Cancel castingFollow

I've been practicing this lately (in 5-mans, not raiding) to try to help get out of the five-second rule. I'm not great at it yet (I sometimes accidentally let the heal go off) but that's what practice is for.

The WoWWiki page that talks about stopcasting says this:



Um. Why? Why is pressing ESC any harder than pressing a hotkey for a macro? What am I missing?

I don't use mouseover macros to heal, is that why? I use a combination of Healbot (when standing still) and bound keys (when moving).

A /stopcasting macro is simply the fastest way to manage things. Hitting escape means you’re wasting a split second pressing your hotkey/clicking your target to queue up a heal afterwards, whereas with a /stopcasting macro you’re done after one push. Hey, that tiny fraction of a second makes as much difference as a few points of spell haste, so don’t write it off!

I have to confess that I use a strafe twitch to cancel casting myself. I’m strafing pretty much nonstop in PVP, so the habit’s ingrained. It's as wasteful as hitting escape. But at least I don’t jump. Jumping to cancel casting is a horrible habit that prevents you from starting your next cast until you touch ground. It’s like a self-imposed Curse of Tongues.

I don’t believe the /stopcasting command is gone. It’s just unnecessary for a lot of its former applications in trinket macros or with Quartz latency bars.

Edited to add: Oooh, look, I offended a jumper! He rated me down! :)

Edited, Jul 29th 2008 5:31pm by emmitsvenson

The difference in result is pretty nihil but after trying such a macro myself; damn this is hellalot easier to play.

Very Carefully. Or use the OTHER set of macros/buttons on the action bars.



It's much easier to use mouseover macros on the portraits or pullout raid frames. Like you said, it leads to a lot of mistakes (or delays) trying to hit the right person in the "big pig-pile of peeps".

Edited, Jul 29th 2008 1:59pm by Shamandin

The biggest thing about a /stopcasting macro is that it's ONE press. Hitting esc->hotkey means two presses, and in raids you can't afford to accidentally hit the hotkey first and not get the spell off, and often can't afford the .2-sec delay of pressing one and then the other. /stopcasting puts it in one button so that you only have to hit it once.

One thing to keep in mind, these mouseover/stopcasting macros can be used in addition to HealBot. Using one method does not automatically preclude the other. Just because HealBot allows me to setup/cast Dispel Magic and Cure Disease (and I've got mouseover macros for both), does that mean I have to stop using Decursive? It's just tool in your box of tricks that you have to pull things out of when it all falls in the pot.

What I'm saying is - under normal, predictive circumstances I use my focus and mouseover macros to do my healing (and in cooperative 5-mans, most of it's done using the focus macros 'cause the tanks the only one taking damage). Several times, when it all falls apart, HealBot makes it much more CONVENIENT to do the healing. For example, in last nights Attumen fight where the tank was cursed, the mage was slow on decursing and he took several strong hits and went down ... and the other 2 healers were the next to go. So I went from being the group healer w/ a little bit of DPS'ing to being the ONLY healer in a situation where the DPS had to stand around getting hit while the offtank got control (took a moment and we lost a DPS or two doing it). HealBot here helped ME (and like always, YMMV) adjust to the sudden change in the tactical situation.

So, IMO, keep it around. You might find a mixture of the different techniques works best for YOU.

I've not played with Pitbull enough to do that. Unfortunately for me, I experimented with Pitbull right around patch time. When the patch hit, it got broke and took a little while to get updated. ag_UnitFrames (which I used before Pitbull) was patched and ready so I went back. All that to say, I wish I could help ya with that one, but ...

As for another AddOn - One I used in the past (before Blizzard deliberately broke it) was Decursive. Since they broke it, I was doing everything manually (with the mouseover macros). Recently, I went back to using Decursive. Even though HealBot has similar functionality, I like how Decursive gives you a small "hotbar" with color codings (including range info) and automatically sets your cleansers for left/right/middle click. And for the mage, in addition to Remove Lesser Curse, it sets up Polymorph. It's unobtrusive enough that it fits into my UI right below HealBot and I rarely notice it 'til it 'Bong's at me and the player's (or pet's) box changes. It's not the "just mash the button at the top of the list and it all goes away magically" addon it used to be (and yes, it used to automatically choose which spell to cast for you). You still have to click appropriately for the right cleanser.

Again, it's personal preference and ymmv. It's worth checking out, even if it's just for notifications.

There is a small, invisible box just to he upper-left of the first box (bottom-left-most box in group by default) that you can mouse over and move.

While we're on Decursive, anyone know of a Desurive-like tool that I could overlay perfectly with Grid? I don't think you can go that with Decursive, and it's annoying the hell out of me :/ Decursive doesn't group the same way as Grid or something, and I like Grid putting groups top-to-bottom rather than left-to-right.

Get grid. You can set it up so that the icon representing the magic/disease debuff appears in the middle of someones grid box. I have this set up and have a click casting macro set up so that I can ctrl-leftclick for dispell magic on the unit frame and ctrl-rightclick for abolish disease.
Best thing about it is that it still shows all the incoming heals to raid targets while keeping its size small, makes overhealing much easier to avoid.

here's an example of how it looks in my UI. I'm shadow in this picture, but my layout remains the same for healing purposes
http://www.random-guild.com/forum/download/file.php?id=187&mode=view

also, check out http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t23790-priest_holy_raiding_compendium_v2_wow-2_4_3_a/
and look under 'setting up grid to be useful as a priest'. Its by far the best list of optional grid modules I've come across so far

Sweet. Sounds like you've found your setup.

I know most people look at mine and go "How can do stand all that?" Easy. It's what I've found fits my setup the best. Their big complaint is being able to see things. All I can say is - I can see more here than I could with 40 health/mana bars cluttering my screen trying to heal MC. Once I get home from work, I might go through the trouble of getting a screen shot of my current setup and posting it somewhere.

I briefly read through the responses, and from what I can see no one addressed this.

The reason why you dont use esc is because if you press it twice by accident then you loose your target. I have done it not realizing that my tank is not my target anymore and caused a wipe.

The stopcasting macro should avoid this happening. :) Just a heads up, like i said I skimmed the post and didnt see someone bring it up.

You silly priests :P

*cat form and dashes back to the druid forum*

I've been using them since whenever this post was ("Hi, my name is Teacake, and it's been four weeks since I last used Healbot") and I can tell you I'm a much speedier and better healer now.