Joining the Clique
June 2nd, 2009 Posted in Dungeons, General, HealingDespite its title, this isn’t just a post about healing. Tanks, don’t skip this one over…
There comes a point in every character’s leveling career whereby instance levelling begins to get ever-more difficult. Not because the instances are too hard (they aren’t), but because the number of people willing to run those instances slows to the barest of trickles.
I’ve hit that point with Druziraa – halfway through level 79, and there are four instances I want to run. Halls of Lightning, Oculus, Caverns of Time: Stratholme, and Utgarde Pinnacle. They give me XP, they give me loot that will be useful when I start to run heroics in half a level’s time. Unfortunately, this is where the demand for instance runs seems to peter out. Nobody wants to run the plain old 80 instances and I spend a lot more time in LFG advertising my presence than I did a couple of levels ago.
However, I’ve had enough practive to get the hang of click-casting now. I’m still not 100% there, but definitely good enough that I can keep everyone alive without too much hassle. For the odd thing (Innervate, maybe, though I really haven’t had much cause to use it) I’ll go back to the old ways. Soon my healing spells won’t even be on any action bars, removing the temptation altogether.
Healing, enjoyable as it is, isn’t what I enjoy the most though. I’m still very much a tank at heart, and as such a lesson learned while healing isn’t a good lesson unless I can apply it elsewhere. And in this case, while my unit frames are staying as they are on Namthe (Grid’s displays just tell me too much I don’t care about, and aren’t pretty enough), Clique has come with me, for two abilities in particular:
- Intervene
- Vigilance
Mousing over a raid-frame and shift-clicking to intervene to someone seems a lot easier than trying to find them to click in whatever’s going on on-screen, especially if they’re out of your current camera angle. Similarly, ctrl-click on a unit frame to change the Vigilance target on the fly during a fight works particularly well, for those times when your main vigilance target isn’t doing as much threat as your expected, or is dead. It feels a lot like the original design of the Vigilance talent (akin to Hand of Salvation) and isn’t nearly as disruptive as I’d thought it might be.
My raiding UI has changed somewhat since the last time I posted it over a year ago; sometime soon I might get around to a post discussing why it’s changed, and how it’s helped me.
2 Responses to “Joining the Clique”
By Kadomi on Jun 2, 2009
I also use Clique for shouts and using a bandage. Can’t imagine playing without Clique on any character!
By Aurik on Jun 3, 2009
Absoloutely! Grid + clique is wonderful for abusing for many purposes and oddly enough I was going to make a post on this and wondered if Intervene would work with it too – my warrior-let is too little to have that yet.
As an aside – on my rogue I have grid as a very, very small window with no notices and only names and class colours – all of my toons have different profiles (since my priest, druid and shaman need different information when healing) and I find that a completely unadorned grid, stripped of all extras, can be super-useful as raid frames for non-healer classes and I’ve never found another which shows threat so blatantly. The ability to add custom buffs and debuffs is also nice, too, though I think a lot of ‘normal’ raid frames do that now too?
As to the instances – yeah. A month or two back there were still a lot of baby DK’s levelling and groups were ok but now it’s become a lot more difficult to find groups for *normal* level 80 instances. I’m surprised you’re not finding the few groups out there as a healer though – half the time I’m in LFG I see people looking for healers for pre-80 instances as they are so few and far between.
The one thing I have noticed, though, is that when you hit 80 people are willing to go to heroics with you far more quickly than they would have been in TBC so perhaps that is a small blessing.
/hug