Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘macros’

Cuddling, the Draenei hunter with the most beautiful pet in the world, is growing and recently she finished off a quest in Borean Tundra which awarded her a Gun!

Now, Cuddling is not a fan of guns really because of the loud sound they make, scaring every prey within a kilometer off once she presses that trigger. No, much to the annoyance of the resident hunters of her guild, she’ll take a silent deadly bow or possibly crossbow over a gun any day.

But this was a blue gun, and she was toting an old green crossbow which she had found lying in a ditch somewhere in Outland, so she set her doubts aside and woved to get a silencer asap, donned a pair of ear protectors, grabbed the gun from Thassarian’s clutches and threw her old crossbow out.

Only to find out that her Gun skill was the amazing 1/360.

So what’s a girl to do?

Well, she travelled to Ironforge, entered the Deeprun Tram and set about to single-handedly exterminate the entire rat population there.

Armed with her gun and cheap bullets she made a macro to speed up her shoot-out:

/target Deeprun Rat
/cast Autoattack

And the shooting started. As the rat kills numbered in tens and then hundreds, passengers arriving or leaving on the Tram had to detour around the rat corpses piling up, and some even stopped to admire her dedication to keep the rat infestation of the Deeprun Tram at bay, or possibly question her sanity.

“You really have a problem with rats, don’t you?”

It didn’t take her long to kill the 400+ rats needed to max her gun skill, and get a few Sword skillups as well from a ferocious rat or two coming to close.

But it is a bit too noisy for her liking, and she will keep her eyes out for a new bow or crossbow.

One sure way to rub your nose in how many addons you rely on in your daily WoW is to transfer to another server.

Because, you know, all your addons and user interface and macros and even Blizzards’s own in-game options will reset their settings when you transfer and you will end up with a blank slate of helpful addons and options not being helpful at all.

And somehow they are all inter-related. I could not customise my HealBot until I had fixed my macros I use therein, I could not dress my shaman in her various ItemRacked gear outfits until I had  set all stats displayed in RatingBuster. And I had totally forgot how to tweak the displays of the plethora of BigWigs warnings so I ended up with them all in the middle of my screen obscuring important things going on.

Thanks to a pro reminder of a fellow transferee (you know who you are – thanks!) I had been clever and screenshotted all my macros and settings for some of my addons, so it was not such an ardous task to fix it all as it might have been. But still, it took a good many hours to pimp ‘em all to my satisfaction.

Got some aha-experiences as well when I worked my way through the addons. HealBot, for example, comes not blank but with a pre-set suggestion of shaman heals and spells. Did you know shamans have a spell called Cure Toxins? I didn’t. Can’t remember ever using that spell, especially since Cleanse Spirit does the same thing for the same cost and with the added benefit of removing a curse as well.

And even though you test and tweak and check them you still need to do a live SAT to weed out all the little bugs and things that ar not quite right.

For example, I thank the gods of Providence that my very first run with the raid guild I’ve applied to (and been accepted into!) was 25 man Vault of Archavon and not 25 man Iron Council on hardmode. I know the VoA fight a little – enough to be really really determined NOT to die in a fire (thus proving that I am a noob instead of just suspecting it) and with my instant self-heal spells handily macroed in to save my be-tailed behind in case of an emergency.

I did manage to not die in a fire, I managed to not die at all actually, and after having calmed down a bit from the initial panic (what? now? no, I am not reeeeeeeady!) I slowly woke up to the fact that my Chain Heals did not, in fact, splatter their pretty whitish-green lazor beams all over my fellow raiders.

And I rapidly found out that this was because I had, in fact, not bound the Chain Heal to its usual left mouse button hot-key. Residing there was now the eminent Healing Wave, a spell that is not bad at all but perhaps not the best choice for raid healing :P

Anyways, I got it worked out eventually and got a whole bunch of new ideas for how to Improve Stuff as well! I see many hours of macro playing looming ahead! :-)

In light of all the announced coming changes to buffs and debuffs in a raid environment I feel it is a bit unsafe to write more about what to do to keep your mana up when raiding.

Except for one thing – how to save mana by actually using the abilities and trinkets that you have equipped.

My memory is excellent! – only very short! So I rely a lot on macros and addons to help me remember to squeeze those nice on-use abilities out of my gear.

I have the talent Inner Focus from the Discipline tree. This talent gives me a free spell every three minutes.

Now, there are two ways to use this one – either save it for those oh-shit-situations when you need a heal NOW and you have absolutely no mana left, or you use it every time it’s up.

I go for the latter alternative, and it helps me stay out of the 5-second rule and thus regenerate more mana, hopefully avoiding those oh-shit situations altogehter.

I have macroed Inner Foocus to my heal spells, like for example Greater Heal.

/cast Inner Focus
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

Every time I click the macro, it tries to cast Inner Focus. If it’s available, good, the blue spiral spell effect flashes and I begin to cast a mana-free Greater Heal. If Inner Focus is on cooldown, I get an error message but I cast a Greater Heal anyways, using mana for it.

