Posts with tag macro

Axes, maces, lightning, fire, frost, and wolves, and best of all, Windfury. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance at Big Hit Box and pens the enhance side of Totem Talk.

A dead DPS does no DPS. It's as simple as that. Whether in a raid, an arena, or out soloing and leveling, staying alive is priority number one. This is as true for enhancement shamans as it is for any class. Thankfully as enhancement we have a few more options than most DPS classes including our saving-throw talent: Maelstrom Weapon.

I consider it an absolutely essential duty to toss out MW4/5 heals in a damage-intensive environment, especially if the fight is new progression for your guild or you're in a tough match in PvP. I remember working on Tidewalker in Serpentshrine Cavern, I'd throw MW5-Healing Waves on the tank constantly. The damage was so intense on our main tanks and their health so spiky that at 4 procs of Maelstrom Weapon he'd be at full health then a split second later when I had 5 procs he was dangerously close to dying. My Healing Waves rarely over-healed when we learned that fight it appears my memory is failing me as MW did not exist when SSC was progression content. I do distinctly recall tossing out Lesser Healing Waves to help top off the tank when the MT healers were Watery Graved.

Tossing heals on the main tank in the Tidewalker fight was the exception, for the most part when using MW for healing it's a matter of keeping yourself alive. Read on to live to fight another phase.

Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music.

/target reader
/wave
/use The Mischief Maker

There. I love a captive audience.

This week I'll be writing about macros for priests. I will touch on why and how to use them, then provide a few useful ones that readers sent in during the past week. This article will not be an introductory guide for the use of macros because... WoW.com already had one of those. Hit the jump for the link.

Rich Maloy is currently working on a distributed processing application called SimIt!@HOME which will calculate all possible enhancement shaman spell rotations for any possible situation given any gear combination. The application will also have an option to calculate all potential scenarios in which "sim it" is a half-a** answer but you should say it anyway.

If I told you the enhancement shaman basic spell rotation was: SR, FE, SW, MW5_LB, MT(0), LS(1), ES_SS, SS, FS, ES, LL, FN would you run away screaming?

What if I told you that was just for single target boss encounters and there's a different priority for boss fights that require changing targets, another priority for boss fights with heavy adds, and yet another priority for trash mobs. Scared yet?

It's OK. Please come back. This is what we Enhancers have bouncing around in our head. I'll make everything alright by breaking it down into a few easy-to-remember chunks. Because we all like chunks.

With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown.

As previously mentioned in our lengthy review of the Razer Naga, Razer had plans to update their 17-button MMOG-centric mouse to enable key mapping. Heathcliff Hatcher from Razer responded to concerns about the mouse's configurability back then that "software driver remapping of keys is a standard function for most of Razer products and we do have suitable solutions that we intend to release in the near future for Naga that will enable this feature out of game."

Razer delivered on that promise with an update to the mouse driver, allowing users to configure all 17 buttons. This addresses the reservations many players expressed when the product launched in August last year. The driver update also supports different profiles, allowing users to configure different key functions according to their current application. Razer has also added full macro capability including timed delays between keystrokes. However, it should be noted that taking advantage of this last function might violate the World of Warcraft's terms of use, something that plagued the first versions of Steelseries' World of Warcraft mouse. Read the FAQ regarding the driver update after the break.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the idea of using spells based around procs or on-use trinkets. Now I don't know about you, but I sometimes tend to forget that I have these on-use abilities. Other times I never notice procs going off.

But first, what is a proc anyway?

A proc is short for procedure. They are events that happen when conditions are triggered. For example, Val'anyr will trigger a buff for the user when they heal players. This buff then grants the player to place shields on anyone they heal.

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly peek into the world of the death knight. Your host, Daniel Whitcomb, is enjoying the most wonderful time of the year, when a death knight can hang around in his natural habitat all day long without seeming creepy. Or no creepier than usual, at least.

As you approach the end game of WoW, one thing you may find out quickly is that the proper use of macros is a great way to take your game to the next level. Sometimes they streamline moves, other times they allow you to perform actions that would be otherwise impossible. Death knights are definitely no exception, and though we'd be here all week if I went through all the ins and out of macro theory, or even death knight macro theory, I figure right now is still a good time to get you started.

Let's look at a few basic essential macros for the various roles and trees of the class.

I haven't played a tank in a while, so I haven't had to mess with stats at endgame for a long time. Though my paladin is slowly getting there, so this little macro over at Honor's Code might come in handy. Parry and dodge are very similar abilities -- both of them help you to completely avoid damage from bosses as a tank. But they do have a very few important differences (Parry speeds up your next attack swing, and is affected by diminishing returns at higher levels of the stat), so when you're gearing up at endgame, you want to make sure to balance them out in the right way.

Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the rogue class. This week, we talk about a few of the most common rogue macros in use today.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've had the opportunity to play my rogue quite a bit more than I am typically able to. Brewfest and Onyxia have had me busy every night, helping my guild mates slay Coren Direbrew over and over again. I was able to pick up a Direbrew's Shanker 2.0, although it won't see much use, it's still nice to see one in my bank beside the previous versions.

