One handed healing

Sicko, I don’t mean it that way. 😀 

I do mean physically healing with only one hand, but what you do with the other hand… that can stay in your little mind over there.  What I have in my other hand; however, is this: 

/facepalm

 

Yup, that’s the latest addition to our family, little Josh.  Only a week old here.  With his entrance into our world, I have again had to learn the art of one handed healing… and in addition some one handed tanking, but that’s a different post all together. 

With our first son, I was just beginning to do some raiding in Karazhan (oh the memories).  With him still being so young, I would need to stop and feed him (bottle fed.. I am a guy, nothing comes out of these) every once and a while.  Well I had gained a bit of a skill in being able to control my character’s movement as well as healing abilities all with just my mouse hand.  Now typing something in raid chat was a different story, and took longer than normal, but was still doable. 

I can truly constitute this ability to addons.  From early on, I had begun to learn how to work with Grid, and its beautiful space saving form factor.  Unlike a lot of people I still enjoyed using Clique, simply because of the challenge it still provided over Healbot, and because I like the customizability of it and ability to use it no matter if I’m healing or killing stuff.  So, the combination of Grid/Clique have been a boon to my ability to heal with limited arm mobility. 

A bit later I will get into some of the specifics, but first, I can imagine that a lot of healers out there are looking at me wondering why I don’t use mouseover macros, and the current trends out there.  Well, I’ve grown spoiled.  I never had a chance to play with mouseover macros, nor wanted to map that many things to my keyboard.  Before coming to WoW, I used to play a lot of FPS (First Person Shooters).  This had gotten my hands into pre-memorized positions, and it was really hard to move from that.  However, I didn’t have to, as WoW had many of the same movement controls as most FPS defaults. 

So, on with the story.  I had begun raiding Karazhan with a group of friends.  They all knew that my wife had recently had a baby, so understood any AFKs that I might have to take.  Since it was our first son, I wanted to be sure that I was able to help my wife as much as possible.  Because of this, the only chance I really got to get on was in the late evenings, and fortunately, my son slept fairly well… at first.  Anyway, as time went on, I had begun to learn the intricacies of Clique, and was able to use the addon to map nearly everything that I needed to my left, right, and middle click buttons on my mouse, as well as using a few modifiers easily reachable with my left hand.  With this set up, I was able to feed my son while he was in my left arm, using my left hand, and still effectively heal the raid with my right  hand, using only clicks and mouse movements.  Here was my setup for nights that I watched the baby: 

Right-click: Holy Light
Left-click: Flash of Light
Shift Left-click: Holy Shock
1: Divine favor
2: Divine Illumination
3: Trinket 1 (Now Divine Plea)
4: Trinket 2 (Now Trinket 1)
5: (Trinket 2) 

With the advent of WotLK, I’ve since added Beacon and Sacred Shield to some focus macros. 

Lucky for me, paladin healing isn’t super difficult in the number of spells to use, especially back in BC.  I have always been a button clicker, and not a keybind macro kind of guy, so this setup worked out well.  Except for on Shade of Aran… evil movement fight.  Anyway, being able to use the mouse to move worked well, and if I started soon enough, I was far enough ahead of the roaming blizzard to keep heals up on the tank. 

It became well known amongst my raiding friends that I was able to do that, though when mentioned with a PuG member around, it usually made for some awkward questions. 

Well, now with our second son here, I’ve had to pick up that skill once again.  Though the fights are tougher, and require more movement, it’s still possible, and with coordination with your other healers, you should have no problem attempting some one handed healing.  (Maybe use the other hand to eat a bacon sammich or something… mmmm.) 

What kinds of [unusual] things do you feel you’ve been able to do in WoW?