The first conditionals, [target=mouseover, help], makes me cast the macroed spell on my mouseover target if it’s friendly.

The second conditionals, [ ], is for when I don’t have a mouse-over target or I do have one but it’s hostile, in which case the macro behaves like a plain /cast Greater Heal, casting it on my current target or myself if I have no selected target and auto-self-cast enabled.

For added clarity, I put #showtooltip Greater Heal at the top of the macro. This shows me the usual spell tooltip when I mouseover the icon.

I also use the stopcasting technique for my Greater Heals, so I have put a /stopcasting before the actual /cast Greater Heal. This means that every time I click the macro I restart the cast.

(Why do I do this? you may ask.

I do this because of the 2,5 seconds cast time for Greater Heal. When you are on tank healing duty and don’t want to waste mana and drop a full Gheal on an almost topped-off tank, you interrupt the spell and start casting it again right away.

You also don’t want to wait around until the tank gets noticeable damage, because if you don’t have a Gheal in the pipe already by then, those 2,5 seconds will feel like an eternity and you might end up with a dead tank.

So, start casting Gheal by clicking the Gheal macro. If the cast is almost at the end and the tank is still at almost full heal, click the macro once again to abort the cast and start it again. If the tank is taking damage, finish the cast and heal him up. Rinse and repeat.)

The macro now looks like this:

#showtooltip Greater Heal
/cast Inner Focus
/stopcasting
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

But wait! Being a lazy twit efficient healer I have put even more in my macros XD. You are allowed to use 255 characters in every macro so why not make the most of it?

I have three trinkets that I use when healing: Essence of the Martyr, Vial of the Sunwell and Figurine – Seaspray Albatross. All of them have very nice on-use effects – if you remember to use them.

Same here as for the Inner Focus spell, hold on to the trinkets or use them? It’s like a bottle of wine, either you save it for that extra special occasion that might never happen and it may even turn rancid and yukky, or you drink it and turn that mundane tuesday evening into a sweet mellow night.

So I put my trinkets in my macro like this:

#showtooltip Greater Heal
/cast Inner Focus
/stopcasting
/use Vial of the Sunwell
/use Essence of the Martyr
/use Figurine – Seaspray Albatross
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

I get an error message saying Item is not ready yet or You must equip that item to use it, but the spellcast is not hindered.

I have macroed all my heal spells like this now, on the philosophy that it’s better with a mellow tuesday afternoon that happens over and over than an extra special saturday night party that might never come ;P

(The /stopcasting is only used in the Gheal macro though, since it’s useless in instant spell macros like for Renew, Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing and I don’t want to accidentally interrupt any casts of Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing or Binding Heal.)

Edit: *slaps head* Forgot one vital part of this macro! There’s really no use in burning all your spell and trinket cooldowns unless you are in combat, so I have added the conditional [combat] before every spell cast or trinket use.

The macro now looks like this:

#showtooltip Greater Heal
/cast [combat] Inner Focus
/stopcasting
/use [combat] Vial of the Sunwell
/use [combat] Essence of the Martyr
/use [combat] Figurine – Seaspray Albatross
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

This way I won’t pop the cd’s just by shooting a frisbee to the tank before he engages a mob, when I am still full of mana.

I am a sucker for macros to save key space, and my warlock Paynne has quite a few of them for her most common spells.

I know there are addons and stuff like that to help out with many of these things but I like fiddling around with the macros, trying to make them work :-)

Banish
#showtooltip Banish
/focus [harm, modifier:shift]
/clearfocus [target=focus, dead]
/cast [target=focus, harm] Banish

You target the mob you want to banish and click the macro while pressing down SHIFT to set your focus to this mob and banish it, all in one click. If you just want to set the focus to be prepared, if you are not ready for the pull yet or something, just jump after you have clicked the macro to cancel the spellcasting. Click the macro again (without SHIFT) and you will Banish the focused mob, regardless if you have any other mob currently targeted, like the skull mark perhaps.

The white glow around the Infernal portrait shows that it is my current focus and pressing my macro will keep banishing him.

When the mob dies, the focus is cleared and you can chose another focus if you like.

This macro also works well when you want to Enslave something, (provided of course that you replace the Banish with Enslave Demon in the macro ;P)

Pet Attack/Follow
Have you ever had that horrible sinking feeling in your gut when you see your minion storming up to a mob with his/her axe/whip/whatever raised, pulling way too soon and maybe even wiping the group/raid? And you realise that you have accidentally clicked the wrong key, perhaps left-clicked instead of right-clicked when you were being a good warlock and turning off your Felguard’s Cleave to not risk breaking any CC?

If you ever experience something like that, this might be useful to you: I have mapped the Attack and Follow commands to a macro, and placed it on my Q key for easy access.

