So I was healing yesterday and in my party I had to manuallly click on guys to select them to heal, is there a way I could hotkey to select a member of my party or pet?

The function keys are bound to party members and an alt (I think) Function is for a party member's pet. Although I am curious to hear how healers are actually functioning in SWTOR. Using Function keys, clicking portraits, some other method? What has been found to be the most efficient way to heal in the Old Republic?

I haven't really found healing to be much different than WoW in the days before hover over macros were common, and back when most people used ct_ra since healbot, clique, vhudo, etc. didn't yet exist.

 

To heal effectively, I did the following:

 

I switched the party frames to raid frames.

 

I made the tiles large enough that I could readily see the health and energy bars as well as buffs and debuffs but not so large that they'd take up my entire screen.

 

I set the health bars so I could see health numbers on the frames.

 

I unlocked the unit frames (right click on the people icon and click unlock) and moved the unit-frame box to a good location near my personal portrait so I could watch environment and the health bars in the same glance.

 

This gave me a unit frame set-up that is fairly standard for a healer.

 

True to other games, I found that targeting can be generally accomplished using F1 through F4 for players and Shift+F1 through Shift+F4 for companions. However, during stressed moments I prefer to mouse hover and click on the unit frame portraits (I also imagine target selection through clicking will be required when party sizes exceed the number of F-keys available for targeting).

 

I generally mouse bind my healing abilities in games, but I quickly discovered that when using mouse button binds, if my mouse was hovered over the raid frames my heals would not cast. This could be fixed easily enough by setting my mouse buttons to keyboard keys, but I decided to go a different approach and so I set my dps keys to my mouse and my hot bar numbers for heals. I found doing this worked better for me since it made my heals and dps abilities all accessible without needing to page abilities.

 

For heals I reserved 1 through 6 and reserved Shift+1 through Shift+6 (which is the range my left hand can reach) for key spells. I use a seven button mouse and the mouse keys are reserved for DPS spells and abilities. I've reserved modified non-numbered keyboard keys (Shift+T, Shift+G, Shift+Y, Shift+S, Shift+R, etc.) for cool-down sensitive and buff type abilities.

Edited December 19, 2011 by Lycaena