Why its bad/good to click?

[Deleted]

If you where doing 43% of the healing in a current 25 man raid that says a lot more about the groups you "subbed" for than how amazing clicking is.

[Tziva]

The only healers who outheal me are AoE healers (as they can heal more people at once) and those who outgear me (especially having the healing trinkets). This occurred repeatedly in 2 expansions.

That's not bragging, that's the facts.

Raiding experience from a very different era is not a valid way to project current performance. Things have changed a lot since then, especially for healers, both in terms of mechanics and also because players have another two years of experience to build skill off of. Regardless of your underlying point, at worst it is dishonest to present your comparisons in the present tense when you're talking about something from two years and two expansion ago. At best, it's irrelevant.

(fwiw, nowadays all healers have AoE heals. The niche of a particular class being a "single target" healer or a "raid healer" is completely obsolete)

I think until you have relevant, current experience, it's probably best to leave it out of your argument entirely, or be careful to frame it in the context of the era your data comes from.

[Moozhe]

Personal experience or anecdotal evidence has no place in this discussion.

If you want anecdotal evidence, I could join LFR and unequip my pants and still out DPS everyone by a large margin. I am not going to go around saying that unequipping your pants is a DPS increase.

Every raid group is a random grouping of people with different skill levels, different gear, different class/spec/talents, different roles (tank healing, raid healing), different frame rates, different latency, different real-life environment and distractions, etc.

[Calamorn]

So! My computer seems to have broken. The PSU is failing. No WoW for me for awhile. Luckily I have this crappy laptop to use. Which I guess, instead of spending my time enjoying myself, I'll take the time to make a second post here. (First is on page 29 I believe)

Once again! I'll start by saying that anecdotal evidence is just that. It DOES NOT matter how much more damage you do than the other people in your group. It DOES NOT matter how much more healing you do than the people around you. If the OP was actually doing a research paper (they probably really aren't) that wouldn't be anything someone could put into it and get a good grade. Like in my previous post where I stated as a feral I regularly do more damage than the mages I meet, it does not mean ferals do more damage than mages. It means I outplay those players.

This is not a discussion about personal experience. I can't stress that enough.

Statement: "Clicking is faster because mouse sensitivity is higher."
Answer: Incorrect. Even if you've a mouse with buttons where the left and right button were extremely sensitive with a high dpi that you could move quickly across the screen, you're missing a fatal factor. Just as easily you can buy a mouse like that, I can buy a keyboard like that. On top of that... In my last post I linked a video by Kripp, one of the worlds best playing hunters. His status as one of the best doesn't matter, what matters is that the information in it is correct and relevant. One of the largest factors to your damage is getting as many global cooldowns in a fight as you can. This means hitting an ability as SOON as you can. The two factors that normally limit this are reaction time and latency. If you're just clicking ONCE, you're watching for the GCD to be up and then clicking an ability. This gives you a (comparably) large gap. That gap is latency+reaction time. The way this is avoided is by spamming your keys at a quick interval to be able to account for the fact that latency changes at from the start of a cast. Is it possible to spam click on your mouse? Well... yes, but once again, you're limiting input factors to maximize what you can do. The -best- way to maximize input to account for these things is to add as many inputs at a time as you can. For instance, spamming a key and having abilities bound to mouseup+mousedown so you can roll your mouse to spam more. A single global added over the course of a six minute fight can add to your dps.

A bit of napkin math rounded to show difference a SINGLE gcd can make.
Lets say I'm a player that does 100,000 dps on a single target fight, no gimmicks. Average fight length is six minutes.
100,000 damage per second
x 360 (seconds in six minutes)
36,000,000.

Over six minutes I will effectively do 36,000,000 damage, that is the same as 100,000 dps.
If over the course of six minutes, I can squeeze out a SINGLE more GCD than someone else and hit something for 100,000k, that single added hit is enough to give me an added 277 dps.

"Why can't that be done with clicking?"
Because that leaves you no time at all to use your mouse to move. You can't be -constantly- spam clicking your abilities and at the same time be using your mouse to move. A change of latency for five seconds that moves you from 50ms to 150ms means if you arent spamming, you're missing fragments of time that at the end of the fight will have given you anywhere between one or thirty added abilities within a fight duration.

