicker. After writing that I will probably get even more of them.
But the truth is that, in my opinion, there's no reason at all to keybind your partymembers. First of all, if you play like me and don't click a single spell (Except Teleport: Moonglade), you just don't have enough keys for a quick and good target, and that also means you actually have to swap targets when casting your spells. Another negative effect of keybinding your partymembers is that, at least as a druid, you're always on the move. Always finding that perfect position and always running from a priest-fear / Kiting a rogue.

My mouse is constantly either over grid or just to the left of grid to turn. It's also always close to the center of my screen so that if someone I need to target s out of tab-range, I can easily target that one with my mouse aswell (Although I hate doing it).

So with grid we can easily always be on the move, without having to leave our (ad/qe) fingers to any other button to target someone, and we always have full movement while casting our most important spells.

While helping our friends to DPS with some moonfire, insect swarms, wraths, or timing perfect cyclones, we never have to switch from our target while hotting them.

Ok, so lets get started...
If you take another look at the picture about, you will see that in some corners of the frames there are small squares.

You can also see a sheep-icon on the rogue and another icon on the priest in the lower-right corner.

For some reason the dude I stole the screen from intends to heal in some sort of 25+vs25+ enviorment.. CRAAZY :S

Or his mage got MCd and sheeped the rogue, who knows. Anyways...

So these small squares and the bigger icons basicly provide us with information about that character. With that icon we know the rogue is in sheep. What we want to do is increasing the size of that icon, making it show wheter we have a lifebloom up, and also show dration left and current stack of the lifebloom.

The squares also provide us with information. It might be an aggro-alert, a low-mana alert, an indication that this target has a poison on him or an indication wheter this person has a renew on him. The sky is the limit. Every corner can hold a small square, and every square can mean something different. So we have 4 squares + the icon. Not however that only the main icon can show duration and stacks, and every one of our 5 indications has a priority (Basicly a layered system to determine what to show first. So I can have 2 things on the big icons. Lets say i have Lifebloom and Poisons. Poisons has priority 100 and Lifebloom has priority 90. This means that whenever a poison is up on the target I will see an icon for which poison it is, and when there is no poison I will see Lifebloom information.)

So here's 2 examples on how we can set up our frames:
Druid (PvP-enviorment):
Icon: Poisons with priority 100, Lifebloom with stack and duration, priority 90, Curses with priority 70 (I don't consider curses too dangerous, and I will notice Hex in other ways).
Top-left corner: Square that indicates wheter Rejavunation is on the target
Top-right corner: Square that indicates wheter Regrowth is on the target
Bottom-left corner: Square that indicates wheter Abolish Poison is on the target
Bottom-right corner: Whatever. I have an aggro-alert here. Having WG feels unneccessary. You could perhaps have an indication on wheter a curse is up on the target (Since its low-priority), or an indication that your partner is movement-impaired or sheeped/feared)

Prest (PvP-enviorment) (Just winging it here, it's jus examples):
Icon: Magics priority 100, Diseases Priority 90.
Top-left corner: Renew active
Top-right corner: Abolish disease active
Bottom-left corner: Power word: Shield up
Bottom-right corner: Power word: Shield debuff active


Having the information mentioned above available 24/7 on our main healing-tool is crucial to effectivize your healing.

Keeping your hots up all the time or renewing your shield on cooldown has never been easier.

Reapplying every important spell with some single mouse-clicks while taking a good position or kiting around a pillar will be trivial. (As long as you havn't unbinded a and d or q and e that is)

Settings
So unfortunatly I don't have WoW available to me, as you all know I only blog when I'm bored at work (It's a tough life)

But lets start with Clique. After installing it you'll have an extra tab in your spellbook.

Hit that and then hit 'Frames' (I think). You should be able to see a list of addons having checkboxes in front of them. Uncheck everyone except the ones named something with Grid.

(Notice that I might be wrong in the names of some of the options I'm asking you to click, but it shouldn't be hard figuring out where to go as I'm describing what you should do once there)

Then hit 'Custom', and you should have some options to set mouseclicks. Explore that a little and add a couple of clicks. Make sure your left-click is still target (So we can target for example NS, Swiftmend, etc), and bind you right-click and some modified clicks aswell.

Now if you try hitting your Grid that should look awful, you can see how your character performs actions on the target without even switching from your main-target.

So that's all we need to do with click.

No we go /grid config

Set up a nice size (Mine is pretty small) by using your own extensive intelligence, and then find the option to make health-bars horizontal.

Now we come to the little troublesome part, setting up our Icon and Squares. As I was saying, I don't remember all names, and I'm not gonna save this and post when I come home, so bare with me...

Open the Frames menu. Under here you should be able to find menus called "Top-left, Top-right", etc.

Under those you should once again find some checkboxes. Go in there and check what you want that position to indicate. "Center" is the name of what I'm calling "Icon".

Now you should've set top-left to only show reja, top-right to only show abolish, etc, etc.

So now we head to the main-menu under frames, I think it's called "Spells" or "Events" something similar.

Here we do all the settings. If you didn't find the spell you wanted to add to a corner or the icon earlier, you can also add it here. Just type the spell-name and add it. Grid will handle the rest.

So now you can go to ex Lifebloom. (If I'm not mistaken you have to add either that one or Abolish Poison yourself)

You'll see the priority bar (It might not be called Priority but somethign similar). Set it to your desired value.

You also have color options. The way I've set it up, my Lifebloom-icon covers my health-bars, so I have gone colors, and then on the right side I've toned down the Alpha so it's semi-invisible. That way i see both the buffa and the health.

You'll probably figure out all other options you need to add. I think there some 'Show stacks' etc etc. It's not rocket science.

Play around some with these options and try some other things out for yourself, what suits me might not suit you.

And then we're done.
Now go play some skirmishes, try it out, get used to it, and WHAM.. You'll soon have another 200 rating.

Last: I might go home and check this up, there's probably some option I've forgotten, in which case I'll add here later. Also feel free to ask questions in the comments if something is unclear.
 

Recent 2v2 announcements
Everyone knows I can't write an entry without some comments on stuff I either hate or like. In this case it's actually like (First?).
The recent 2v2 change that you can purchase everything from 2v2 rating except shoulders and weap, and that you won't get a title, is actually damn nice, assuming Blizzard allows people to buy the S6 weaps.

With full Relentless and Furious weaps you are definatly ready to take the desired rating in 3v3, and as I've explained earlier, shoulders mean ****.

The title-loss simply means that 4 out of the classes that got an easy ride to Glad now doesn't and I approve of that. Facerolling a DK shouldn't be a free Glad-title, and anyone able to get it in 2v2 should be able to get it in 3v3 aswell assuming he actually is better than all enhance-shamans as he claims.

And if you don't have the time to find a 3v3 and put some time in to that I don't really know if you deserve the weapon. It should be about practice and skill, and not about playing lucky setups in 2v2.

2v2 should be about fun and learning, and I definatly think the current changes promote that. You still get gear, you still get points, you can still compete and learn, but in order to really compete you need to become a little better.

One thing I dislike though is that Blizzard doesn't just increase the PR gain for 2v2, or even set a rule that after 10 wins your PR matches your TR. Seeing as the 2v2 will matter less now, it's excellent for teamjumping and trying out some new partners/setups, however, it still sucks to have 200 games up to your TR even though you only play 2k+ rating no matter what mate you play with.

In my case my mate in 2v2 and one of my other mates in 3v3 is on vacation for 10 days which means I can't play seriously and improve at all during this time. Forget skirmishes and BGs, every decent player knows arena-play on a higher level is way different than the lower levels.