Setting up your UI to heal with click casting

One of the most fundamental improvements to my healing was when I moved over to click casting with my mouse instead of my keyboard.

The advantages are the reduction of just a button click, but with the amount of healing going out those button clicks soon add up. That first heal lands fractionally quicker allowing you to save more lives.

When I first started in Warhammer I went straight to Squared. You can set it up to take all your spells with different combinations of CTRL, ALT, SHIFT and your left mouse button. Unfortunatly there's not the same functionality as in WoW where you can also use keybinds when your mouse is hovering over your unitframes. I've added a few extra addons to enhance Squared:

• SquaredHDIndicator shows you when your target has a heal debuff. Purple 25%, Black 50% and Orange is an outgoing debuff. 
• SquaredHOTIndicators allows you to view what length of HOT you have on your target. This allows you to see when you have Rune of Regeneration up (default green) and Rune of Serenity (default yellow).
• LibRange & RangeFadingSquared featured in my previous post. This improves the fading functionality of Squared when your group members are out of range. Remember to untick 'Enable range/LOS fade' under Misc Options when installing this.

I've also changed the style of Squared from the default as seen on the right to the one below. Choose and adjust to suit yourself, there are other examples on the Squared website here.You can easily adjust to this functionality by opening the Squared configuration, going to Import/Export and pasting in this code:

icon-offset-x:n:-19|color-hpbars:b:true|direction-member:s:down|leaderbordercolor:t:156,156,189|hot-color2:t:255,0,0|color-hpnames:b:true|boxheight:n:30|colorgroup-msupp:t:110,255,178|bordersize:n:3|hot-color1:t:0,255,0|groupbordercolor:t:100,100,150|spacing-member:n:6|icon-alpha:n:1|texture-border:s:squared_border_1|boxwidth:n:85|colorgroup-hpdead:t:40,0,0|hd-color1:t:190,0,128|colorgroup-rmdps:t:251,227,60|testmode:b:true|hd-color2:t:0,0,0|text-position-level:s:top|hd-color3:t:255,128,64|texture-background:s:squared_bar_3|hot-color4:t:255,255,255|colorgroup-tank:t:218,218,255|bordercolor:t:0,0,0|hp-low:n:20|meep:n:2|update-freq:n:0.3|rangefading:b:false|icon-position:s:left|fgcolor:t:0,188,0|color-classbars:b:true|colorgroup-rsupp:t:189,255,0|text-position-hp:s:bottom|hot-color3:t:255,255,0|direction-group:s:right|text-align-top:s:bottomleft|status-buff:s:none|spacing-column:n:160|color-hpborders:b:true|texture-offline:s:tint_square|icon-scale:n:0.8|text-align-bottom:s:rightcenter|namelength:n:10|colorgroup-rpdps:t:233,194,0|text-align-center:s:bottom|status-hot:s:topright|columnsize:n:4|spacing-group:n:25|text-font-top:s:font_clear_tiny|texture-foreground:s:squared_bar_6|status-debuff:s:bottomleft|direction-fill:s:right

You may wish to read the whole article before you set the keybinds in this section:

• Click - Grungni's Gift
• CTRL + Click - Rune of Regeneration (if you use a lot of RoR you may wish to move this to an ALT click to work your thumb instead of your little finger).
• SHIFT + Click - Rune of Cleansing
• ALT + Click - Rune of Shielding
• ALT + SHIFT + Click - Rune of Serenity
• CTRL + ALT + Click - Protection of the Ancestor's
• Z - Rune of Restoration
• SHIFT + CTRL - Rune of Mending (again I never cast this and thus it is on an awkward key combination)
• Blessing of Valaya, for those of you are interested, is bound to a nice spammable C key

The main issue I had with using a vanilla Squared is whenever someone was out of LOS or out of range it would self-cast the spell. Often in the heat of battle I would have fired off two Grungni's Gifts on myself before I realised they weren't landing on their intended target. Back then, at 30AP a pop it wasn't doing much for my AP pool! The only way I found to get round this was to install NerfedButtons and bind all my heals through NBSquared. Instead of the first cast instantly landing on click, that first click selects my target. I lose a bit of efficiency as I have to double tap my target for the first heal but I thought this a small price to pay for not crippling my AP. If anyone knows another way to prevent War self-casting in these situations please let me know.

You can load up the NerfedButtons ui with /nb ui. Drag your spells from your abilities menu (shortcut key V) and save. Make sure you have choose addon 'NBSquared' and type in n for a normal mouse click; s for shift click; sa for shift alt; sac for shift alt control; etc.

Now there's no need to do any fancy-pants checking using NerfedButtons, you can if you want to but it's beyond the scope of this guide. One little addition I have enjoyed is to add Rune Of Life to the cast list with Rune of Cleansing on shift click. This just gives you the ability to shift-click on a dead player in battle to rez them.

I'd like to go on to bind Divine Favour to a cast but I've run out of key combinations. Maybe I should replace Rune of Mending...

