http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...815451&sid=1#0

Big changes coming

I was going to ask why we're having this thread again, but apparently it's official now.

The UI/Macros forum predictably exploded in rage. Are people really that reliant on Emergency Monitors, Decursive, click-healing, and so on that they cannot possibly fathom healing without them?

Exactly how is click-healing even on par with the emergency monitors and decursive?

Thats the really the problem. They remove something that makes the game alot less tedious but isnt abusive at all, to hit decursive and other mods. It really blows.

Will it also mean we wont be able to auto-retarget after feign death/scattershot/fear etc? Or is it achieved through use of "target last attacker" function or something?

Can only imagine how much it wil hurt rogues at group pvp(arenas) if so ...

You can still press a key to retarget. The point is to remove most of the automated stuff. Automated targetting, automated spell casting, stuff like that. It gets rid of Click-healing stuff at the same time, but is it really that hard to click people and cast a heal(or cast a heal then click people)?

I am worried about the fate of FastCast.

That mod is really a life saver when you're a spellcaster and you have 400+ latency.

Slouken confirmed that click-casting will be possible (to some extend at least - I never used it so not sure how advanced the addons are).

I'm really interested in the focus unit stuff too.

The focus stuff is great. Just as a tank who often has to have a non-boss mob targetted it's tough to tell what is going on regarding Razuvious or Anub, etc..

Also I can set priests as my focus targets in bgs and kill them repeatedly!

I don't think the main problem is people being reliant on decursive addons or emergency monitors, it's the fact that these kind of addons remove a lot of the tediousness from healing.

Now before you flame me with any 'holier-than-thou, back in the old days when I did the Molten Core' sort of arguments then realise that I'm coming from the same place. I was back there with you healing in the Molten Core without the assist of any helper addons. As a matter of fact I used to enjoy the whack-a-mole playstyle back in the day.

It wasn't until I played around with emergency monitors and decursive addons for a while that I realised what an absurd type of playstyle exclusively playing whack-a-mole is. These helper addons actually helped me pinpoint perhaps the most tedious part of healing for me.

Now I don't entirely 'rely' on these kind of addons today, but I do close to 50% of my healing directly through emergency monitors and a majority of my decursing. Neither of these kind of addons noticeably bumped up my healing efficiency and nor did they somehow make encounters any easier for my old guild to beat. They sure as hell made things less boring for me though. For example there's no way I'd ever go through the Molten Core again without almost entirely 'relying' on these sort of addons. It doesn't fly on progression nights though.

When it comes to things like Naxxramas I don't use those addons that much, at least not the emergency monitor. When I need to be at the top of my game I actually rely on myself and go back to the old whack-a-mole playstyle. I do much better that way and I bet the same goes for most healers if they actually tried it. It's way more tedious, but in my experience more effective if you really want to do your best.

So no, I don't rely on these kind of addons and I actually can fathom playing without them. It would simply make the game a lot more boring and tedious and sure as hell wouldn't make it more fun and exciting. I just can't see the point of removing these kind of addons in specific.

By all means remove all kinds of addons that turn the dumbest blokes into super-healers by pressing a single button through an entire instance, but don't go nerfing my decursive addons and emergency monitors. :ph34r:



[edit]
and yes, i can still easily go through the molten core manually decursing everyone. i can't think of any encounter not specifically balanced around decursive that decursive would make any simpler than they really are. it really is not hard for guilds to set up sane decursive assignements without the help of decursive addons. it is extremely tedious for the decursers though and i say that from extensive experience. it's not harder, just more tedious. i can't put enough emphasis on that.


[edit]
and no, i don't use any addons that pick spells for me. my emergency monitor is simply a miniature whack-a-mole. i need to click the name on the emergency monitor and then i need to click a spell myself to cast it. :p

According to what slouken is saying this is going to effect mods that auto determine a spell to cast - things like lazy tank, lazy rogue, decursive/detox, any healer mod that auto picks a rank of spell to use... etc. Click casting in the sense of "I have a heal bound to my mouse button and click a name on the raid UI and it auto targets that person and begins the cast" will still work.

I'm a little confused about the part where it says that the "protected" ui frames for targets cannot be hidden, moved or altered though.

If thats all they are taking out then set decursive not to pick ranks anymore. Heck for paladin it shouldnt even be using that logic anymore since the mana cost is the same for the low level and high level version now.

Possibly even cheaper with the high level one if you have the cleanse libram, something interisting to go check.

There has to be some additional change with targeting and that means we can still do the same damn thing its just going to be a heck of a lot more inefficient. And no i dont mean inefficient in picking the target yourself i mean inefficient in CPU usage.

They can't be moved in combat to break emergency monitors. Also, via hide/move you could recreate Decursive by just moving the button that cures the relevant person to directly under the player's cursor (or just to a fixed place where the place clicks).