Statement: "I out damaged or out healed my group! I always have! My way is better."
Answer: No, your only comparing yourself to the people around you. It's called anecdotal evidence. By that logic, no one should be able to do the things you do if they're doing the opposite.
Back in ICC, I regularly posted world top 20 feral damage parses with WoL. I did this without ever having gained a deathbringer's will, it just wouldn't drop for me. I posted these numbers as an ArP softcapped feral instead of a hardcapped one. Even more, I did it in a casual guild on a server not meant for raiding. My friends around me werent pulling decent numbers. One of the contributing factors to how much damage or healing -you- do, is how much the group around you does. The more damage everyone does, the faster a boss dies. The faster a boss dies, the higher uptime percentage based you have on your cooldowns compared to times when you have no cooldowns up. (There are of course breakpoints to this, if you have more cooldowns at 3-minute, then its a 3-6-9minute point). The fact I was even ranking at all meant I was doing well. The fact that I had ranks for every fight in the top twenty? Considering my surroundings I meant I was doing -extremely- well.

But this doesn't automatically make something I do better than something other people do. That isn't how science works. See, what I said is anecdotal. It relies on personal experience to make a conclusion that is larger than that. The number of influencing factors in anything given is giant, and you cant boil it down to any one thing in particular. The ONLY thing that is reasonable is to break them apart on a point by point basis and try to outweight pros and cons to see which one is mathematically better. In a raid, there are way too many other contributing factors for personal experience to have ANY weight. AT all.

Statement: "You've never raided this, gotten to xyz in arena.' OR "I've gotten to this, done that, I know."
Answer: ANECDOTAL COME ON GUYS. Once again, influencing factors could be -thousands- of things. And while I will fully agree that in most cases you're going to get ridiculous excuses, it doesn't matter. Because it's anecdotal. It doesn't change the fact or truth behind the underlying concept scientifically.

This works both ways. You cannot use this to make an argument for either clicking or keybinding. What you -can- do, however, is make this statement. "The vast majority of the worlds top end raiders and PvP players keybind. While a SMALL number click, most instead choose to keybind. This means there is likely a performance increase in keybinding and we should -examine why-." And even then, just because the top players are doing something does not mean its mathematically better in all situations. Not without some sort of proof.


Statement: "When I was pulling upto 43% -- yes 43% -- of the overall healing in ICC 25m in WotLK, that was simply too much work). Because of that trend some healer has to push them through, and I do (when I raid). In the process I know how I compare to other healers.

The only healers who outheal me are AoE healers (as they can heal more people at once) and those who outgear me (especially having the healing trinkets). This occurred repeatedly in 2 expansions.

That's not bragging, that's the facts."
Answer: First, this does not show how you compare to other healers. This shows how you compare to the other healers -around you-. It is freaking anecdotal. I don't know how many times I'm going to have to use that word in this post.

Second, in ANY raid, especially a 25 man raid, if you're doing 43% of the healing, more than anything, it shows an issue with those around you. Healing throughput on the whole has never EVER had a big enough gap that one healer could do fourty-three percent of the healing vs five or six other healers on any sort of fair nongimmicked fight.

Third, this in no way takes in class mechanics. Take ToC for example, I played a resto-druid at the time. The simple fact that I was resto meant two things. First, my healing would be INSANE for Valks and Anub. The boss mechanics just played into resto healing. The fact that on those fights I outhealed all of the other classes didn't mean I outplayed them. I didnt even make me better than them.
Hell, the fact that I regularly outhealed all of them didn't make me better than them. What it did mean, is that my class abilities were better suited for the job at hand at that time. I could have been playing worse than them and got better numbers for those fights.

Fourth, even against players of the same class and spec, this doesn't matter. There could be a million reasons why someone does better than someone of the same class and spec on a regular basis. Better cooldown useage, better uptimes on abilties, faster general reaction speed, better knowledge of fight mechanics and movement, better gear, better setup ui to facilitate things easier, better macros to help, better hand eye coordination, better computer to reduce lag, better internet, better keyboard and mouse, better dexterity, more practiced with their class and spec, your talents, glyphs, ability to react under pressure. The fact that there are so many different things is why personal experience means all of nothing.

Statement: "Players who click can't be good at the game." OR "Players who keybind think clickers cant be good."
Answer: This is going to actively differ based on your judgement of what -good- is. There are some players who can click and be good. The fact remains though they will never do as well through clicking as they have the potential to do through keybinding. The major argument here isn't that clickers aren't good.

It's- We have a player who isn't doing something they could be doing to improve their play. -That- is what means they aren't good. The same people here trying to argue that you should be keybinding would ALSO argue if someone wasn't using a flask. Wasn't prepotting before pull and potting mid fight.

