New Mouse / Redoing Macros

New Mouse
So, I finally caved in and got a new mouse. I'd been using a Logictech trackball, and I liked that I didn't need to have a flat surface for mousing. However, I was unable to turn up the dpi of the trackball enough to get across the screen without 2 or 3 scrolling motions on the trackball. So DraNgNon finally convinced me to buy a Razer Naga. It arrived the other day and I installed the drivers last night.

I'm liking it so far. The higher dpi is a lot nicer, and I'm already liking having a mouse again. I'm not entirely sure what spells I want to put on the thumb pad, but I've set up another bar in Dominos for the numpad. Minimally I'll want to put the targeted AoE spells on the mouse pad. I've also put a mouseover rez macro for Morn. And I'll definitely want to get the dumb healing mushrooms for Khryie on the mouse as well.

Macros
So with a new mouse I've been looking at my macros. I needed a mouseover macro for rez and I wanted to put my focus interrupt/cc macros in a central place so I don't have to worry about copying new macros over for different characters.


Focus CC Macro:
#showtooltip
/cast [target=focus,exists,nodead] [] Strangulate
/cast [target=focus,exists,nodead] [] Mind Freeze

Mouseover rez:
#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover] Raise Ally

Mouseover healing with fallback to targeted ally heal and then self heal:
#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover,help] Lifebloom; [help] Lifebloom; Lifebloom

Mouseover heal with trinket use:
/target mouseover
/use FabulousTrinket
/cast Swiftmend
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Macro it!

Mornara killed Ultraxion for the first time tonight on Normal mode. It was a pretty fun fight, though there is really no room for error in there. Well, there is room for one error, as long as it can be fixed by a speedy battle res. But in general it was a fun fight. I liked it a hell of a lot more than Zon'ozz, who I now refer to as the ping pong boss from hell. But that's a post for another time.

It was not Darkfall's first time killing Ultraxion, but only about half of us had killed him before. So there was some learning to be done. Fortunately I had some good advice from DraNgNon, who had killed him before on normal mode.

I'm embarrassed to admit that several of the wipes were my own fault, either from not staying in for Hour of Twilight, or not getting out for Fading Light. However I was having a very hard time making sure that I clicked the button at the right time. I mouse with my right hand, and also hit my Vent talk button with the right hand as well. And doing both of those at the same time to call out the bad stuff was not working for me.

So I remembered the cardinal rule of tanking. The cardinal rule of playing WoW. The rule that underlies all the other stuff you need to do: Keybind! Keybind your abilities, but especially keybind your cooldowns. And if Heroic Will isn't a (fight specific) cooldown, I just don't know what is.

/click ExtraActionButton1

So, keybind that sucker: make a macro and put it on a action bar. Once I did that we got him on the next try.

Lifeblood, Berserking, Elemental Mastery

So, I am an idiot.

Here's Kuan's Chain Lightning macro. It's set this way so I don't blow a substantial percentage of the Berserking buff waiting on the GCD of an instant cast (proc'd by the Elemental Mastery). Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst are similarly macro'd.

#showtooltip Chain Lightning
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/castsequence [combat] reset=15 Elemental Mastery, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Chain Lightning

I totally spaced on how Lifeblood was a 20s buff of 480 haste with a 2m cooldown.

Berserking is still a 3m cooldown.

Elemental Mastery is 3m too, but subject to Feedback, which reduces its cooldown by 3 seconds every time.

I messed with putting the sequence with Lifeblood in between there, and tried it on a heroic dummy just to watch the result, and was unpleased. That setup really doesn't work too well, since the cast sequence will "stick" on the spell that isn't on cooldown.

So, I'm going to unwind the cast sequence. It'll blow a portion the Berserking at first pull but it won't really matter, the GCD is also hastened.

#showtooltip Chain Lightning
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/cast Elemental Mastery
/cast Lifeblood
/cast Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Chain Lightning


Mount distraction

So in Vashj'ir it's possible to get underwater mounts, which is quite cool. But these mounts never work outside of Vashj'ir. And of course a flying mount isn't so useful underwater.

I decided I wanted one button for either a flying mount or the swimming mount. This was quite a challenge! First I just tried it. That fail'd. Then I grabbed this mount macro from Wowwiki:

/run if not IsMounted() then local g,f,s={g,g,g,},{f,f,f},{s,s,s} local t=GetRealZoneText()=="Vashj'ir" and s or (IsFlyableArea() and not IsShiftKeyDown()) and f or g CallCompanion("MOUNT",t[random(#t)]) end
/dismount

This macro seriously does not work. The primary problem is that GetRealZoneText() doesn't provide "Vashj'ir". It provides, like, 'Shimmering Expanse'. And there are three such zones. Thus began my adventure in experiments with Lua. I tried defining a list of zones and putting a for loop, but it just didn't work.

