Because the devs' job isn't to preserve an optional 3rd-party feature, it's to improve the actual game they're marketing and selling as they deem appropriate. It's kind of silly that on one hand you're complaining the devs are wasting time on something you don't personally care about, then on the other hand you're complaining that the devs aren't walking on eggshells to avoid someone having to mildly modify their 3rd-party unofficial UI add-on. I have to be blunt here — no one cares. Just like no one cares what I want. He's not working on mouseover support to make Lovestar happy, he's doing it because he thinks it's a good feature for the game and I accidentally gave him an opportunity to comment on it. Mouseover healing / buffing is a well-established style in other games of this genre, there's nothing avant-garde or whimsical about extending it into SOE's MMO(s).
It allows you to execute actions on whatever target is currently under your cursor, instead of actually clicking and making the full target switch. This has a very wide variety of applications for smoother / more efficient gameplay. As some quick random examples: You can mez a target on the other side of the room without losing your current target inside a big ball of mobs. You can quickly activate short-term buffs, etc. simply by hovering over the frame of the target instead of having to make lists of name-specific macros or briefly target them directly, which would potentially disrupt your autos, etc. You save a 'click' step and the constant swapping of your target when healing, which improves your reaction times and healer DPS more than you might assume in text. I'm not sure how EQ2's engine works, but in WoW you could use it to quickly interact with "object mobs" that were frustrating to successfully click on due to obstructions or weird pixel shapes, etc. (etc) This is one of those many subtle features that sounds a lot less useful than it actually is once you try it and get used to how smooth it is to just cursor-dance around to target allies / mobs instead of constant click / target-swapping.
Yeah, TY, this is a good suggestion for anyone not aware of it. I do use the Alias trick atm. It isn't a terrible compromise right now. It's a little clunky and bloated, but it works. Basically the same functionality (if not superior) in an established group that runs together a lot (like guild raids), alongside manually entering names in the target blanks. I'm personally partial to mouseovers because I tend to PUG a lot in MMOs just for variety / practice and mouseover'ing the frames is faster and more intuitive than manually-changing a lot of macros to fit each new group comp. At least EQ2 even has Alias and target blanks, though — try SWTOR, where BioWare is like "You know what? **** you and your UI addons and your Macros and your play comfort. You can click everything and squint at raid frames that display only 4 of your entire raid's buffs at once, so good luck having any clue if your hot or reactive is falling off Faceless DPS No. 7."
What would really rock is the ability to extract "active frames" from the raid window .... ie extract MT/OT and make them big and allow quick action on them ;-) Also I would love to have more than One target .... example : interface store my three last target into frames, so if we fight 3 named I see them all (and their casting bars) and their targets ... An to make it perfect we then would be able to select which Buf and debuf we see ... Usually most permanent buf are just useless information and temp from proc are mostly useless too, but knowing important thing (typically tank is immune or immune to physical etc ...) would be nice.
Also in WOW you could move around active object represent each member of the team. It was up to you to organize it as you wanted, if i remember correctly you could left member that needed no special attention in the raid window, but you could extract as many as you wanted and get easy to click target with on top mouse over actions. What left me chocked when i started eq2 was : The raid window. The targeting ;-)
About the 'having more than one target' suggestion. My Templar is super slow compared to the more modern healers. I have 6 separate targeting icons on my hotbars and when I get in a group, I manually type people's names into them (not always all 6, but at least 3 usually). Some of them I have reserved for character archetypes like "this one is for the mages, this one is for the tank(s)... etc. They attempt to fire a buff whenever I target that group member. As for enemies, I rely on target of target, as a healer, my target doesn't matter much, since I don't raid and don't often get in a situation where I need to be worried about breaking a strat by attacking the wrong mob or at the wrong time. I also don't attack much in a group with that character. No time while waiting for spells to go off. That's what works for me. I haven't had the need to do that on Warden yet, but I appreciate the suggestion of /alias usage, which saves me making sure I'm targeting the right person before I give the "ready" signal. Sometimes spelling those names is tricky. I renamed a bunch of my characters for the exact reason that I noticed how hard it was to spell other's names! I usually spend the "waiting time" before we start the zone doing my editing and spell checking of my buttons.
