The Pew-Pew Macro

So I sometimes have people ask me why I have so many damn macros and addons.  "I can play just fine without any!" they cry.  I know you can; back when WoW first came out, I didn't even know you could make addons.  Oh wait... when WoW first came out, you couldn't.

That's beside the point; the important thing is that while you don't need addons or macros, they do help you play more effectively or efficiently.  Even really simple things can make the game a lot more fun and/or less annoying.

I thought I might share one of my Hunter macros today.  I don't think it would be an understatement to say that this macro has not only made grouping easier, but has saved both myself and my group a number of times.

So, let's cut straight to the macro itself.

#show [mod:alt]Parry;[mod:shift]Flare;Auto Shot
/stopcasting [mod:alt]
/stopattack
/stopmacro [mod:alt]
/startattack [nomod:shift]
/stopmacro [nomod:shift]
/stopmacro [target=focustarget,noexists]
/target focustarget
/petattack
/startattack

The function of this macro is three-fold, depending on which modifiers I'm holding down.  For the purposes of this post, assume the macro is bound to the '1' key.  The macro's functions are:

1. It turns auto shot on (1),
2. it stops me shooting (Alt+1) and
3. it makes both myself and my pet attack the target of my focus (Shift+1).

"But," I hear you say, "I already have a button to turn auto shot on and off; it's called 'Auto Shot.'"

Aah, not quite.  The regular auto shot button doesn't turn it on or off, it toggles it.  It's an important distinction.  With this macro, you can spam 1 all you like to start auto shot up.  But more importantly, you can hit Alt+1 to not only turn auto shot off, but cancel whatever you may be casting at the time.

Imagine you're trying to pull a mob off someone that's pulled aggro and draw them on to your trap.  You're blasting away, trying to generate threat, when the mob aggroes on you.  It's sailing towards you, and you need to stop shooting it or you'll break your own trap.  Without this macro, I would often toggle auto shot off and then back on again by accident, or not cancel my steady shot in time.  With this macro, it's much harder to mess up.

You can also use it to do things like hit a mob in a Freezing Trap with a Scorpid Sting without risk of breaking the trap itself (hit Scorpid Sting followed immediately by Alt+1.)

The last function is basically building an assist-like command into the button.  The way I use this is to have the main assist (or failing that, the tank) focused.  This means I can instantly start attacking their target, and sick my pet on it, by hitting Shift+1.  This is actually harder to do than it sounds.

Y'see, WoW does a lot of things to "help" the player.  For instance, if you get within range of a mob, but don't have it targetted, and hit an offensive spell, WoW will automatically target the closest mob for you.  Nifty, huh?

Umm, no.  Not when the closest mob happens to be the one you right just five seconds ago trapped.  Bam.  Bye-bye trap, hello irate mob.  You would not believe how many times I nearly wiped groups while trying to work the kinks out of this macro.  "It's OK, I'm sure it's working this ti... yeah, OK, I think I know what went wrong.  Hang on..."

So, if that all sounds handy, you can copy and paste the macro code into one of your character's macro slots, and off you go (make sure to select the "?" icon.)  If you'd rather know how the macro works before using it, read on.

Let's pull this puppy apart to see how it works.

#show [mod:alt]Parry;[mod:shift]Flare;Auto Shot

This line just controls what icon is shown for the macro.  I prefer to have each unique action have its own icon, as a kind of visual reminder to myself that the modifier keys actually do something.  It will show the Parry icon for the "stop shooting" action, Flare for "assist" and your gun's image for "start shooting."

/stopcasting [mod:alt]
/stopattack
/stopmacro [mod:alt]

These three lines are how the "stop shooting" bit works.  First of all, we use /stopcasting (if Alt is held down) to cancel the current cast.  We then use /stopattack to turn off Auto Shot irrespective of modifiers.  Finally, if Alt was being held down, we stop the macro (we've already done our job.)

But wait... why stop auto shot?  Because we don't know if it's already on or not.  We explicitly turn it off here so that we know what state it's in.

/startattack [nomod:shift]
/stopmacro [nomod:shift]


Now, we do the "start shooting" part; we turn auto shot back on and stop the macro if Shift wasn't being held down.  One nice thing is that this /startattack cancels out the previous /stopattack, so the auto shot timer won't reset if you spam this macro.

/stopmacro [target=focustarget,noexists]
/target focustarget
/petattack
/startattack

Now for the "assist my focus" part.  First of all, we stop the macro if our focus doesn't have anything targeted.  This is what prevents WoW from simply finding and targeting some random mob in front of us.  We then manually switch our target to our focus' target, send the pet in to attack, and turn on auto shot.

And that's all she wrote.  Not too bad, huh?  Admittedly, it took a bit of trial and error to get all the commands in the right order, but at least I've already done that part.

So there you have it: one instance where some macro magic can make life as a hunter a lot easier.

My New Favourite Toy

What?  No, I still love you, [Parachute Cloak].  You know I'd never give you up.  But, you have to admit... you're kinda useless indoors.  Oh stop crying, it's not like I'm breaking up with you.  Besides, you're not even sentient!  How can you possibly be upset when you have no emotions?

OMG, emo much?

Where was I?  Oh yes, new favourite toy.  Behold the awesomeness that is:

Frost Grenade Requires Engineering (325) Use: Blasts enemies for 75 to 125 Frost damage and freezes them in place for up to 5 sec.  Damage caused may interrupt the effect. (1 Min Cooldown)

Look familiar?  If you've played a mage at some point since 2.0 went live, it should.

Freeze 14% of base Mana 35 yd range Instant cast 25 sec cooldown Blasts enemies in a 8 yard radius for 74 to 86 Frost damage and freezes them in place for up to 8 sec.  Damage caused may interrupt the effect.

