Healbot 101

Today I will explain the basics of a very useful add-on for any healer; Healbot.

What is Healbot?
Healbot is a user created UI add-on that enables you to cast beneficial spells on party/raid members, their pets and other non-grouped friendly targets. It allows you to cast a multitude of spells within needing to individually select the target and graphically shows you their current health state (high/low, poisoned, cursed etc). As a customisable raid frame, you can view your entire party in a single frame, regardless of if you are in a 5 man dungeon or a 40 player raid group.

Where can I get it?
Healbot can be downloaded from;
Curse.com
WoW Interface

Why is it useful?
There are two main reasons why Healbot is so useful, they were briefly outlined above but I will explain further here.

• Health bars – Each player in your raid has a health bar in the raid frame of Healbot. This shows a range of data, such as current health,  seen both as a % of the bar that remains and the colour of the bar (green at nearly full, down through orange to red when on very low health). You will also see numerically how much health the target has e.g. 132k/167k, as well as their name in the appropriate colour (yellow for rogue, brown for warrior and so on). Additionally, the bars will change colour entirely if the target is affect by a debuff; dark green for poison, brown for curse, blue for magic effect and something else for disease (not sure what the disease colour is as I never take notice of it being a druid 🙂 ). Finally the health bar will also show you a mini-icon of any effects currently on the target that are relevant to you as well as time remaining, so it will show the shield-wall icon when the tank uses it (as well as a countdown timer to how long is left on the ability) and it will show your HoTs icons and time remaining but it will not show the icon or timer for the priests renew.
• Click to heal – All the commands with Healbot are based on a series of mouse clicks with or without a key press at the same time while hovering over the health bar of the target in the raid frame. The basic ones are 1 click (left, middle or right button) and the same but with either ctrl, alt, shift or alt pressed as well. Immediately this gives you the possibility of 15 different casts by just pressing a key + a mouse button. This be further extended by pressing 2 or more keys (for example, my Rebirth is bound to alt + shift + left click so that it is quick to use, but as all my heals are click + 1 key I can’t accidentally use it.). This means that all your healing spells (and others such as thorns) are always just 1 click away and it is very difficult to cast the wrong spell once you master healbot.

Ok, I downloaded it, WTF are all these settings?
Healbot has a number of various settings regarding sizes, colour of bars and so on. The only one we are interested in at the moment is how to configure your clicks to your heals in the correct order. In order to do that you will need to;

1. Open Healbot options (either click on the link on the raid frame or the icon around your minimap).
2. Once you have the options window open, select the second tab (“Spells”) at the bottom of the window.

3. You will then see this page;

From here you can enter whichever spells you wish to have bound to these commands. Any spell is acceptable so long as it can be cast on a friendly target. I will list my own choices below, but as a rule of thumb it is a good idea to bind those used most frequently to the basic left, right and middle clicks. As for crtl, shift and alt you may have to experiment a bit to find which are easiest for you to press in the heat of battle. This first page is for left click and its alternatives, using the dropdown menu “Button” (circled in the image) you can select other mouse buttons

As you can see, for basic usage, healbot is exceptionally easy to set up. There are many other settings that can be played around with to help you and I will cover those another time. Below, as an example, or for comparison, is my own list of heals and how they are bound in healbot:

• Left Click: Lifebloom – Very basic spell, not matter what instance I am in so I want it immediately accessible.
• Middle Click: Wild Growth – This is our standard AoE heal, so it needs to be easily and quickly accessible
• Right Click: Rejuvenation – Another core spell that I want instantly accessible.
• Shift + Left Click: Nourish – Usually use this on the tank, so it is also tied to left click same as LB, so I can cast LB with a click and the same click with shift held will refresh it.
• Shift + Middle Click: Regrowth – Used to be a major spell, but is getting less use, so it is relegated down here, but it still has its uses (sometimes)
• Shift + Right Click: Healing Touch – A bigger heal than nourish, but not as commonly used so it is bound to a similar combo so I can keep shift depressed if necessary and switch to HT instead of nourish.
• Alt + Left Click: Swiftmend – Again I primarily use SW on tanks, so it is bound to the tank button same as Nourish and LB.
• Alt + Middle Click: Thorns – A useful spell at times, but not one that I use a lot so it is relegated down to here.
• Alt + Right Click: Remove Corruption – Used to be my Abolish Poison button so it became Remove Corruption in Cata.
• Alt + Shift + Left Click: Rebirth – As I have mentioned before, this is an easy to reach combo for quick casting, but as nothing else is like it, I won’t end up casting it accidentally.
• Alt + Shift + Right Click: Tranquillity – Same as Rebirth, I want it available but not so easy to accidently use and blow an 8 minute CD

You have no doubt noticed that I don’t use crtl, this is because usually when I am playing I am also on Ventrilo and my PTT key is crtl and it annoyed the hell out of my guildies if I used it for Healbot as well 😀

As mentioned above, this is nothing more than the basics and I will cover additional tweaks and options in another post, for now enjoy the simplicity of Healbot 🙂

Kat