Monday (23 Aug) - Me and my Macros

Monday (23 Aug) - Me and my Macros

Just a few this's and that's before getting into the main discussion of macros (so, you can tell not much went on yesterday).

First of all, Wild had a sudden insight. He and Philly and JB have been diligently working on getting heirloom gear for all the various classes so that our baby alts can grow up fast. The Wild family has amassed a large pile of shoulder and chest heirloom gear for both accounts that should serve all of the existing low level toons on both the horde and alliance side (assuming the gear is shared and no one gets greedy). Happy was doing an accounting of the gear and noted that there was no leather gear. There was cloth gear that leather wearers could use, and plenty of mail and plate gear as well, but no leather. Happy just shrugged. After all, the only leather wearing classes were druids and rogues, and there weren't any leveling Wild family toons in those classes. Even the new toons planned in Cataclysm - a goblin mage and a warrior worgen - don't use leather. All was well - WAIT! There is one toon who uses leather - WILDSHARD! And come Cataclysm Wild will be leveling from level 80 to 85. Wild suddenly realized that HE NEEDED his own heirloom gear!

By a juxtaposition of the stars (and just blind luck) Wild came to this realization just as a call for Wintergrasp went out. Heirloom shoulder gear can be purchased using WG shards. Wild checked his currency and he had 160 WG shards. Too hundred shards would buy Wild the shoulders. Wild headed for WG, collected four weekly quests (that give 10 shards each), and belted on his dismal set of pvp gear. His resilience (a pvper's best protection against other players) totaled only 173, where 800-1000 was considered good. Oh well. As a tree druid in pvp Wild would be heavily targeted and probably spend most of the battle running back from the graveyard. The horde was defending, and for 15 minutes everything went very smoothly. We got complacent, however, and the alliance attacked from the east, breaking through the walls and entering a very lightly defended interior. The rest of the horde were chasing alliance outside for kills. Wild launched himself into one of the Keep's heavy guns and blasted the invading alliance siege engines. Wild had two guns shot out from under him on the outside walls, and a third blown apart under me on an interior gun. But Wild did considerable damage to the allie assault, destroying most of their engines and killing many of them. They were inside, though, and allie soldiers poured in.

Wild died several times as a small horde defense tried to stem the larger allie assault. We did our job, keeping the allies from taking down that final door while the rest of the horde hustled back to the Keep. The Horde successfully defended the Keep, and Wild got the forty shards he needed to buy his heirloom shoulders. Wild still needs to get a leather chestpiece, which he can buy for 40 triumph badges. Those won't be hard to get.

In other important news, the DER family is back! Yep, we should start seeing more action in our Monday night pvp fests in the next week, when all three of our intrepid team can finally get together as one. Even now there is considerably more activity going on between the horde and alliance cousins, positioning gear and gold where it can do the most good. Lost is making slow but steady progress on the Alliance auction house as well, working on building that nest egg for the Tea Green alliance guild.

Ok, now on to Macros! Come on, show some enthusiasm!

Every now and then I review my macros to determine if I should make any changes. Macros are basically short bits of code that players can save and use to perform functions. Macros help players by altering game play in ways that better suit individual player styles. Yes, WoW has a standard User Interface (UI) and some players are happy with the default setup. For those who want more flexibility, or prefer a play style that the default UI doesn't easily support, well, macros can help with that.

There are two main camps regarding play styles: clickers and keybinders. Clickers use the mouse keys and on screen buttons to cast spells and use abilities. Keybinders use keyboard keys for the same purpose. Militant keybinders believe that clickers suck and can't possibly play as well as the worst keybinder. Clickers say that's crap and that clickers can play just as well as any keybinder. Mostly this battle revolves around character movement, which I'm not going to bother talking about because it's a stupid (and endless) argument and a matter of individual preference.

When talking about casting spells and abilities, however, keybinders and clickers go about that in very different ways.

