It's a Pity Enchants Don't Stack

Admittedly, it would be a tad overpowered.  I mean, that crappy pair of white bracers I have would make excellent T7 tanking gear with all the bonus stamina it'd have...

So in 24 hours, Porphyrria went from 65 enchanting to 250.  She'd been soloing lowbie instances for a while, and DE-ing the drops, so she had tons of dusts and essences to play with.  That said, about half of the skillups came from buying stuff off the AH.  Farming for enchanting mats becomes progressively less feasible the higher you get.  Not simply because the instances get harder, but because the drops get fewer and far between in longer and more complex instances.

I tried running ZF for some mats the other day, and spent 70% of my time chasing after casters.  In ZF, they have this nasty habit of running away at low health, but not coming back.  They just stay wandering around at extreme range, occasionally casting at you.  I once spent 20 minutes searching for one mob that had glitched up to a high bit of static geometry.  Since it wouldn't come back like most mobs do when they flee, even if it couldn't see me, it took another 5 minutes to kill it.  I couldn't really move on until I did because the damn thing was keeping me stuck in combat.

In the end, it was easier to simply buy the mats off the AH, or buy appropriately-levelled green gear off the AH and DE that.

As it stands, I need to get Por another 50 points in Enchanting before she can DE the massive stockpile of ilvl 115+ greens I have.  That's a problem because those 50 points require 400 Dream Dust (oh, and 10 Greater Nether Essence.)

This is either going to take an awful lot of dungeon runs, or a colossal number of monies.

That said, one good thing has come out of all this.  If you've ever tried to powerlevel enchanting, you know how much of a pain it is.

Move to left side of screen, click "Enchant," move to right side of screen, click item, move to top centre of screen, click "Yes."  Repeat until suicidal.

See, enchanters can't just queue up a dozen enchants, click "Make" and then go off and craft a cup of coffee or a sandwich.  We have to do them one at a bloody time, repeatedly telling the game that, yes, we really do want to enchant that.  YA RLY!

But I've found a way around it.

Macro the first: "Craft-It™"

/click CraftCreateButton

Macro the second: "Yes, Damnit™"

/click StaticPopup1Button1

Here's how you use them: put them both on buttons next to each other.  Open up the enchanting window, pick an enchant.  Now, enchant an item in your inventory.  I'm not 100% on this one, so make sure you're enchanting an item that's already enchanted; if it's not, enchant it once then do it again.  Click "Yes" when the dialog asks you.

Now, if you want to repeat the enchant on the same item, press the first macro followed immediately by the second.  No need to pause or anything; drum your fingers across if you like.  The game will dutifully repeat the enchantment you have selected on the last item you enchanted, and dismiss the confirmation dialog without ever actually showing it.

Now, you could probably combine those two macros together by pasting the contents of the second macro after the contents of the first macro.  The only reason I've used two macros up there is because that's what I tested with, and didn't think of combining them until two paragraphs ago.

When you've got to do 20 Greater Defense to Cloak enchants in a row, those macros are a God-send.

P.S.  This is my first attempt at using an SVG image.  There's a fallback for people using antiquated software created back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and Ansett was still in the air (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer!) Let me know if there are any issues.

Looking For Macro

Every time I log on, I forget to do something really important: put myself in LFG.  It's just a pain in the bit that I sit on to have to click through the drop boxes over and over and over again.  So I did what all good programmers do; I jury-rigged a macro to do the work for me!  [1]

/script local a,b;a=SetLFGType;b=SetLookingForGroup a(1,2);b(1,2,7) a(2,2);b(2,2,9) a(3,2);b(3,2,11)
/script SetLFGComment "BM Hunter; I kill stuff dead."

Yes, it looks horrible, but it's not too obtuse.  Well, OK, it is, but at least there's a method to the madness!

/script local a,b;a=SetLFGType;b=SetLookingForGroup

Programmers are lazy, and since "SetLFGType" and "SetLookingForGroup" are kinda long to type, I just set up a shorter name for them: "a" and "b" respectively.

... a(1,2);b(1,2,7) a(2,2);b(2,2,9) a(3,2);b(3,2,11)

Here's how the LFG system works: the system gives each player three "slots."  For each of these slots, you specify the type of thing you're looking for (dungeon group, raid group, battleground, etc.) and the specific location (Mana Tombs, Karazhan, Warsong Gulch, etc.)

"a(1,2)" is saying "set the first slot to look for a Dungeon group," while "b(1,2,7)" says "set the first slot to look for a Dungeon group for Steamvaults."  Yes, the "1,2" in the first call means the same as the "1,2" in the second.  Don't ask me why it's repeated; as far as I can tell, it just has to be.

So where did those numbers come from?  Here's the trick: open up the LFG window, and set it to look for a group.  Pull down the first drop down.  It should have a list like "None, Dungeon, Raid, ...".  The first entry in this list is "1", the second is "2" and so on.  The same applies to the second drop down.

Say you want to look for a group to run Zul'Aman; pull down the category list, and count down to "Raid."  Let's say it's the third one down.  Now pull down the second list and look for "Zul'Aman."  Suppose that it's ninth in the list.  Finally, we'll use the first LFG slot for this.  The code would be:

a(1,3);b(1,3,9)

That's not too bad, right?  In the example of my macro, I'm looking for groups for Steamvault, Shattered Halls and The Arcatraz.

/script SetLFGComment "BM Hunter; I kill stuff dead."

This one's pretty simple: it sets the LFG comment.  I like to make mine at least moderately amusing.

So that's it; when I log in now, I can just hit that macro, and it sets me up in LFG.  And the next time some half-brained level 12 idiot invites me to a group without saying a word so I can run him through RFC, it only takes a second to fix it back up!

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[1]  Dance, computer. Dance!

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.