Keybound: Part 4 — Click-casting

I’m now going to talk about click-casting. If you don’t know what that is, it may sound odd that I’m advocating something regarding clicking given what I’ve discussed in previous parts of Keybound. This is different — kind of.

Click-casting is not about clicking a skill on your action bar, but rather clicking a unit frame with any mouse button and (optionally) in combination with a modifier to throw a quick spell at that entity. This is vital when in a healing role, where targeting each person (particularly in a raid) cannot practically be done by keyboard. If you’re going to click each target anyway, you may as well cut those button presses down to half by click-casting directly on them. If you still really don’t get it, check this video.

There are a couple of addons with click-casting, but none quite as well-known as Clique. I can’t say a bad word about this addon — it’s easy to use, lite, and does what it says on the tin. You can also use a collection of macros, but I’ve never used this method and can’t find a whole lot of useful information in a Google search. My recommendation is to grab Clique. I do believe Clique only works for mouse buttons, whereas macros will do the job for your entire keyboard. This isn’t much of a setback for me, as I find it unnatural to press a keyboard button when hovering over something anyway.

Example Clique Setup

So, what should you bind? Well, that depends on your class. I find it useful to have interrupts, CCs and other utilities bound as harmful actions for use particularly on focus targets in PvE, as I never quite got sorted with focus macros in my usual binds. Anyone with heals, decurse abilities or other useful helpful actions should bind them without exception. I have a ridiculous amount of helpful click-cast binds on my Protection Paladin, including hands, taunt (this one is particularly useful), etc.

Click-casting is not a replacement for binds. I still strongly suggest that you bind everything on your click-cast list to keys as well. It is easy to get stuck into just clicking frames all the time, but there are situations where you’re going to want the speed and flexibility of running around and casting. It’s also very nice to have an MT targeted so you can unload heals on raid members via click-casting and use your normal binds when the MT is taking a hit.

And that’s the end of part 4. I’m slowly running out of things to talk about when trying to keep it strictly to the topic of binds, so part 5 will probably be a summary with some smaller tips that I couldn’t really fit in elsewhere. See you then!