True keybinders do not use the mouse to click on anything. The primary function of the mouse is for movement. Clicking would be used sparingly, and only in situations where speed/combat don't come into play (opening a bag, for example). Every spell/ability that a player intends to use in combat (and many not used in combat) are "bound" to a key. Keybinders have to remember what key each spell is bound to, and then train themselves to be able to hit the right key for the desired spell without resorting to looking at the keyboard. If you play a class/spec that uses a lot of spells and abilities, that can be a lot of things to remember. Forgetting where that "save me" spell is bound on the keyboard could be fatal.

The true clicker places all his spells/abilities on his rows of buttons visible in his screen, using the mouse keys to click on the button to cast spells. The advantage is that the player doesn't have to remember what key does what spell; he can see his spells right there on his buttons. Moving the mouse and clicking on buttons takes longer than tapping a key, all else being equal. In addition, it can also interfere with movement if you are also using the mouse to move with.

Then there are macros, which are used by both keybinders and clickers. Keybinders make macros and bind them to keys. In that sense Wild belongs in the keybinder class because I typically create macros and then bind them to keys for easy use. However, I'm not militant about it. The only keys I bind things to are the number pad keys. For example, all of Wild's healing spells are contained in macros bound to the number pad keys. That's only nine keys to remember and my right hand already has the muscle memory to hit the key for the spell I need without me really thinking about it or looking at the pad. That said, I cheat, just in case my aging brain takes a vacation during a critical moment. I have a 3x3 grid of buttons with all the same macros assigned to the buttons that match the number pad. Should I forget, I can still click the button to cast. Wild has a lot of other spells besides his healing ones, and I still place all of those on buttons for click casting as needed. It works for me.

Today Wild updated his healing macros, thanks to Valithria Dreamwalker. Wild has a spell called Innervate, which is a powerful mana regen spell. Wild doesn't need the spell for himself much anymore, so I usually cast in on other mana users if I see they're having mana problems or ask for it. In the Dreamwalker fight the priest that is outside the portal healing the raid burns a lot of mana very fast. So Wild checks her mana each time I exit the portal, and if she's dropped below 50% mana I cast Innervate on her. I wanted to update my simple Innervate macro to send her a whisper letting her know she'd just received an Innervate. It's a three minute cooldown spell so that would let her know how long before the next one would be available.

After getting that done and testing it - ALWAYS test your macros! Get a letter or a space wrong and the thing won't work. Don't find that out in the middle of a raid - Wild took a look at his other macros and decided to update them to be more flexible. Here's the macro Wild put together for "friendly spells" - spells that would be cast on a friendly player only.

/cast [@mouseover,nodead,help][nodead,help][@player] Regrowth

Regrowth is a healing spell. That part is easy. But what does the rest of that gobble-de-goop mean? The commands inside the [brackets] are targeting commands.

[@mouseover,nodead,help] says that if my mouse if hovering over a target (@mouseover), and that target is not dead (nodead) and it's friendly (help) then cast Regrowth on that mouseover target. If those conditions don't apply, then go to

[nodead,help] which says if you have directly targeted something (implied) and that target is not dead and is friendly, cast Regrowth on that target. If neither of the above conditions apply, then go to

[@player] which says cast Regrowth on yourself. Note that [help] is assumed since you are obviously friendly to yourself, and [nodead] doesn't apply since if you're dead you won't be casting any spells.

How does this help Wild? Wild normally is a "mouseover healer." I have a raid frame setup that shows me the health of every raider, and to heal them I hover my mouse over their frame and hit the numberpad key for the spell I want. When Wild is tank healing I usually have the tank assigned as Focus. That way I don't have to use the mouse to hover over his frame. I click on his focus frame and hit the key I want to send the heal directly to him while still being able to mouseover heal at need. To heal himself Wild would have to un-target the tank and then hit the appropriate key, or, horrors!, I'd become a momentary clicker and right click the spell button for self healing. If I wanted, I could insert another targeting command like

[@focus,nodead,help]

and I'm actually thinking about trying that.

Philly also has her DPS spells macroed and placed on the number pad keys. "Save me" spells, such as Fade and Shield, are also keybound to the numberpad. This is most useful to me so that I can use the mouse for targeting and movement. For DPS Philly doesn't use mouseover at all. Hostiles are better targeted directly.

End lesson. ;-)