Macros

In honor of my sister-in-law coming into town, I will talk about macros.  My internet search really started when I wanted to understand macros in Warcraft. My spells look something like… Curse, DoT, DoT, Howl of Terror, DoT, Fear, Curse, DoT, go get a soda, DoT, Fear, get snack, Curse, etc. And if my Soul Stone is at the 10 minute or less I would see how many mobs I could juggle. This made me aware that I was limiting myself. I was using my first two bars and typing shift+1 and shift+2 constantly. I wanted to avoid going to shift+3. My search started with wowwiki.com. It was a jumping off point but there are some things that no one informs a beginner macro writer.

1)  Your macros are dynamic. That is right, they change. I am learning change in macros is good. Each Mob is more prone to different curses and spells. Think about it… Why would you ever have Immolate and Incinerate in your cast sequence while killing fire elementals? That is just crazy talk. But for spiders Immolate and Incinerate just burns those critters alive until they are feet in the air dead. Good times.

For Warlocks it is our curses that get changed out all the time. As an affliction lock my default is Curse of Exhaustion. A quick write up on Curse use can be found here under Curses. So it is not unheard of for me to change out my curse a few times a night.

2)  I recommend separating your spell schools. Warlocks are all fire and shadow. So shadow in my macros have no modifier and fire is on my modifier:alt. This bright idea came from Keystone’s blog Massive Multiplayer PK. If you have a school of magic silenced, you can immediately swap to a different one. So far this is working for me.

3)  Be careful about using Ctrl as your macro modifier. Ctrl+# are used for pet (minion) abilities. I use alt, this allows me to use my thumb and only lose jump using the spacebar while using the modifier.

4)  See the above statement “used for pet abilities” this lets us steal macros from our friendly Hunters. Those pansy pet feeding nature loving communities have a whole slew of macros for pet use. (Don’t they realize that pets are meant to be sacrificed? Feed pet sounds like maintenance to me.) Get use to the term “Huntard”. The term sounds like an affectionate way to hunters address themselves. Feel free to call your hunter by this term. Note to my slower readers… that was sarcasm. Sheesh. 

5)  Patches over the last year have invalidated a swath of fun macro features. Don’t get too excited if you find some posting that doesn’t work. But /castsequence was added and should be considered a lock talent. Own it and love it.

Question: I still don’t know how to key bind macros to letters or the Function keys. Yes, I have tried the keybinding in the menu and I am just not seeing it.