Posts with tag Macros

While many tout using the mouse for speedy gameplay, you can't overlook the power of the keyboard. While moving and turning is most quickly done with a mouse, it's a slow way to activate spells or open menus, so if you want to speed up your game, it's a good idea to learn WoW's default keyboard shortcuts as well as how to make your own key bindings and macros. We'll cover the basics and help you get started.

WoW's keyboard shortcuts
You may be surprised to see how much you can control with your keyboard. The first step to keyboard mastery is by opening up WoW's key binding interface. Just hit your escape key to open up the game menu and then select Key Bindings. Now, we aren't going to mention every key binding in WoW here, because as you scroll through this menu you'll see there are a lot of them.

Senjira recently asked on the European Interface and Macros forum:

Hey guys i was wondering if i could create a targeting arena1-2-3 macro where i can add several #showtooltips, where the tooltip alters depending on which character i am playing, for example it shows block when i am on mage and link when i am on shaman etc. etc.

I would like this as i like to keep a clean UI, and would like to avoid making 5x Tar 1-2-3 macros..
Thanks in advance!

Community manager Taepsilum responded with a solution involving using the items in bags:

#showtooltip 0 1
/target Arena1

This will change the icon and tooltip of the macro to be whatever is in the first spot of the character's main backpack. The macro works, but I find it confusing if a consumable or something else you can use is in that bag slot, since not just the icon changes. The tooltip lies so I can't tell if it's my macro or a stack of stamina scrolls.

Macros are one of the key things that allow complex raiding and PvP. They're essential for maximizing DPS and for preparing for those specific situations in PvE and PvP. It's rare that a top player will come along that doesn't have a complicated set of macros.

That said, the system is relatively old, and hasn't been given much love in recent years. While new commands are added now and then, the system itself screams of 2004. There's been lots of advances in not only the way we play the game, but in how players could program the macro functions themselves. Upgrading this system is a topic often discussed, and apparently it's on the minds of Blizzard as well. Taepsilum chimes in:

Taepsilum

Devs are looking into revamping the whole macro system at some point, meanwhile, simply increasing the number of slots would probably be good enough. They were having some discussions about doing just that but we still don't have any concrete plans on the way, if anything changes we'll let you know.

source

Don't hold out your hopes for it happening anytime soon, but if you're like me, you're keeping your fingers crossed for the next expansion.

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Collecting wild pets for your army can be tedious, particularly since you can't tell the quality of the potential pet before you fight it. You can, with either a macro or an add-on, tell the quality during the battle, however. With this information, you can trap the creature or not, as you see fit.

The add-on is Pet Battle Quality Glow. It is out of date, but still functions without errors. So you just need to enable out of date add-ons in the AddOn List located on the Character Select Screen in order for it to show up in game.

As seen in the screenshot above, Pet Battle Quality Glow changes the icon color of the pet you are fighting, indicating its quality. Just like items, blue is for rare, green for uncommon, white for common, and grey for poor. The add-on also changes the color of the name.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Fox and Basil's reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

As you start spending more time making money, you start to realize how much time you waste. Have you ever had to mail every single item in your bag to another of your characters? It's a lot of right-clicking. There are a bunch of tasks like this, including selling to vendors, buying from vendors, prospecting, posting for sale, and crafting.

First, know that only some things can be really automated. If there's a cast time, for example, the best you can do with a macro is shorten multiple clicks into a single macro that can be clicked or hotkeyed. Luckily, there's no cast time on vendor and mailbox interactions!

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome.

Holy paladins have come a long way from the days of five-minute Blessings and WhisperCast. There's a good kind of complexity that comes from being given choices, and there's the bad kind of complexity that comes from busy work. The developers are constantly streamlining the game and removing outdated mechanics, and I can't complain. Even though addons like PallyPower made our lives easier, the new Blessing system is so simple that we don't need any external help to handle it.

Today's holy paladin has different addon needs from the healer of yesteryear. Three of the most important holy paladin addon concerns are unit frames, holy power management, and raid-specific alerts. In Dragon Soul, there are plenty of important things that we need to keep track of. Raid encounters are only going to get more and more complex and chaotic, and we need to be able to quickly get the information we need.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done.

So you know your rotations. You know your gear priorities. You know what to reforge, which buttons to hit, and how to stay out of the fire. These are all good things. Yet still, you feel like you're missing something. Maybe you feel like you could crank out another 1-2k DPS on some fights. Maybe you feel like your health keeps dropping a little low when you tank.

Sometimes, the problem with problems like these is that it's not a big glaring thing you're forgetting (nor is it forgetting to drop your favorite lucky vanity item). Sometimes, it's just that you need to tighten up your play just a little bit. This week, we're going to take a look at a few simple tricks that hopefully a lot of you can use just to shore up your play and go the extra mile.

Macros recently got a small but important save feature in the default UI, as well as the ability to keep the macro window open with other windows to facilitate easier macro creation across the board. These were quality-of-life changes that made an already robust macro system a bit easier to navigate. Macros in World of Warcraft are powerful tools that can up your game significantly, and the right macro combination can turn one action button into a powerhouse.

