On May 22, Olivia Grace wrote a piece called “Keys to PvP: Keybinding, movement and clicking” for WoW Insider. It was a good article and discussed what you’d expect – using the mouse for movement, using keybinds rather than clicking on skills, and setting up keybinds.

I use both the keyboard and the mouse for movement depending on the situation. I don’t click any of my skills. In fact, I don’t display my skill bars. I have bars that onto which I throw random items, and I have a non-clickable bar onto which I put certain long-CD skills just to use to track when they’re ready. They can’t be clicked. My healing skills are all performed the Clique on Grid. For those who don’t know, that means that various clicks I perform on my raid frames perform different heals. Right-click on someone to cast Penance on them for example. For this reason, I’ll use the keyboard to move if I’m using the mouse with Grid. I posted the following comment on the article:

As a healer, I find that I do movement with WASD and the mouse, depending on the situation. I’m healing on unit frames. Is that clicking? I actually have no buttons on screen at all, but all healing spells are bound to mouse buttons for Clique.

I expected that to be the end of it. On June 7th, Olivia Grace wrote a follow up piece called “Keys to PvP: How to heal with keybinds, clicking and movement.” When I saw in Google Reader, I was decided to read it because it seemed applicable to me. I was surprised to find this in the third paragraph:

But the main topic I’m here to address is healing. CaylynnRunner, berna.bleeker, adyuaa, andPeterAnagirou all talked about the trials of PvP healing as users of Healbot, VuhDo, Clique and the like, and that’s what I plan to talk about today.

I wasn’t expecting that! I didn’t really write this article to discuss keybinds or movement. I was actually just excited about being mentioned on the site! (Of course, I’ve also been published on WoW Insider, so you’d think I wouldn’t be that excited.) I’m just impressed that she took the time to answer.

I will say, however, that I wasn’t exactly disagreeing there. I was just mentioning why I used the keyboard for movement sometimes. In her follow-up, Grace discussed ways to heal without using the mouse. First, she discussed targeting players with keys, say party members 1-5 with the numbers 1-5, and then simply pressing the button bound to your heal. Another interesting method she discussed, about which I had never though, was using different modifiers to select target. Say the ‘1’ button casts Penance. Control+1 might Penance party member 1, alt+1 would Penance party member 2, shift+1 would cast on the next, etc. It’s a fantastic idea! However, both these ideas would only work in arena. I don’t really enjoy arena.

What about battlegrounds? She heals on her raid frames when she’s being left alone just like I do. There’s one catch; when she heals someone by clicking on her raid frames, it selects them. Her healing spells are also bound to keyboard shortcuts. When she’s under attack, she can move with the mouse and use keybindings to continue healing the person she last had selected. That’s a pretty nice idea. The only problem I still see is that I do a lot of offensive casting in battlegrounds as well. I like to keep an enemy selected so I can cast offensive spells on them while casting healing spells using Grid.

While I’m used to my way, I may have to try her way though if I have the time to try learning it! Again, I just want to repeat what really excited me. Grace was directly responding to previous comments in her new post. Fantastic :)