It isn't a matter of clickers cant be good at the game, I've meet some pretty good clickers. It's a matter of, They'll never be as good as they could be otherwise.

Statement: "ITS A PREFERENCE"
Answer: So is coke vs pepsi, doesn't change the fact that scientifically one has to be worse for my body than the other. However small the difference -there is a difference- and THAT is what this thread is about.

___________________________________________________________________

The vast majority of arguments made in this thread are either anecdotal, ad hominem or just not well thought out. The OP hasn't replied in thirty something pages, this topic should just be locked.

[Xtacle]

There is obviously a difference in maximum performance between clicking and keybinding with the binders always pulling ahead in any situation. But that difference isn't as great as many people are making it out to be in here, for me at least. There hasn't been an encounter where clicking meant make or break for me, then again I am more of a hybrid between binding and clicking. Using the default UI and as a Warrior, I have abilities off the GCD like Heroic Strike, Charge, Kick, etc. and heroic leap bound where everything else I click.

Oh and Pepsi is most certainly better than Coke.

[bionics]

For the record, I think it is fallacious for anyone claim that someone needs heroic raiding experience or a high rating in arena to weigh in on the topic of keybinding verses clicking action bars. I think even the most casual player can formulate conclusions on the matter. In fact, I think a person's armory data is irrelevant in almost all discussion on this forum, despite the value some posters may place on it,.

It's definitely not irrelevant. Perhaps the importance becomes inflated in the eyes of some with a superiority complex ("I did such and such so your opinion is less valid") but to call it irrelevant is just plain fallacious.

Would you go into a job interview with no references and claim they didn't matter? Would you take someone with only experience killing Hogger in-game over someone who downed the original Naxx? Didn't think so.

[heath1056]

There really is no good argument for clicking. It's overall less efficient and not possible to out-play other players who are effectively using keybinds, macros, and mouse buttons. Most often, you can't even click before the gcd has rotated.

[Tziva]

It's definitely not irrelevant. Perhaps the importance becomes inflated in the eyes of some with a superiority complex ("I did such and such so your opinion is less valid") but to call it irrelevant is just plain fallacious.

Would you go into a job interview with no references and claim they didn't matter? Would you take someone with only experience killing Hogger in-game over someone who downed the original Naxx? Didn't think so.

I'm not saying experience is always irrelevant, but it depends on the context. I find that a great deal of the time people bring up people's armory in debates, it is irrelevant. There are many, many situations where people can formulate an opinion on an issue based off of outside data or limited experience or simply making logical conclusions. Afterall, I don't need to be an Olympic swimmer to tell when someone is drowning. I mentioned it as a preface for my critique to indicate that I don't point out someone's experience lightly or habitually. In fact, I typically discourage people from bringing personal armories into debates, because it is almost always wrongly used to attempt to discredit other posters, as if someone isn't allowed to have an opinion on PvP if they're not in the top 1% of arena teams.

That's not to say that having personal experience behind your position can't lend validity to one's position in some discussions. Obviously it is relevant in the particular circumstance when someone claiming to be a superior player hasn't actually done any meaningful content to make that claim valid.

And I would also say even bringing up one's personal skill irrelevant to the topic of keybinding is irrelevant in the first place.

ANYWAY.

We're getting offtopic, it is partially my fault, so let's go back to talking about the actual differences, positives, and negatives of keybinding verses spell clicking.

[Myrrar]

The only healers who outheal me are AoE healers (as they can heal more people at once) and those who outgear me (especially having the healing trinkets). This occurred repeatedly in 2 expansions.

In vanilla I used to beat all our rogues on DPS. I haven't touched a rogue since then. I am the best rogue I've ever played with and will now give rogue advice based off it.

Little silly huh? No, if you don't pvp, haven't raided or done real pve content in years, you aren't in the place to pretend you can say anything about what is best or not best for those situations.


This is a ridiculous conversation anyway. You are a healer, ofc you click. Almost every healer in every level, including top end raiding and pvp click because they use vuhdo or grid+clique. That's not clicking, that using an addon. If you click a target then click your bars well....that's a pretty huge problem. But I can assume that's not the case and you are using an addon.

Healing is not even close to the same as dps or tanking. Never has been, never will be.

[PrairieChicken]

Clicking equals I'm not going to do anything while moving.

Attenuation for Zorlok lasts about um 15 seconds? not sure but at least that.
You will probably see it three times in phase one and let's say three more in p 2
that's 15 * 6 = 90 sec.