Finally I got something working, with help from my guildie Point, who did most of the heavy liftingexplained to me that {g,g,g,} is really a hash, not a list. the for loop needs two variables iterating over an iterable expression.

/run local t={16,18}; local zones={"Shimmering Expanse","Abyssal Depths","Kelp'Thar Forest"}; for z,n in ipairs(zones) do if (n==GetRealZoneText() and IsSwimming()) then t={1} end end CallCompanion("MOUNT",t[random(#t)])
/dismount


EDIT: Actually that doesn't work either, it doesn't dismount right. Here's the final one.

/run if not IsMounted() then local t={16,18}; local zns={"Shimmering Expanse","Abyssal Depths","Kelp'Thar Forest"}; for z,n in ipairs(zns) do if (n==GetRealZoneText() and IsSwimming()) then t={1} end end CallCompanion("MOUNT",t[random(#t)]) end
/dismount


Ravasaur acquired

...perhaps now the blog will get less boring for our readers, now that the Obsession has been satisfied...

meanwhile... it's Raptor Time

/castrandom [nomounted] Swift Orange Raptor, Black War Raptor, Venomhide Ravasaur
/dismount
/script VehicleExit()


Kuan macro follow up

Just from playing with heroic dummies, having the macro on Lava Burst is worth 300 dps and between that an watching Event Horizon Kuan easily broke 3000 dps, self-buffed.

I then took him into Heroic Drak'Theron and did 1800 dps over all. My eyes were all over the screen and Event Horizon was not where they need to be for a real fight. bleh. Now I'm starting to experiment with a layout that puts Event Horizon up next to player and target unit frames, now.

Resto-wise, Kuan and Viljo went into Icecrown to kill some of those lvl 81 Elite giants partrolling on the parapets in the southwest part of the zone. I got very confused by every thing proc'ing! I'm not used to the healy stuff proc'ing on Kuan. Anyhow it was a bad test as Clara was also testing a "pvp" spec with high stam and so really the giant didn't hurt Viljo much at all. TopScore went nuts with the heal values though. Kuan has a pretty decent set of healy gear - it's not a lot of Tier pieces but he needs 7.5+ to upgrade it, he's over 2000 heals, self-buffed.

OMG troll shaman macros

So shaman talents are all about the 3 minute cooldown of the "buff this tree". Using these effectively is augmentedcomplicated by playing a Troll with the Berserking racial, which is right on up there with "combat regen" as the best racial in the original game.

Elemental.
Blizzard has chosen, again, to rework Elemental Mastery. Pre 3.1, it gave a 30-second or so buff to Critical Spell chance with a 3 minute cooldown. As such I macro'd it along with Berserking (which is also a 3-minute cooldown) in to Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning:
#showtooltip Lightning Bolt
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Elemental Mastery
/cast Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Lightning Bolt
But now in 3.1, Ele Mastery has been changed to a pure Elemental perversion of Nature's Swiftness (NS), a spell for restoration Druids and Shaman to insta-cast the next Nature spell. The new Ele Mastery does that for Shaman damage spells, with a 15-second crit buff. So first of all, it needs to go in front of Lava Burst. Or does it? Back to that in a minute.

Just because the spell is now insta-cast doesn't mean it's off the 1.5 second GCD. And Berserking is only a 10-second haste buff. I for one am really not feeling like sitting here watching the spell button spinners count down the GCD for 15% of the time Berserking is up. So that macro up there, which is guaranteed to waste 15% of the Berserking buff, has got to go.

So. Thinking about it, one way to make sure I'm not doing that, is to use a cast sequence:
#showtooltip Lightning Bolt
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/castsequence Elemental Mastery, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Lightning Bolt
Even if I do this with multiple macros, like Lava Burst and Lightning Bolt, this is what will happen (not counting any haste, lag, or spell travel time):
Ele Mastery (0) -> LvB (0) -> LB (2.0) -> Berserk (2.0) -> LB (4.0) -> LB (6.0) -> LvB
(ok, lag will mean I can't get more than 3 LBs in there although IN theory more can fit.)

Let's go back to the question of adding the Ele Mastery in front of Lava Burst. What will this do? It will mean the damage is dealt at the beginning of the GCD for the spell, instead of at the end, which will make a difference once every 3 minutes under two possible conditions:

• Flame Shock almost expiring
  
• boss is about to die in 2 seconds and I want an extra 10K damage in my WWS!!!