Heh, actually it's the opposite for me. I must play without stuff such as Emergency Monitor or to Decurse. If I do use them my healing or how fast I select/cleanse my target fall off horribly and I barely can heal anymore after a while.

So basically I just need to stick to the old formula, all the small raid windows up, select, cast a heal.

Can anyone explain what "click cast" is?

Click-cast is where you dont actually have to select anyone to heal them.

For example, I have Clique, a mod that does click-cast. So I can hover my mouse icon over someones raid bar, rightclick, and it will cast Gheal1 at them. I can then leftclick and pw:S them. Mouse4 and cast renew on them, all without having to actually target them.

It basically halves the amount of button pressing you have to do to heal, which REALLY helps on trying to heal in pvp or in moving fights.

Making healing less fun or a chore has crippled several other MMO's in the past. I hope that isn't what this does. Healing is the least of their concerns if they're worried about mods making raids easier. Thaddius style mods almost play the encounter for you - the healing is still very specific.

Mods like CastParty, ClickHeal etc allow you to bind spells to mouse clicks. I use CastParty and I'll have HW5 on LMB, LHW6 on RMB, Chain Heal on Alt-LMB, NS Macro HW10 on Shift-LMB etc. To cast the spell all I have to do is click on the person I wish to heal in the RaidUI or on the emergency monitor. All it does is simply remove the step of hitting the hotkey once you've clicked on the player to select them.

CastParty can also make decisons for you to select ranks and even types of heals for you although I personally can't see the point and fail to see how it could make a more informed decison that I could - I never use that part of the functionality and this is the sort of thing they're trying to get rid of.

OKay thanks for the explanation.

I think I will have to stick with manual targeting/spell cast, it wouldn't help me at all.. ><

This change will bring nothing but tears I still think. I know the goal is a good one but I simply don't see how it is worth doing so in this way.

The targetting bit seems on its surface to be bad enough and that's a huge understatement. Being unable to cast any spell at all through even a simple macro though is surreal. I don't want "focus", I don't want more keybindings. I am not a healer primary (and even when I do play a healer, I would prefer to have single-click options to perform that role) and frankly, I really dislike decursing fights as it is on my Mage. If I am forced to pull out the whole raid and play whack-a-decurse on even occasion, I'd rather play one of my other dps classes instead. It's not that it is hard it is that it is annoying and especially so for a class that frankly is paying attention to other matters.

Yeah, yeah... doom and gloom for something that isn't even past beta yet. It is pretty silly on the face of it. Still, anything that discourages healers to play or makes their lives harder is a bad thing in my opinion. I do miss the relative freedom of playing my warrior and rogue at times and I can certainly see people that switch for the 60-70 gear reset not wanting to go back to the PITA classes as it is. Take away decursive, whispercast and the various click-cast mods and I see that being even more of an issue. Don't get me started on the whole stamina++ business.

EDIT: On further review, it may well not be quite so bad. I'll leave my rant up but from here I'll reserve judgement for now until at least I get a chance to tpy with the new UI restrictions a little. It's still going to cost a few thousand man-hours on our side of the fence though and I am still not convinced that it was needed. This problem has been in the pipe literally from day one and invalidating a pretty massive scripting base still seems to me to be a pretty harsh move. Especiially if the measures are not effective.

To clarify my original reply on click-healing: there's a bit of a difference between binding heals to mouse buttons, and any of the series of mods that heal your target using the lowest possible rank to put them at full health, or other such nonsense. The latter isn't going to work given this change, the former apparently will (because they're changing the way keybindings work at the same time, which might turn out well).

Well is the problem that decursing is boring or that it's boring to do manually?

I don't really exactly enjoy banishing, handing out healthstones or soulstoning either. But I do enjoy the diversity of getting to do something different now and then.

If they made fights where you actually have to make intelligent decisions about who you decurse, I really can't see how this change would matter much, except from making PvP abit more balanced (I'm obviously biased about that though :P).

I definitely find it an interesting change, though one that I will most likely be unhappy with in the end, as I've grown used to (as this if my first healer) to being somewhat dependant on these mods. I'm going to download Clique and toy with it in hopes that it will be what the doc ordered, but there will definitely be some learning time in there, which isn't exactly what I was anticipating. I suppose a somewhat gentle changeover can be done utilizing a combination of mods until TBC launches though.

Decursing in and of itself isn't boring, it's just that most cases where it's needed while raiding aren't all that interesting because they're basically only challenging because the vast majority of your raid is afflicted by something and then it needs to be removed. There's no interesting decision making about it, it's basically "Remove this from 40 people quickly or be in trouble".

Examples of bad decursing style encounters: Lucifron, Chromaggus, Noth.
Examples of good decursing style encounters: Huhuran, Grobbulus.