Zorlok fight lasts 8 minutes or so. 90 seconds out of 8 min is nearly 20%
Which means that clickers will waste 20 percent of entire combat doing nothing
while keybinders can do full output to semi optimal output.

If you don't know the importance of minimal DPS / healing loss you shouldn't be raiding. That's really the basic mentality required for raiders. I'm not even talking about heroic

PvP well do I need explanation for that...

[Tziva]

Clicking equals I'm not going to do anything while moving.

As I understand it, most clickers move with the keyboard rather than mouse, so they should be able to move and click still. They may exist, but I personally don't know anyone that moves with the mouse and clicks their spells.

Attenuation for Zorlok lasts about um 15 seconds? not sure but at least that.
You will probably see it three times in phase one and let's say three more in p 2
that's 15 * 6 = 90 sec. Zorlok fight lasts 8 minutes or so. 90 seconds out of 8 min is nearly 20%
Which means that clickers will waste 20 percent of entire combat doing nothing
while keybinders can do full output to semi optimal output.

I'm not sure this is super fair, either. Even if clickers couldn't do anything while moving -- which I'm not even sure is true, as per above -- most players are not going to be doing a whole lot during attenuation anyway due to cast times. Melee are pretty much the only ones unaffected; healers and caster DPS are going to be severely limited already, regardless of the physical mechanics they use to cast spells.

(mildly related: I'm actually a mouse-mover usually, but I use my keyboard strafe as melee during that fight so I can keep DPSing)

[PrairieChicken]

As I understand it, most clickers move with the keyboard rather than mouse, so they should be able to move and click still. They may exist, but I personally don't know anyone that moves with the mouse and clicks their spells.


I'm not sure this is super fair, either. Even if clickers couldn't do anything while moving -- which I'm not even sure is true, as per above -- most players are not going to be doing a whole lot during attenuation anyway due to cast times. Melee are pretty much the only ones unaffected; healers and caster DPS are going to be severely limited already, regardless of the physical mechanics they use to cast spells.

There are some limitations but there is big difference between doing suboptimal things like spamming instacasts and keeping debuff up and doing nothing.

And far as I know keyboard turners are worst of the clickers. Clickers with decent output should be using mouse to move. Maybe wrong but hm

[Baltasar]

Just using the mouse makes you a clicker.
Those who bash the real clickers are just jelly cus they got owned by one.

[Xothic]

In vanilla I used to beat all our rogues on DPS. I haven't touched a rogue since then. I am the best rogue I've ever played with and will now give rogue advice based off it.

Little silly huh? No, if you don't pvp, haven't raided or done real pve content in years, you aren't in the place to pretend you can say anything about what is best or not best for those situations.


This is a ridiculous conversation anyway. You are a healer, ofc you click. Almost every healer in every level, including top end raiding and pvp click because they use vuhdo or grid+clique. That's not clicking, that using an addon. If you click a target then click your bars well....that's a pretty huge problem. But I can assume that's not the case and you are using an addon.

Healing is not even close to the same as dps or tanking. Never has been, never will be.

Hollywood the Cracked is a fucking awesome song.

On another note, clicking is bad or whatever.

[Theholypally]

32 pages? Seriously?

There is NO ARGUMENT which is better out of the two. Clicking was, is and will always be inferior to key binds in every way possible especially for people who want to attempt to conquer tougher challenges in the game.

---------- Post added 2012-12-06 at 10:06 AM ----------

Just using the mouse makes you a clicker.
Those who bash the real clickers are just jelly cus they got owned by one.

Those claiming to click, owning key binders, are liars.

[Kevyne-Shandris]

Little silly huh? No, if you don't pvp, haven't raided or done real pve content in years

You don't define "real" as some number on a website. You define it as what you have done (and recorded), and what others have witnessed.

And you never witnessed what I done to judge.

I already posted what I've done that was current, and if you choose to ignore it, that's your problem not mine. I don't have to prove anything to you.

---------- Post added 2012-12-06 at 05:41 AM ----------

If you where doing 43% of the healing in a current 25 man raid that says a lot more about the groups you "subbed" for than how amazing clicking is.

What it showed was despite all that hell of crazy damage taken, I not only exceeded, did so by clicking.

You can be good at what you do, if you try.