One of the more difficult aspects of macros is sharing them. Going to a website, copy-pasting the macro you need, and working through the system is not the ideal way to send macros from one person to another. Categorizing your macros has been a pain since the inception of the macro window, since the only real category options are character-specific macros and general macros. There has to be a better way!

This week, we're talking macros with MacroBank, an addon that gives players more options on the macro UI and gives players a crucial tool in macro sharing. Hopefully, with increased proliferation of MacroBank, we can get the ability to share macros with each other as a default feature in game.

Each week, WoW Insider brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com.

Welcome, friends, to another exciting week here at Reader UI of the Week. I am your ever-vigilant host, Mathew McCurley. Before we begin, I wanted to remind everyone about the submission process for sending your Reader UI to be thrust into the spotlight for all readers to see. First, send images, not videos. I appreciate you taking the time to put together a video showing how your UI works, but for the purposes of the column, I do need some screenshots to go along with it. Second, "here's my UI, I hope you like it" is great, but it cannot be the only content you send along. We need more! What do you like about your UI? What was your design goal? Do you have any pieces of the UI that you just can't live without? You don't have to write a novel, I swear.

Other than that, submissions are easy! Big screenshots, please, and your WoW character's name is suitable. If I cannot tell what gender you are from the screenshots or your name, a gender-identifying pronoun will be provided for you at random. Submit your UI to readerui@wowinsider.com!

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen dabbles in shadow. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast.

Some time last year on Spiritual Guidance, I wrote an article on macros for healing priests. Overall, it was a simple approach to the topic, touching on some basics like binding consolidation, communication, and a couple of utility macros. The article generated a lot of discussion, and several readers submitted some quality macros for their fellow priests.

Since a few of those macros are now outdated and I've added a few new macros to my spellbook in the interim, I thought now would be a good time to revisit the topic and look at what I've dug up in the past few months. Since these were accumulated over time, I haven't kept track of all the original authors of these macros, so if you see something in here you wrote, feel free to shake your fist at me.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

Tanking successfully often hinges on control -- control over your surroundings, the enemies around you, your damage intake, the threat ceiling, and so on. The more drops of tanky goodness you can squeeze out of your every one movement, the better. And that means that the more efficient you are with your GCDs, the better your performance will be.

One of the easiest ways to make your actions more efficient is with the judicious use of macros. No, I'm not talking about the heresy that was the oft-paired 9 macro and 6 macro back in Wrath, but rather some neat little tricks that can give new forms to your abilities, prevent disastrous side effects from others, give you better raid utility, or even allow you to dominate the interrupts chart on a certain fight.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

In today's edition of The Queue we discuss Titan, Bolvar as the Lich King, how mages are cheaters, and more.

Sturmovic asked:

Will WoW Insider cover Titan as well as WoW when it comes out?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. On Saturdays, Josh Myers tackles the hard questions about enhancement. Can we tank? Can we DPS with a two-hander? How does one shoot web? The answer to the first two is "no," and I have no idea about the third.

When I first started playing during The Burning Crusade, I had no idea what a macro was. I'd love to pretend that this was because World of Warcraft was simpler back then and that a good player could get away with never using a macro. Unfortunately, that isn't the case; I just wasn't a very good player in my shaman's youth.

The truth is that macros are something that any serious raider or PvPer should never be without. They fulfill a variety of roles, from cast sequence shock macros saving you some bar space to using your Feral Spirits' Bash ability on a focused healer to interrupt their Tranquility cast. In a raiding game where the ability to interrupt a target you're not DPSing is a huge asset, learning to manage your abilities through macros is a huge benefit for you and for your raid group (as well as for your arena team).

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. This week, Justicar Alex Ziebart tackles macros for retribution paladins. Questions? Comments? Feel free to email the author.

Retribution is a spec that has a lot to gain from intelligent use of macros. We have so many abilities that share cooldowns that there's no reason not to consolidate them. As hybrids, we have an enormous spread of abilities that we may not use often, but when we do need to use them, we need to use them at a moment's notice. And properly.

This article will cover basic retribution macros -- mouseover macros, focus macros, modifier macros, and that sort of thing. Macros hold an incredible amount of potential for customization, so it would be next to impossible to list everything a paladin might potentially use. Once you know the basics of how these macros are built, you can do whatever you please with them. Onward!

Ready Check helps you prepare yourself and your raid for the bosses that simply require killing. Check back with Ready Check each week for the latest pointers on killing adds, not standing in fire, and hoping for loot that won't drop.

We talked last week about raid calling. Even if every raid member has read up on the fights, watched videos, and has all of their addons installed, some well-timed raid calls can do a lot to help your raid work together.

A problem presents itself if some raiders can't be in voice chat. While I'm sure there are dozens of folks eager to say "can't chat, shouldn't be in raid," the fact is that voice chat isn't always possible. There are medical reasons, lifestyle reasons, and even practicality issues. It happens. Maybe in a perfect world with blue skies, everyone is always in voice chat; but the reality is that you should have a method on hand to deal with voice chat failures. Some people simply can't hear the audio clearly, no matter how carefully and loyally they turn on the program.

Typing in raids isn't universally feasible. Addons like Deadly Boss Mods handle a lot of the typing and calling work, so it's not all bad. But what you need is a quick and easy way to spam raid chat with your unique instruction. The answer to that need is to use macros during your raid.