Poll - Your personal healer: Do you prefer a merc or a macro?

There are some great healer bots out there: FastHeal, KissAssist, and Bot. Do you prefer them to mercenaries?

I run my own healer macros when I PL a char.

Still, I wonder how well FastHeal, KissAssist and Bot would work when ungrouped. Anybody using them outside of group?

I've seen them used outside of group. I think they work great in general group/named situations. Trying to use them in a raid... Maybe not so much.

I use a merc for now. Mainly because my computer and wallet can't handle one more toon!

i used merc until i got my cleric eather geared and spend a lot of time working on my .ini so i have a 4 bot team. magi/SK/cleric/chanter. with 2 merc caster dps. really nice group

My poor little laptop can't handle the three toons I run now, I can't spare the resources for run a 4th account as a healer, so I just work with my merc(s). I tank just find and dps just fine with my SK/Bard/Wiz team with 1 dedicated Wizard merc and 1 that I swap between Wizard and Cleric and 1 full time Cleric merc. I really haven't run into anything I can't do just yet.

I once used 3 healers to run a macroed CH-heal rotation and one-grouped Anguish with it. That was fun. Nowadays I use a merc or 2 if needed, saves me money or Kronos.

Nothing beats kiss. Mercs are trash

Back when I raided I used my bot.mac all the time on raids and nearly 100% of the time i was the top healer and my dps bots were top 5 in group gear with raid weapons. No matter how fast a person is, they arent faster than a computer at reacting. So long as the macro is coded properly, it will always outperform a person.

I cant speak for other macros or plugins as the only macros ive ever used other than my own are the nils series afcleric/encbot/ranger ones, but everything I write works outside of groups in some capacity; either by adding the toons you want to heal onto your XTargets, or via netbots.

As far as preference of merc over player.. well.. depends on how lazy im feeling. Mercs are fine most the time but now I just keep my healers in silver status so I dont rack up krono costs. But expansion time hurts when you have 12 accounts (which is why i bid for all these krono promotions). $480 a pop for expansion + sub costs are nuts when I actually need to level toons.

I have not moved up to full on macroing yet, so I use a 3 man 3 merc team, 2 healer mercs 1 caster merc and I only kill what wanders near and agros to my guys, I break a camp that has 3 - 5 spawns then let the mercs do all the work while I loot and mobs respawn. I feel it makes me less likely to get caught but mercs are fickle little bastards! So I have had to add more and more action to my macros, guess I should step up and get the real macros running!

I actually run both. My Cleric is my main, but I do more than just healing. The healer merc has different rules for healing than what I set, so they ultimately compliment one another. When actively playing, I'll run the Cleric (pulling, etc) and let the merc do most of the healing work for me, while other classes are macro'd.