Keybound: Grid and Clique

Welcome to the second post of Keybound, my guide to all things Keybindy and cool. Today’s focus is Grid and Clique, and what they can do for you.

I’ll start with a small explanation of each one. Grid is a raid frames addon, that watches the health of your raid. You can modify it to show buffs, and aggro warnings, and a few other things. Everyone should have either a raidframes mod, or drag the blizzard raidframes out of the ‘O’ panel. Knowing when someone’s died or about to is vital, and it’s almost impossible to heal a raid without raidframes. Clique is an addon that links up to raidframes and unitframes, making it so that clicking on them whilst holding down a certain button triggers an effect. Example:

Zal binds flash of light to ‘Shift-Leftbutton.’ In a raid, I see on Grid that someone needs about 5k’s worth of healing, I shiftclick on their box with my Left mouse button, and Zal casts a Flash of light on them, without re-targetting or pausing for a moment.

Here are my Holy Clique binds –

Hitting those combination of keys ontop of my normal Grid raid setup will result in those spells being cast on them, regardless of whether I’m targeting them or not. Everything that has extra weight to cast, like Hand of Protection, I have on my action bars. I don’t risk Keybinding these, because I move very fast when healing and a finger brushing the wrong modifier could result in the tank getting the Hand of Protection, or worse, the Divine intervention. So I save those spells for my action bars. But this saves out the ‘middleman’ step which new healers do – using an addon like grid to target someone, so they click onto the person, go back to their actionbars and click the heal. That means there’s a 2 second delay on every heal, plus a larger margin of error. Not a good way to do it.

From this, I can tell that Aarwen, Horadric and Allisia are dead. Denu is in need of a heal, and he’s a Shaman, so his health can be topped off with a Holy shock/flash of light. Prettypink and Famouswolf are in the same situation. Crases is currently tanking, so he has the red Aggro border. If one of the people I know isn’t tanking gets that red aggro border, I’ll immediately start spam healing them until it goes away. It could save their life. Everyone who’s faded out is out of range. Normally it wouldnt be so many people, I took this shot just after a kill and had backed away from the raid somewhat.

Now I tell things from a healer perspective, but I’ve dpsed and tanked too and this post is just as useful to those who do that. I have a similar set of bindings for my Ret spec, so I can heal in an emergency. When I used to tank, I bound Righteous Defense to Ctrl-Leftclick, so I could keep one eye on Grid. If someone suddenly developed a red aggro frame, I could Ctrl-Leftclick on their frame and have all the mobs run back to me.

Any DPS that can decurse, cleanse, whatever, wants something similar. If we take Mages for an example, as a pure DPS class, they can still make good use of it. They can bind Focus magic, Amplify and Dampen Magic, Remove Curse and Slow fall, to name a few.

So go, take what you’ve learnt, and put it to good use. There are different addons that work like this, such as Voodoo and Healbot, but I find this way to be the most free, the least laggy, and the most customizable.

-Zal