I captured this bit of a World of Logs parse from one of the Onyxia attempts, where I was able to my AoE combination macro: it's a very deadly combination. Looking at numbers like these make me wonder if perhaps the great FoK nerf of 3.2.2 wasn't as heavy-handed as it was made up to be. With a Vanish fix on the horizon for patch 3.3 (who's PTR is coming "soon") and the red-hot topic of 'weapon swapping', I decided to do a bit of housecleaning and tidy up my macros and addons in anticipation.

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Engineering has quite a few useful tools in addition to their famous repertoire of toys, but not every player knows how to make the most of them. There are many reasons for this, including:

• Not being informed on the latest improvements. Consumables may be less cost-prohibitive, for example, than the last time you checked.
• Believing the "Engineering is useless" hype that lingers from darker days, and feeling creatively blocked after an expensive and tedious leveling process.
  
• Being an irrational yet strangely normal cooldown and consumable saving individual. Awkward Zombie illustrates the latter nicely, and we've talked about stingy cooldown use in the past.

This week, Insider Trader is going to discuss a handful of the Engineering tools that you really should be using to the fullest, and why.

This is actually a really cool idea for a site -- Fitzcairn's Macro Explain-o-matic is basically a web script that reads WoW macros, and will go, line by line, through them to put exactly what they do in plain English. Sure, odds are that if you have a macro already, you probably have some idea of what it does, but if you've ever wanted to learn how to write macros, or aren't sure exactly what the macro your friend emailed to you is supposed to do for your character, you can just throw it in a text field, and then Fitzcairn's script will break it apart for you.

The site will even let you save (with a permalink) and email any macros you punch in -- though I couldn't find a way to browse them, maybe Fitzcarin is working on that. There are lots of resources online to find macros, but not so many to explain them well, so the Explain-o-matic is definitely worth a bookmark for the next time you need a little help.

[via Twisted Nether]

You've read that right, there is a new patch that is dropping today, and right now. Patch 3.2.0a. This patch is a small one, yet important one that is fixing a variety of client issues that have been present since Patch 3.2. This is the first time in quite a while that a patch has not dropped on a Tuesday, and that one has come without any prior notice.

Of particular note with this patch is fixing of the "dump macros" that were being used by numerous rogues. Ghostcrawler hinted earlier in the day that there would be a fix for this soon, but it's surprising to see it solved so quickly.

There are also some graphic fixes in the game that many people should be pleased about. In particular for Mac users.

The full announcement, including patch notes, after the break.

A Youtube user by the name of psychorabbitt left a comment on our Get Kraken! video with a pretty sweet tip for getting the quest done easier. It was so simple and obvious that I feel really, really dumb for not thinking of it. If you have a video card that does the whole "you can't see the monsters until you're already flying past them" thing while doing this quest, you can just make yourself a macro.

#showtooltip Flaming Spears
/tar North Sea Kraken
/tar Kvaldir Deepcaller
/use Flaming Spears

Update: Kittahsmash from the comments below posted a macro that works quite a bit better.

#showtooltip Flaming Spears
/tar North Sea Kraken
/use Flaming Spears
/tar Kvaldir Deepcaller
/use Flaming Spears

Spam away, and your quest is done! Honestly, I probably won't use it, because I like the hunt-and-peck of trying to find and target the mobs you need on bombing quests. Just spamming a macro would be way less fun for me personally. If you're not such a fan of bombing quest or your rig isn't very cooperative during this one, sure, use the macro all you want.

Yeah, I know, obvious macro is obvious... but hopefully I'm not the only one that didn't think of it. Boy would I feel dumb.

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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I don't PvP that often (especially not with my Hunter), but I still found this list of Hunter macros over at Huntman's Lodge really awesome. Whether you just want to make some common tasks easier (the one-button target/Hunter's Mark/pet attack/start attack is a macro every single Hunter should have), or you want to cut out some keystrokes (the /use [target=player] Heavy Frostweave Bandage is a macro that's great for every class out there), macros can provide a lot of solid support to your game in any situation. For some reason, we all use addons, but macros are generally overlooked, despite the fact that the system Blizzard has built in for macros can be pretty powerful all by itself.

Garwulf has even more macros for Hunters on a special page, and of course there are lots and lots of suggested macros and macro guides available online. Especially since macros started being saved to the server instead of your individual machine at home, if you're still using regular abilities on your bars, looking over the available macros for your class should help you out a lot.

Welcome to Scattered Shots. I am Eddie "Brigwyn" Carrington from The Hunting Lodge and I'll be your tour guide each Thursday as we explore what makes our Hunters tick and how we can make them better.

Well, maybe not your mother. But you know us Hunters, we really love our macros. Unlike some other games out there, World of Warcraft gives players a pretty simple method to help customize their playing environment. We all know about the cool add-ons like Recount and RatingBuster. Now add to that the ability to arrange the look and feel of our User Interface and Blizzard really has done something special.

Instead of trying to tackle those, I thought we could talk about the one that gives many of us players some difficulty: macros. And you know what? They really don't have to be that complicated.

Before we get started, I would be remiss if I didn't at least explain little bit about macros. At least I need to define what macros are what they are not. Macros are a way to combine several commands (attacks, emotes, or other actions) and combine them into a single button press or click.