That's right; Frost Grenades are a mini ranged Frost Nova in-a-can.  Well OK, it's less a can and more of a highly volatile explosive device with a hair trigger, but no one said Engineering was without its risks.

But what about them makes me love them so?  For those who aren't aware, without talents or set bonuses (bonusii?), hunters cannot trap a mob back-to-back.  The problem is that our Freezing Trap lasts for 20 seconds, but all our traps have 30 second cooldowns.  This is why good hunters pre-trap whenever possible: drop the trap early so that the cooldown can at least partially clear.  That way, you can drop the next trap sooner; in extreme cases where the mob resists, you can drop your next trap immediately.

But no matter how careful you are, there are going to be times when things go, excuse the Klatchian, librarian-poo.  That is, your druid tank accidentally pulls by Moonfiring your trap target, or the first trap resists and the cooldown isn't up yet, or some silly paladin didn't watch where he was dropping his consecrate.

None the less, hunters of all specs have a few tricks up their sleeves for times like these.  Beast Master hunters can use their pet's intimidate to root the mob for a few seconds, Marksman hunters can Scatter Shot, and Survival hunters have increased trap duration and so much damn agility that they can practically evasion tank [1].  That's not even mentioning Concussive Shot and Wing Clip kiting.

But some times that's not enough.  Enter the Frost Grenade.  This puppy will root the mob for five seconds (which is half of the difference between our trap durations and cooldown,) giving you enough time to get to distance and drop a new trap.

In a Steamvault run earlier tonight, these things got used on four occasions.  Twice was for keeping a mob occupied while I got a new trap ready, once to save the healer from a mob that broke free of the tank [2], and once on those bloody gnomes.  I hate those things; hold still and die!

As a bonus, the materials for making them aren't too expensive; 1 Primal Water, 1 Mote of Fire, 2 Motes of Earth, 2 Netherweave Cloth, 10 Fel Iron Casing and 10 Handful of Fel Iron Bolts (80 Fel Iron Ore in total) will net you 50 grenades.  They're made in lots of five and stack up to 10, so I'm keeping a stack on myself and one in the bank.

If you're a hunter and an engineer, I strongly suggest you check them out.  Best of all, the recipe is taught by your friendly neighbourhood master engineering trainer (335 skill required.)

---

[1] I do not recommend or endorse hunters attempting to evasion tank simply because they have agility coming out of their eyes...  Now there's an idea for a WotLK talent: agility eye lasers!

[2] Admittedly, the mob was nearly dead anyway and I kinda accidentally ended up rooting it right next to the healer.  But it's the thought that counts, right?  Right?  Guys?

Now, hit me in the face.

I love the Servants of Allistarj. What's that? You don't know about them? If you're one of those classes that only loves their weapons for their stats, you can go ahead and skip this one; the rest of you read on.

Ok, now that the prissy casters are out of the way, let's talk technique. How often have you had an awesome new weapon drop that not only bests your old one stat-wise, but looks just plain bad-ass? So you equip your shiny new toy, go out to farm for those blasted Sunfury Attack Plans, only to discover that every single swing is missing. And then you get killed by a mob four levels below you.

It's only then you see this in the chat log: "Your skill in Polearms has increased to 64."

Damn. So now what? You've got to go train your skill up. That means running around with the lowest level weapon you can buy, flailing ineffectually against various types of bears until they die from a lucky hit, forcing you to find a new one.

This is where the Servant of Allistarj comes in. This chappy is a level 54 mob in The Blasted Lands. He has no special attacks whatsoever. His only means of damaging you is hacking at you with his one-handed sword. No stuns, knockbacks, drains, etc. This means that once you're over about level 60, the guy can't really kill you unless you fall asleep.

He does have one special ability, though: he can't be killed. Well, OK, he can be killed, but only if you're on a long quest chain that nobody bothers with any more, and even then you've got a very small window of opportunity in which to do him in. But apart from that, he can't be killed [1].

So what you do is, you aggro him, pull him somewhere out of the way of the various nearby patrols, turn on auto-attack, and go watch TV. Or paint a picture. Or read your sizeable collection of Terry Pratchett novels. You need to stop by every once in a while and just chug a health pot, or maybe keep him at arm's length for a few seconds while you bandage. Also keep in mind that you can actually go AFK while in combat. If nothing else, just hit jump every 15 minutes or so.

If, however, you are a Paladin like myself, you can just judge Light and switch on Devotion Aura. If you've got enough armour and a fast enough training weapon, you can pretty easily out-heal the poor guy. He's just gonna stand there fruitlessly chopping at you for the rest of eternity.

Incidentally, I just got a point in Defense. It's now 330/330!

Seriously, I have gone off, made a snack and a cup of coffee, checked my mail, created this blog, and only lost about 30% of my health, if that.

So, the next time you get a cool new weapon, and discover that you only really trained one-handed maces so you could equip [Last Year's Mutton], go have a chat with the Servant of Allistarj in The Blasted Lands. He'll appreciate the company.

Incidentally, for you casters (and Hunters) out there: Dr. Boom for the win.

For those of you wondering about the title, that's largely paraphrased from what a Kendo instructor once said to me. I had to try very hard not to laugh at how absurd it was for me to be standing there, repeatedly beating him over the head with a wooden sword, with him saying "harder!"

[1] Back before Blizzard "fixed" them, you could kite these guys all the way to Stormwind. Once there, they would aggro the guards. At this point, the Servant would gleefully run around Stormwind, killing everything. The only way to get rid of them would be to page a GM and wait for them to come along and death-touch the poor chap. Incidentally, it was on just such an occasion that I levelled up my Druid's dagger and unarmed skills...