/petfollow [target=pettarget,exists]
/petattack [target=pettarget,noexists]

Press Q once to attack, click it again to make your minion come back.

DoT
Paynne also has a macro for the most common DoT-sequence that she uses when grinding or farming

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=combat/target Immolate, Curse of Agony, Corruption

When the target dies the castsequence resets so you always start with Immolate on a new target (or whichever DoT you want to start with).

(For some more warlock macros see my earlier post Demonic macros)

So,I couldn’t resist anymore, I specced my little lock back to demonology…

I use her too much for questing still to be comfortable with that destruction build I tried. Also, I heard that for a destro build to be really effective you need an awful lot of spell hit, which I didn’t have (always good to find some scientific reasoning to back your decision, eh?)

Anyways, I like the demo spec and I just luuuv my Felguard, he’s so protective of my little gnome (well he is more than twice her size so she can hide very well behind him).

Paynne has by far the most spells possible to use at the same time than any other of my girls (or maybe I just haven’t discovered all the other girls’ spells…ah well) and I use a lot of macros when I play her.

I have scoured forums and other venues of information to get my macros the way I want the, and I have shamelessly stolen snippets from anything that I thought I could use…so I figured maybe I should share some.

Summon Minion [Edited 2008-03-05]
Since I usually quest with my Felguard out this is a very convenient macro:

#show Fel Domination
/run PetAbandon()
/stopcasting
/cast [nocombat, nopet] Summon Felguard
/castsequence [combat] Fel Domination, Summon Felguard

[Edit: the bold text above (nopet) added to make the macro work as intended]

The macro is read from the top down. The first line shows if the cd on the spell Fel Domination(15 minutes) is ticking.

What this macro does is the following:

If your Felguard is out, in our out of combat, one press on this macro will dismiss him.

Why is it useful to dismiss your pet in the heat of the battle, you might ask. It is useful only if you plan to use your Fel Domination (you know, the spell that lets you summon your minion in 0,5 second – whooosh and he’s back) and resummon him, because when you do that, he will come back with full health/mana and all those buffs he had on when you dismissed him! If he dies and you Fel Dominate him back, he will come back unbuffed (although still with full health/mana). Takes a bit of concentration to see what how your minion is getting damaged and keep track of his health as well as your own, and get that key-clicking to work, but if you manage to pull it off the difference between unbuffed and buffed might help save the day :-)

The next line checks to see if you are in combat and if you are not you summon your Felguard the usual 10 second way.

The last line also checks to see if you are in combat, and if you are you cast Fel Domination on the first click and Summon Felguard on the second click.

So, to sum up:
Pet out – click once for dismissal
No pet and in combat – click twice to summon
No pet and out of combat – click once to summon

Pretty nifty, eh?

Paynne and her darling Felguard in the big city.

Seduce
Yeye, I am a warlock, we have a way to cc humanoids, and its called SEDUCE. Ever heard of it? I think many people, including warlocks, have not. It is a tricky thing to pull off correctly, and since it relies on a spell channeled by a succubus who might as well be made of glass, it has a big risk of gettin fubared unless you have practiced it before trying it on in a multi-pull in a 70’s instance.

/focus [modifier:shift]
/cast [target=focus, modifier:ctrl] Curse of Shadow
/clearfocus [target=focus, dead]
/petpassive
/cast [pet:Succubus, target=focus, harm, nomodifier] Seduction

We have a hunter in our guild who is one of the best trappers I have ever seen (well we have many bit this particular one I have played with a lot), and when I tank with him in my group I never worry about the mob with the blue square on. I know he will take care of it most assuredly, trapping, kiting, whatever’s needed, while at the same time dishing out an enormous amount of damage on the other mobs.

I want to be able to use my succy seduce like that hunter uses his frost traps. I am not even close at the moment, but I will get there (I hope).

This is how you use the macro (btw if you choose the red ? as the icon for you macro it will display the correct icon for whichever spell you have in it):

You target the mob you want to seduce and then you hold down shift while clicking the macro. The mobs portrait will get a shiny border so you see that you have set it as focus correctly.

Now you can target any other mob you like, your focus will still be set on your chosen mob. When the pull starts, I usually hold down ctrl and click the macro to cast a Curse of Shadow on the focused mob to lower its resistance to the Seduce and to get it running in my direction, to me and my succubus next to me, and then I hit it with a Searing Pain to get me high on the mobs threat list. After that, click my seduce macro, watch the mob start spouting hearts, and switch target to the skull.

Now I blast happily away on my nuke target pressing my seduce macro about every 15 seconds or so (I have improved Seduce) to keep the focused mob in the seventh heaven. The Curse of shadows and the Searing Pain is usually enough to keep the mob from going for the healers or my made-of-fragile-glass succy the first times the seduce is reapplied.

Paynne and her hot succubus out on a Seduce practice run.

I have some more nice warlock macros that I will post at a later time, now I better post this or I will keep editing it forever ;P