Curious about how you all set up your healing...

I've dual-boxed for many months now using Synergy. I used my 70 lock to quest my Draenei priest and also run her and family members through instances, she's been 70 for a few months now and decently KZ geared. I ended up buying a third account for more storage and xferred my paladin (almost 65 now) to to that account. Last week I came across this site from a mention at wowinsider.com. I started 2 trial accounts last week and did some 5 account tests with 5 new locks and it was super fun, lol. I now have 5 full accounts.

So all this time I've been zipping my mouse over to my second computer and using f2 to target my lock, f2 + f2 to target my void walker and healing, etc. zipping my mouse back and forth firing off spells using the keyboard. Now that I'm using keyclone I'm trying to adjust my thinking and set up targeting and healing macros so that I can just fire them all from my main computer.

I'm obsessing over which way to go, do I set up targeting keys for my healer then a vast array of different heals? Or do I set up fewer heals and map the heals with the specific party member target in the macro? I've healed as playing just my priest for months now and always click the party member and fire the heal with my keyboard. I've never used clique or healbot, etc. so I'm kinda leaning towards doing the target keymaps then heals as separate keys sent to my priest.

My main focus is PVE and I'm looking forward to eventually doing instances by myself. I'm going to start with trying out Ramps with my 64 tankadin, my 70 lock and 70 priest and bring along 2 family so they don't mind when I wipe us, lol. Once I level up my other locks, shammies, mages then I want to 5-box them all into instances myself.

So I would greatly appreciate anyone that wants to share how they take care of the healing side?

I know in the 4lock 1priest setup most run priest as main and massover heal. With my 5x shaman I just use lesser healing wave, or chain heal. The lesser healing wave macros are each set with 5 keybindings with target=toonname... So when I press it that char gets 5 lesser healing waves. Then when I do chain heal I have target=player so all 5 chain heal based off themselves making it a group complete heal.

I have no experience other than dual boxing but i would think run healer as main and use healbot to save buttons

The easiest way to heal is have your healer be your main and your alts just assist you and attack. I haven't yet met a macro setup that's as elegantly simple and intuitive (especially in bad situations) as the click-heal mods that exist (such as Clique). If you simply must play your tanky type as your main, then macros are the next logical choice, assuming you have too much trouble driving two mice at once. In that situation, you might do something like this:

--> 5 heal keys (say F1-F5 for example)
--> Name your guys something that makes it easy to target individuals (most folks just use <name>a, <name>b, <name>c, etc. This is important because in PVP BGs, you can't always get your guys into the ideal ordering.
--> start each of the 5 macros with /target <name>?
--> Then each macro will have something like this:

/cast [modifier:alt] greater heal]
/cast [modifier:ctrl] renew
/cast [modifier:shift] power word: shield
/cast prayer of mending

That same macro on all 5 keys lets you pick the heal by ctrl/shift/alt+F? for the type of heal you want. The rest is just keeping it all straight in your brain through practice. :)

I'm sure some other folks have other ideas, so this isn't the only way. Good luck!

I run a 3-box, Tank, Healer and DPS.

My healer is a 66 Holy Pally and his setup is 4 buttons:
Key U: /cast [target=Party1] Holy Light
Key I: /cast [target=Player] Holy Light
Key O: /cast [target=Party2] Holy Light
Key P: /cast [target=Party1Target] Holy Shock

U heals the tank, I heals himself, O heals the DPS. P heals or hurts the tank's current target.

If I want to use Flash of Light, I use Shift+Key for U, I and O.
From there, I do other macro for Alt+ and Ctrl+ using Divine Favor in the Holy Tree + Spell

I got this other day from a post and saved it to my computer for future refference. Kinda already mentioned in the post but I will share it anyway. And it is from several different people, so I am sorry if I am qouting you and not giving them credit. It is from the post "Need help whit Healing"

Replace "char1" with a character name and bind this macro to F1 for instance. Make sure SHIFT+F1 and CTRL+F1 is unbound. Pressing F1 will shield the character, pressing SHIFT+F1 will cast Flash Heal and CTRL+F1 will cast Power Word: Shield.

You need to create the macro first of all and then you can drag the macro to one of your action bars. After that you need to do a key binding. If you hit ESCAPE and select Key Bindings you will get a list of all the available actions and the keys bound to them.

So if you drag the macro into the 1st slot of your bottom right action bar then go into key bindings and look for "Bottom Right Action Bar" you should find it in there somewhere, all 12 of them. Click on the 1st key box next to it and press F1 which should bind the F1 key to that action bar slot.

Mine's all gimpy right now but it's gotten me through every instance through BRD (not the whole thing of course, god takes forever). Mine's goofy because I'm doing the pally4sham deal and am not having a dedicated healer. Likely I'll follow Vyn's advice in the not too distant future (i'm at 55 now) but I'm purposefully trying to be different. So... I heal with 8 buttons on my xkeys pro. They're in russian and I forget the codes so... let's call them 1-9.

[1][2][3][4]
[5][6][8][9]

5-9 are Sham's A-D respectively casting Healing Wave on the Pally
1-4 are Sham's A-D respectively casting Chain Heal on themselves

So far works pretty well, except for when I can't get the aggro off the one getting hit, then I usually try to Healbot a heal from my pally (pathetic) or bounce a chain heal from another shammy but it's pretty meh as well.

For the pally it works awesome, and for when they take AoE dmg it's pretty good to. The trick on the chain heal is to stagger it so you get the most effective 'bounce'. If I just spam them all at the same time it doesn't seem to bounce to the next most needed very well. At a minimum I think I'm going to setup a cross healing pattern. A>B,B>C,C>D,D>A kinda thing.

I'm thinking about going for a 3 step heal, which would give me the ultimate in flexibility but probably take too much time and/or be too prone to finger fumbles. Anyway the idea would be...


[1][2][3][4] - Pick shammy to cast
[5][6][7] - Pick spell to cast
[8][9][10][11][12] - Pick person to cast on

and put this in some kind of easily reachable and logical configuration. Since I've got an X configuration then I'd try to mimic that as I close as I could so upper left window would be upper left button.

Code:

---

Screens:
[A]-----------[C]
-------[X]-------
[B]-----------[D]

Buttons:
[A][C][5][X][A][C]
[B][D][6][7][B][D]

---

Where X is the Pally. And the pally would be there vs. anywhere else because it would be most used and this keeps the pattern fairly well.

Now the real trick comes in! Wow targetting is too slow IMO. Don't know if it's normal lag or my setup or what but it's an issue, so I can't count on being able to slam a A5X combo and have it change target right. So I think the solution will lie in AHK. Basically I need to figure out how to do the following.

When SC[whatever] is pressed, what for 2 more keystrokes then based on the 3 pressed it will pick which session to send to and then the macro to fire. I think it's possible, just too busy grinding to the holy land (Outland) to sit down and figure it out.

Sorry, probably went too far off topic but just really had to take a break from work for a few minutes.

WOW!!!

That looks kinda complicated.