Wednesday, February 27, 2008

UI on my mind

So, I am unhappy with what I'm doing in instances, and a lot of the unhappiness has been UI. After last night I decided to deal with it.

So, I had this epiphany with Eeyan. He has no abilities that can be on either self or others. Well, except for bandaids and that is never hotkeyed. So I remapped 10 of the mouseable buttons into alt-N for the hotkey they sat over. Then I reordered some of his attacks. I will have to take him into instances with PUGs to deal with the mistakes that result from the first few hours of this, but it will make things so much better.

As for Kuan. A couple things were bugging me. The first one was easy. I had Purge hotkeyed, which is necessary as it is not really used many times, but when it needs to be used, it Needs To Be Used. And hence the problem, if Kuan was in the middle of a cast. So I wrapped it like I have Earthshock wrapped:
#show Purge
/stopcasting [harm]
/cast [harm] Purge

I put the harm conditional in there becuase if I hit the key by accident while healing a friend, I don't want the stop casting. That's unlikely but not as unlikely as I'd prefer.

Actually I don't have that on Earthshock. I probably oughta. There.
#showtooltip
/stopcasting [harm]
/cast [harm] Earth Shock

I need to combine this in some intelligent way with a similar macro that casts on focus, just for the interrupts.

The larger challenge was Ele Mastery. I really forget to cast it most of the time, which is stupid for a 31-point talent. So I checked if it was subject to GCD, and it is not. (More on that below.) So I put together a macro that would cast it, then Lightning Bolt. Now, while it's not subject to GCD, it does have a 3 min cooldown. Really, that sucks, so only once every 3 mins do I get to avoid big red "Spell not ready yet" on my screen. A bit of poking around on wowwiki gave me what I needed though. I added this to the top of both my Lightning macros:
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Elemental Mastery
/stopcasting
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");

It still makes the fail-to-cast sound but I don't care.

Now I have a hotkey free on Kuan's UI. I am going to try adding the Searing Totem back in for now.

time passes
Ok, the /stopcasting after Ele Mastery is not working for me. I will try them without it tomorrow.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Why do you need the /stopcasting anyways?

draNgNon said...

I was thinking if it was still on CD and I had some lag that it would prevent the error condition from stopping the lightning bolt.

That doesn't seem to be true, but, if there is some lag and I hit the hotkey twice, then the second press also stops the lightning bolt.

It will take some getting used to, timing wise. Macros execute on key down; regular spells cast on key up. One of my coworkers who plays a priest calculated the difference and macro'd all his heal spells, bumping his HPS significantly. You'd be surprised how the last three years has trained you on timing of key presses for your working cast sequences.