I hope this helps anyone who hasn't yet moved over to this way of casting, although I'm sure the majority already have. There are a couple of other mods that allow you to do this: Enemy and HealGrid. If you can't get Squared how you like it, try out either of these two mods! Finally if you're not convinced, here's a short example video showing you how you can stay mobile and heal at the same time:

1.3.5 Runepriest Heal Change Analysis

13/6/10 - It seems the spreadsheet wasn't multiplying the base heal value by the group multiplier. This skewed the results for Blessing of Valaya and Rune of Serenity somewhat showing them as less efficient and less powerful than they really are. Fortunatly as the review mostly focuses on GG I only have to correct a few sections annotated in red. BoV values still seem a little low compared to casts on my character but it shouldn't make too much difference to the overall analysis.

Right I've finally got round to updating Stormblazer's Healing Charts to take into account the Runepriest changes in patch 1.3.5. You can see my efforts here. Take note that I have only tested this for my mastery build of 13 Grungni and 11 Grimnir, but should give most people a vague idea. Onto the analysis.

The big change in 1.3.5 was the changes to Grungni's Gift. The base heal amount increased roughly 35%  from 200 - 270HP. The AP cost was massively reduced from 30 to 15.

GG is useful for 3 things: Spam healing on a target to keep them alive, spam healing on yourself when being attacked and healing on the run. Pre 1.3.5 the AP cost to spam heal GG would quickly leave you out of AP, especially if you didn't yet have a high crit pool to regain AP through our tactic Restorative Burst. Post 1.3.5 with the reduction in cost of AP an almost constant spam of GG is possible even with a relatively low heal crit of 25%.

The increase to the base heal makes it more effective in actually outhealing incoming damage. However with any focused damage on a target you will need backup. The benefits of GG is that you can get that first heal in instantly allowing time for group heals or other healers to swop targets.

Here are some statistics (based on my char) of the changes to GG.

Healing per Second (including Crits) increased from 384.4 to 465.4 HP/s. 
Healing per AP increased from 19.2 to 46.5 HP/AP.
Healing per Second per AP increased from 12.8 to 31 HP/s/AP.
Efficiency Scaling (hp/ap/100wp) doubled from 1 to 2 - for each 100 Willpower your HP/AP increases twice as much.

Now to compare this to the other effective single target heal - Rune of Restoration (Rune of Mending doesn't come close):

HPS is 465.4 compared to RoR's 774. A big difference of ~300HPS.
HP/AP is 46.5 compared to  42.4. Grungni's has become more efficient - slightly.
The big change comes in when we compare HPS/AP - GG has 31 compared to RoR's 17.

But lets look at the other benefits:

More likely to proc Blessing of Grungni (+25% healing) due to more casts.
More  likely to proc Restorative Burst (+40AP/3s) due to more casts.
No knockbacks.
Castable on the move.
You get your first two heal (~1300HP)s in the 2.5s before RoR can land. This keeps that character up for the all important group heals or other healers to switch targets.

RoR only useful if you are precasting on someone who is going to take large amounts of damage and you know you aren't going to be hit. It's less efficient now (a lot more so with the tactic proccing regularly). I can hardly think of a reason to use it even in PVE. I don't think I will ever use it again in RvR - and I didn't use it much beforehand.

One of our abilities has stayed quiet up till now - Blessing of Valaya. It has 415HPS not that far below Grungni. Yes it's HP/AP is only 19.2 and it's HPS/AP is a terrible 6.4 but that is only for a single target. These numbers grow huge if your whole group is taking damage, and even if they are not you have a very large chance to proc Restorative Burst (on any of the 6 people you heal) making the HP/AP and HPS/AP much more efficient. You also don't need Line of Sight which has loads of tactical advantages, from hiding behind rocks or standing at a different floor in a keep.

The downsides? Knockback on casting, slightly shorter 100yards range, unable to cast it on other members of the warband, and if casting reactively it might not land in time to save a player due to the 2.5s cast time. The majority of the time this should still be your bread and butter heal - as dull as it is to find a bush and spam cast.

Rune of Serenity

The changes to Rune of Serenity aren't as noticable. The base percentage to healing has roughly doubled from 300 to 600. However the effect of willpower seems to be reduced from 0.4 HPW to 0.3. This is unconfirmed as I admit my testing hasn't been conclusive.

Despite this if landing on 6 players this becomes our most efficient heal (156HP/AP) after Rune of Regeneration (93HP/AP) and Blessing of Valaya (6man -75HP/AP).  Unfortunatly it isn't a very noticable heal because it doesn't always land on those in need. I like to cast it in keep raids and in scenarios as it doesn't cost much and should net some renown leech from other group it bounces to. I try and cast it when another group has taken damage but can't really tell how effective it is. It is now quite an effective heal to use in PvE as you can be sure it is acting on people when the group is taking AOE damage.

Instacast Master Runes.

 1.3.6 Update - Master runes are losing their 2s cast times and actually becoming really insta-cast. No reason to stop using the keybind though as it still reduces mouseclicking. Should be able to have even higher uptime on your master runes now.

Just a quick tip of the day, as I don't see Runepriests taking advantage of their Master Runes very often:

Bind your Master Rune to the keyboard!

 

  I found these spells to be extremely irritating when I started my RP: having to recast every 30s; TARGET IS OUT OF RANGE; and the amount of mousemovement required. Now that it is bound to X I can double tap the button to cast it and I aim it with my second hand. This is a lot more time efficient than moving your cursor to the bar, clicking, moving it to where you want, and clicking again. When you get a dreaded out of range you will be glad you don't have to repeat that process again.