Other than that, it means I've possibly used 10% of the crit chance buff time (the GCD, again) casting a spell that's going to crit anyhow. ("Possibly?" well during the 15 seconds of the Ele Mastery buff there will be one Lava Burst and maybe two. If Ele Master procs off a Lava Burst macro, I will always have two.) OTOH if all the macros don't have a castsequence I could get into some sort of mess.

Hmm, "some sort of mess" isn't very quantitative. My thought is that such a "mess" is possible anyhow since they are cast sequences across multiple macros. Anyhow here they are, and I can either mull over whether to use the Lava Burst macro, or try it against a target dummy, or get four tolerant friends to hit some dungeons with me. Kuan has been mostly hanging out in the target dummy area all week.
#showtooltip Lava Burst
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/castsequence reset=15 Elemental Mastery, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Lava Burst

#showtooltip Lightning Bolt
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/castsequence reset=15 Elemental Mastery, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Lightning Bolt

#showtooltip Chain Lightning
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/castsequence reset=15 Elemental Mastery, Berserking
/castsequence reset=4 Chain Lightning, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt
I am sad that I lose nuking the error message spam off this last one. But it's too long otherwise, and getting this to do the right thing is more important than nuking all the red spam I don't read until I'm trying to figure out why the spells stopped coming and glance at it to see a stun/silence/oom message.

Restoration.
Since I haven't played with a lot of points in the Restoration tree in many many months, and never enough to Main Heal Heroics at level, I needed to evaluate everything for the macros. Actually I went resto first, when messing with them.

The macros follow a lot of this same reasoning above, but here in healer-land the considerations are slightly different, since the effects of Ele Mastery from a Resto perspective are split between NS and Tidal Force (TF). However TF is a 20 second buff, and I want it to proc whenever it can. The problem to solve is that I still don't want Berserking wasted, waiting for an NS 1.5 second GCD.

Anyhow here they are.
#showtooltip Healing Wave
/stopmacro [nocombat]
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Tidal Force
/castsequence Nature's Swiftness, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Healing Wave

#showtooltip Chain Heal
/stopmacro [nocombat]
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Tidal Force
/castsequence Nature's Swiftness, Berserking
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Chain Heal

#showtooltip Lesser Healing Wave
/stopmacro [nocombat]
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Tidal Force
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Lesser Healing Wave
I'll be popping these into Kuan's macros when I log in next, and moving buttons around. These will only be testable by running instances, as there isn't much damage the training dummies do back.

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.

Elephant here I come

I was busy with RL things yesterday and got stuck. So I decided while I waited on getting un-stuck I'd get Vhaas her coins. As a result Khyrie and Vhaas ran around Azeroth for quite a while, gathering coins for the lunar festival.

While we were at it, whenever we were in areas where the mobs were still green, we went on a killfest. The xp wasn't really good for lvl 61 player characters, but it was fantastic for the level 50-some pets. Now Dorano is 60, and Belore 57 I think. And Vhaas' Exodar rep is 7800+ Revered!

Today we logged them in to finish the coins, and woe, the Lunar Festival is done! But with Dorano 60, we paid a visit to Hellfire Penninsula. Did a couple HH quests, and ran to the next flight point. Which is all Exodar quests, woot!

Meanwhile I discovered my hunter macros no longer work quite like they did when I wrote them. Good thing I found that picking up coins, and not in some lvl 60 instance when I would be the idiot by pulling early.

Today I am almost done with the RL things. So now I turn back to Kuan, who need just 4 badges to upgrade his boots, which would be nice before another try at Void Reaver tonight.

Some macros

I often refer to my 'glad I have that' macro when things go badly in an instance run. Here is that macro. Basically it swaps the DPS caster gear for healy gear, in the slots one can swap in combat. Blizzard needs to shorten names, by the way; I can't even display a tooltip, it's so long.

/equip [nobutton:2] Stormshield of Renewal; [button:2] Mazthoril Honor Shield
/equip [nobutton:2] Totem of Healing Rains; [button:2] Totem of the Void
/equip [nobutton:2] Gavel of Pure Light; [button:2] Gavel of Unearthed Secrets

Also, Earth Shock is sort of useless, if one is spamming lightning bolts. Possibly 2.3 makes this not as useful, but:

#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/cast Earth Shock

Lastly, Chain Lightning has a 6 second cooldown. In situation where you just want the highest damage lightning regardless of mana or threat (e.g., PVP, or AOE pulls in an instance):

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=6 Chain Lightning, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt

Macros

Last night during our Kara run one of the priests asked about a macro to "not have to retarget to reshackle". Unfortunately in the middle of the raid is not a great time to explain the inner workings of a macro, and focus, and have someone write and edit their own. I did, however, promise that I would brain dump my macros to the forum. Well here is what I dumped to the Darkfall forum, just cleaned up, organized a bit better, and explained more.

