Friday 15 January 2010

Clique - Inspecting the Ranks Again

After writing the other day about discovering that spell ranks used by addons such as Clique and Healbot are not updated when you train new ranks of the spells, I thought I might write a bit of a guide on using Clique and share a discovery I made regarding the rank problem.

What is Clique?

Clique is an addon used to assign mouse clicks to spells.  It is most often used by healers, in combination with some sort of unit frame addon such as Grid, X-Perl, ag_UnitFrames... the list goes on.  I am using it in conjuction with Pitbull 4.0 (I'll write up a review of Pitbull another time).  You can also use it with the default unit frames if you wish.

After installing Clique, an extra tab will appear in your spellbook.  Clicking on the new tab will open a window listing your current Clique bindings.  While this window is active, you can click on any spell in your spellbook with a combination of Ctrl, Alt, Shift or none of them to assign a binding to it.  For example, in the image below I have assigned Healing Touch to a click combination of Ctrl+RightButton by holding Ctrl and right-clicking on the Healing Touch spell in the spellbook.  Now, if I mouse over a unit frame and hold down Ctrl while I right-click on it, I cast Healing Touch.  If I need to change the binding, I click on the binding in the list and click "Delete", then click the spell again with the new binding combination. 

The trick then is to remember what combination you are supposed to be using for each spell.  It takes a while to get used to it, but I find it easier to bind similar types of spell to the same click-combo on each of my characters that have healing spells.

For example, I'll use the middle mouse button (in my case clicking the scroll-wheel thingy) for the HoTs: Rejuvenation on my druid, and on my priest I assign it to Renew.  Small heal (Flash heal, Nourish) to left button, big heal (Regrowth/Healing Touch, Greater Heal) to right button, and so on.  You could also write down the combos on a post-it and stick them near your monitor. 

The power of Clique is that you no longer need to target anyone to heal them, as long as there is a unit frame for them on your screen that you can mouse over easily.  This saves a lot of time during stressful situations when you might need to click a million times to target people then locate the spell you want to cast on them.  When doing escort quests or if I need to be healing someone not in my party or raid, I usually target them and type /focus to bring up a focus unit frame so that I can heal them while targeting baddies.

Clique and Spell Ranks
In my previous post about spell ranks, I discovered that when I trained new ranks of spells, they weren't updated in my Clique binding list.  The reason this happens is that when I first set up Clique, I had the "Show all spell ranks" box ticked in my spellbook.  This meant that Clique was assigning the bindings to the specific rank of the chosen spell.

You can see in the image above that the "Show all spell ranks" option is ticked, and the Healing Touch spell has been assigned to "Healing Touch (Rank 12)".

If I untick the option to turn off spell ranks, and re-assign the Healing Touch spell to Ctrl+RightButton, you can see below that it has now changed to just "Healing Touch" with no rank specified.  This means that it will always cast the highest rank available, and I won't inadvertently use down-ranked spells.

This technique should also work with dragging spells from your spellbook to your secondary spec toolbar.  If you have the spell ranks option turned off, and you drag the spell from the spellbook to the toolbar, the toolbar should from then on always carry the highest rank.  Note: This needs to be tested and confirmed - if someone can tell me whether this is correct I'd appreciate it :)

It also means that Healbot Continued users shouldn't have the downranking issue, as in the process of setting up Healbot bindings you actually type the name of the spell into the config window, unless you intentionally want to use a downranked spell for some reason.
 
Other stuff that Clique can do
Clique can assign mouse bindings to any spell in your spellbook, including harmful ones.  For example, if you wanted to cast Purge or Dispel Magic on an enemy, assign a click bind to that spell and mouse over the enemy's target frame. You could go the whole hog and assign click binds to your whole dps spell rotation, but I'm sticking with keybinds for now.

There's plenty of other cool stuff that can customise Clique further - visit their pages on Curse.com or wowinterface.com for more resources.

In other general news, Leesah is up to level 67 now and is desperate to get to the Frozen North.  I'm going to try to hold her back in Outlands for a little longer until 69 or 70, just because it makes those starting areas in Northrend so much easier.  Let's see how we get on after this weekend ;)
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