Healed heroics without touching the mouse or keyboard once.

I decided I needed a bit of a change and jumped on my main character that I've not played in 3-4 months, a priest. I jumped in the LFG queue looking for any heroic. After waiting for 15 minutes I decided to try something a little different. As someone of you may be aware I use voice control extensively in my multiboxing. I had a wild idea about playing my priest by voice control ONLY. So 30 minutes later and a lot of macros and keybindings reworked - and still sitting in the LFG queue I was ready to go. I was almost happy I was able to control 99% of her abilities via voice. I managed to get a group a few minutes later and we were off. The first few pulls pointed out the obvious flaw in my plan and resulted in a short AFK break while I fixed a few macros & voice commands. 10 minutes later we were off and running again.

With the exception of the dog barking and at one point the volume of the TV being too loud there were no major issues at all. Also I want to point out it was a melee heavy team so I had 4 (FOUR) melee characters to heal which made the entire run a lot more involved than it should have been. Once we took down the last boss I told everyone what I was doing and how I had never touched a key on the keyboard or even clicked a button with the mouse (with the exception of walking) for the entire run. And the disapointing thing is, only 1 person believed me. :( The others said it was impossible to do as reaction times was considerably slow or voice control was not that advanced. Either way the run was a complete success.

The downside to using voice control to heal a heroic run; I was horse by the time it was over. I was barking commands almost non-stop for nearly 1 1/2 hours. Reaction times were slightly slower and resulted in 2-3 deaths but that was also a result of the heavy melee group.

I did another run shortly after and cleared the instance with only 1 death.

What did I use:
Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.5
*LOTS* of macros

damn, wish i though about this when i was raiding hardcore lol... I could just sit back and relax talking into the mic :thumbup: hehe GJ :)

Very very impressive

If it's not too much bother - could you please give a quick ghetto guide as to how to get yourself setup this way? Really just after a simple example of your spoken command and the associated macro - lik say for example, you want to full heal char 'x' and drop a mini-heal on char 'y'

Would sincerely appreciate it

My original idea was to create a 'target macro' for each person and have the spells on standard buttons. But it would take too long to say: Target Tank [pause .5 seconds] Greater Heal. So I ended up making macros like such

Code:

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#showtooltip
/target BobTheTank
/stopcasting
/cast [nomod] Greater Heal; [mod:Alt] Flash Heal; [mod:Ctrl] Renew

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That tank's macro would take position 1 on the toolbar. In Dargon's custom commands I'd create a new voice command for each event like such;
Heal Tank would send key press 1, Flash Tank would send Alt+1, Renew Tank would send Ctrl+1 etc... So position 2 would be the Mage's spells,

All targeted spells were setup in a similar way; Disease, Dispel, Prayer of Mending, Fear Ward etc...Obviously I had to make macros for every player in the group and I had to rename the /target XXXX each time the players names changed but that only takes 2-3 minutes of pre-setup.

So Noxxy, your example is simple; Heal Tank [wait for spell to cast - watch TV] Flash Mage. Fade. Group Heal (to cast Prayer of Healing obviously).


I did come up with an alternative means of healing and it worked even better than creating macros for each class/person in the group. I just used the standard macros as I would when playing normally:

Code:

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#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/cast [nomod,target=mouseover,nodead,exists]Greater Heal; [mod:Alt,target=mouseover,nodead,exists] Flash Heal; [mod:Ctrl,target=mouseover,nodead,exists] Renew; [target=target,nodead,exists] Flash Heal; Flash Heal

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But Dragon's custom commands were slightly different, I still had the voice commands Heal Tank, Flash Tank, and it would still press the associated Heal button, which for example was mapped to 1, but it would reposition the mouse over the Tanks unit frame first and then press they appropriate key. I just had to define a few global variables, such as the X,Y position of the unit frame and it was all done.

One thing I found very very helpful was my cast bar mod, and for the life of me I can't recall its name right now, but the last X seconds/milliseconds of the bar was a different colour, this different colour indicated a possible point at which you can cast another spell without interrupting the current spell. The length of the spell being cast would determine how big the 'lag' bar was. A flash heal caused a larger 'lag' bar but a greater heal caused a much small 'lag' bar. If I gave the voice command when the spell cast was in this 'lag' bar area it was almost an instant cast on to the next spell. As in there was no down time between casting.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 'Fursphere',index.php?page=Thread&postID=126456#po st126456

Very impressive!

WTB: MP3 File. :P

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Hmmm.... you could actually do this for each instance and then just play it back the next time you go through.... Audio-botting :)

Thanks for taking the time to explain how you do it Fleecy - much appreciated

"One thing I found very very helpful was my cast bar mod, and for the life of me I can't recall its name right now, but the last X seconds/milliseconds of the bar was a different colour, this different colour indicated a possible point at which you can cast another spell without interrupting the current spell. The length of the spell being cast would determine how big the 'lag' bar was. A flash heal caused a larger 'lag' bar but a greater heal caused a much small 'lag' bar. If I gave the voice command when the spell cast was in this 'lag' bar area it was almost an instant cast on to the next spell. As in there was no down time between casting."

Quartz.

And maybe move this over to Software?

Yep, Quartz. Damn, I run too many addons. LOL

you can use /target party1 /target party2 etc so that way your macros are all standardized and the only thing you have to remember from run to run is who each party member is. Also wouldn't work well for battlegrounds, but then again who'd want to setup 40 macros for that.

its a neat idea although I think i prefer mashing my keyboard since I'd get too excited and start yelling nonsense into my mic :)

I should have gone with /target PartyX in the first instance and it would have made things a bit easier for me. But I'm glad I didn't because I would not have considered the latter option of repositioning the mouse over the unit frame and reverting back to my original mouseover macros. For something "different" it was a damn fine success.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 'noir',index.php?page=Thread&postID=126923#post126 923

Quartz.

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I have an add on called Az Cast Bar

That area at the end is calculated based on your connection to WoW, it does the same thing

Basically, if you have a 50ms ping, that means it takes .05 seconds for the server to receive your commands.

So on the bar, the last .05 seconds of the bar is whatever color so if you cast during that part, the WoW server doesn't see it until after the spell finishes. That's how that works

Anyway, sounds like an interesting run with just voice heh

I have recently upgraded to Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10 (from 9.51) and it has almost halved the response time. Version 10 is a vast improvement over 9.51.