[marukale]

Statement: "Clicking is faster because mouse sensitivity is higher."
Answer: Incorrect. Even if you've a mouse with buttons where the left and right button were extremely sensitive with a high dpi that you could move quickly across the screen, you're missing a fatal factor. Just as easily you can buy a mouse like that, I can buy a keyboard like that. On top of that... In my last post I linked a video by Kripp, one of the worlds best playing hunters. His status as one of the best doesn't matter, what matters is that the information in it is correct and relevant. One of the largest factors to your damage is getting as many global cooldowns in a fight as you can. This means hitting an ability as SOON as you can. The two factors that normally limit this are reaction time and latency. If you're just clicking ONCE, you're watching for the GCD to be up and then clicking an ability. This gives you a (comparably) large gap. That gap is latency+reaction time. The way this is avoided is by spamming your keys at a quick interval to be able to account for the fact that latency changes at from the start of a cast. Is it possible to spam click on your mouse? Well... yes, but once again, you're limiting input factors to maximize what you can do. The -best- way to maximize input to account for these things is to add as many inputs at a time as you can. For instance, spamming a key and having abilities bound to mouseup+mousedown so you can roll your mouse to spam more. A single global added over the course of a six minute fight can add to your dps.

A bit of napkin math rounded to show difference a SINGLE gcd can make.
Lets say I'm a player that does 100,000 dps on a single target fight, no gimmicks. Average fight length is six minutes.
100,000 damage per second
x 360 (seconds in six minutes)
36,000,000.

Over six minutes I will effectively do 36,000,000 damage, that is the same as 100,000 dps.
If over the course of six minutes, I can squeeze out a SINGLE more GCD than someone else and hit something for 100,000k, that single added hit is enough to give me an added 277 dps.

"Why can't that be done with clicking?"
Because that leaves you no time at all to use your mouse to move. You can't be -constantly- spam clicking your abilities and at the same time be using your mouse to move. A change of latency for five seconds that moves you from 50ms to 150ms means if you arent spamming, you're missing fragments of time that at the end of the fight will have given you anywhere between one or thirty added abilities within a fight duration.

You seem to have taken the statement out of context, the statement was that if the mouse cursor is already on the button that needs to be pressed, it is faster to click it than having a finger already over a button. I've seen no data sheet from a keyboard manufacturer where key sensitivity is as higher as a decent mouse. A scientific paper needs to take into account that in this specific instance the clicker has the advantage, the paper would then need to explain why this advantage is lost. The statement itself is not false, it is the fact that the advantage is applicable to such a small percentage of game time that other factors outweigh it.

On a side note to get into the latency+reaction time calculations you have to take into account the ability queuing system, server vs client verification and statistical analysis of someone changing their mind. The OP has not stated what course the paper is for and the maths involved in actually covering that is very complex for someone outside a maths discipline to know, assuming university level education a first year maths student should be able to do it and a second year student in a proper science (ie not including things like psychology) would probably be capable. Then again this assumes some level of statistical analysis taught pre-university, different countries may go into more or less depth, I knew Chinese students with great algebraic knowledge but their pre-univeristy courses covered almost no statistical analysis.

[Kevyne-Shandris]

Raiding experience from a very different era is not a valid way to project current performance.

It wouldn't matter, because the same spells that do the job works the same (in a lot of ways now it's easier to heal than in WotLK, I sure didn't have HR to spam to pad those numbers). Now one heal maybe better than the other this expansion, but the mechanics of healing hasn't changed itself. Blizzard can throw in more dexterity into fights, can make all standing still heals impossible to cast (and have months of rage in the process), but folks adapt and play accordingly.

The error here Tziva is blindingly following the mantra of "this is ALWAYS better". It maybe to some, to others it's not. Which is why we have choices in playstyles.

[Deleted]

Clicking isn't necesarily slower, but:

When I move around, I do so mostly by using my mouse, holding rightclick while strafing around. You cannot do that while clicking abilities.
So ideally I'd want everything that I have to use in combat on a keybinding. Stuff like pre-potting I can click, Jeeves (in spite of sometimes having to use it during combat LOL tank shield broken on Wind Lord), Enchanting I can click. Combat Bot (Macroed to CDs) I need on a keybind, because I may have to pop it while moving..
You get the picture, that is why I prefer keybindings. Also you can keep your eyes on what's important, timers, fire on the ground... while still running a perfect rotation, by keybindings.

[Senathor]

I am doing a research paper on how clicking is less efficient than keybinding. I need a counterargument to the positives of clicking, and i also need reasons why clicking is worse than keybinding. I was hoping i could come here to get some ideas from you guys.

Clicking is simple, however, keybinding is more efficient once you've gotten use to it as you're able to press abilities without following the cursor.