---

The page that I pulled most of these from is here:
Mage Macros
Also the official WoW page has a Macro Guide.

• Sheep (or shackle or sleep or fear or banish)
  /clearfocus [modifier:shift]
  /clearfocus [target=focus,dead]
  /clearfocus [target=focus,noexists]
  /focus [target=focus,noexists]
  /cast [target=focus] Polymorph
  
  This sets focus automatically and on recast it casts on the focus target no matter who you have targeted. If you want to change targets in the middle of the combat you can shift-click it and it will change your focus target to the current one. It also clears your focus if your current focus is dead.
  
  This macro can be cast before combat so that you can sheep and then immediately start dps. You just must make sure that you are out of range, sitting, or moving so that the cast doesn't go off and initiate combat ahead of time.
  
  However I've found shift clicking to be really difficult to remember to do in combat, especially since button press plus shift doesn't do the right thing, so i have a second macro, that I click.
  
  /clearfocus
  /focus [target=focus]
  /cast Polymorph
  
  This sets the my focus to whatever I have targeted right that instant, and sheeps them. It's good for adds or emergency retargeting of the sheep.
  
  
• Cast Interrupt
  I've found the below macro to be the best Ever. No need to try to move or jump before counterspelling now, just hit one button and their casting stops. :)
  
  /stopcasting
  /cast Counterspell
  
  Counterspell can be replaces with whatever your character's cast interrupt is, e.g. Earthshock or Silence.
  
  
• Conjure Food or Water
  In this macro, right-clicks summon water, and left-clicks use it. The same logic can be used for food or mana gems, just substitute the names as appropriate.
  
  #showtooltip Conjure Water
  #show Conjured Crystal Water
  /cast [button:2] Conjure Water
  /use [button:1] Conjured Crystal Water
  
  
• Explode
  This will cast your Rank 1 Arcane Explosion while you are not in combat and your highest rank Arcane Explosion while you are in combat. This is useful when looking for stealth enemies to conserve mana. It is nice when protecting points of interest in PvP.
  
  /cast [nocombat] Arcane Explosion(Rank 1); Arcane Explosion
  
  
• Frost Nova/Cone of Cold
  This will cast Frost Nova with your first press, then Cone of Cold on your second. This macro will then reset itself after 24 seconds.
  
  /castsequence reset=24 Frost Nova, Cone of Cold
  
  I don't personally use this macro, but I see how it could be useful.
  
  
• Slowfall/Dismount
  This makes you slowfall but it dismounts you first. If you lack the manual dexterity to dismount and then slowfall when you accidentally drop down a cliff, this macro will help you lots. Also, this thing shows the number of light feathers you have left on the macro icon.
  Note: you will need to press this button twice to dismount and slowfall! Failure to do so in combination with un'goro or flying mounts can have bad consequences.
  
  #show Light Feather
  /dismount
  /cast Slow Fall
  
  
• Teleportation
  Left-click teleports you, right-click summons a portal. The macro
  shows the amount of teleport stones you have left. Select a custom icon
  for this one. All the city icons are in the default list. Of course, you must
  adjust the city name to suit your needs.
  
  #show Rune of Portals
  /cast [button:2] Portal: Shattrath; Teleport: Shattrath
  
  I don't use this one because it would be far too easy to left-click and teleport myself when I meant to make a portal.
  
  

the geekier side of life.

I've often wanted a Lightning Bolt macro for PvP, but have been far too lazy to figure out the best way to do it. finally, after Monday PvP and Tuesday "take care of the adds with chain so the boss gets some damage," I bothered to make one:

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=6 Chain Lightning, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt

I will probably put it in Kuan's UI in place of the Chain Lightning button.

I have wanted a totem timer for ages, and the addons all suck. I finally downloaded GotWood from the Ace2 site. it has the lamest large background image... of a piece of wood that for all the world looks like laminated pressboard furniture you'd buy from Target. so, I took that out. it also spawns a nasty modal dialog when dropping a Stoneclaw totem. so last night I ran Wow for a while in windowed mode, with a couple vi sessions open, and fixed that too.

these things are pleasing. wiping for 16g of repairs in Heroic Mech, however, was less so. the good thing: we downed the end boss with a team that had NO fears. the bad thing: I failed to loot the badge off the first miniboss, or notice until the corpse depawned.

but I bet the repairs would have been slightly less costly if I'd fixed my addon first. anyhow, there it is.