Healing with mouseover macros?

[Makeda]

Who said they wanted to heal something else? Apart from the apparently iffy targeting, the main reasoning against mo heals is that you can't queue them, costing you time between heals, and to minimize that time loss you have to trigger the button to lose as little time as possible, which sounds extremely annoying.

Significant time is lost in switching around targets.

Even more time would be lost if I were to use F1-F8 (keys not normally existent on my keyboard nor my Nostromo Orbweaver, so I would have to emulate them or rebind them onto my Nostromo, losing keys used for other actions. Besides I'm never using my keyboard when active anyway - I'm using the Orbweaver and the Mouse. The keyboard is just for out of combat chat and such). But even if I did plug in an external keyboard with Function keys on it, that is a wide spread to have one's fingers moving over - look into the ergonomics of that. Significant time and muscle strain would be wasted there.

With a mouse-over I can cast immediately on the needed target without interruption of other activities.

By having more than just <mo>, I can be fully fluid in how I select who gets a heal, and have plenty of fallbacks.

Essentially this allows me to heal faster, more like a blend between how I do in games like WoW, Wildstar, or Overwatch - avoiding the mess of 'targeting' - leaving that clunky old outdated gaming system to the DPS side of my actions (just as I have to do in WoW, which also uses to the outdated 'select a target' system).

The time loss of going through a short series of 'if-then statements' for software is in micro-seconds. Not worth noting.

[Mhaeric]

Significant time is lost in switching around targets.

Even more time would be lost if I were to use F1-F8 (keys not normally existent on my keyboard nor my Nostromo Orbweaver, so I would have to emulate them or rebind them onto my Nostromo, losing keys used for other actions. Besides I'm never using my keyboard when active anyway - I'm using the Orbweaver and the Mouse. The keyboard is just for out of combat chat and such). But even if I did plug in an external keyboard with Function keys on it, that is a wide spread to have one's fingers moving over - look into the ergonomics of that. Significant time and muscle strain would be wasted there.

With a mouse-over I can cast immediately on the needed target without interruption of other activities.

By having more than just <mo>, I can be fully fluid in how I select who gets a heal, and have plenty of fallbacks.

Essentially this allows me to heal faster, more like a blend between how I do in games like WoW, Wildstar, or Overwatch - avoiding the mess of 'targeting' - leaving that clunky old outdated gaming system to the DPS side of my actions (just as I have to do in WoW, which also uses to the outdated 'select a target' system).

The time loss of going through a short series of 'if-then statements' for software is in micro-seconds. Not worth noting.

I don't think you're understanding where they're saying the time is lost. Using function keys to select a target and heal without a macro lets you do it well before you have to actually cast the spell, even letting you hit the button to cast the spell before you are able to cast it and have it go off when it's ready and you can be using your mouse to do other actions like rotating the camera at the same time as doing this.

With a <mo> macro you can't pre-cast (just like with any macro) or pre-prepare your target. You have to both have the mouse over the target and press the button after, even if only by milliseconds, when the skill is already ready to cast. You can't press the <mo> macro button ahead of time, since macros don't allow queuing, and if you mouse over early to prepare the target early then you lose the capability to use the mouse for anything else at the time such as camera movement. I.e. With a <mo> macro (or any macro) you have to be really on the ball for timing or you lose GCD time. With function key targeting, you have a lot more leeway for when you can initiate actions and move without clipping into your GCD.