Sunday, October 3, 2010

4.0 and Macros

I took some time this weekend to dive into the PTR, looking specifically at what changes I would have to make to my setup. Beyond a respec and many broken mods, the most notable thing I needed to update was my macros.

Possible Bugs:
  • Lifebloom refuses to be cast via macro, insisting it isn't ready yet.
  • Insect Swarm is not being learned properly from the trainer. Trainer insists I've already learned it, and the spellbook insists I need to speak to the trainer.
  • ADDITION: talented imp-feral-charge may not be "working as intended." Sometimes it won't allow ravage to be used; others, you can cast 6-8 unstealthed ravages for free and rack up the CP.

Ability Changes
  • Dire Bear Form becomes Bear Form
  • Maul has a cooldown, but does not trigger the GCD still. Will require some error-cleanses to keep from spamming "that ability isn't ready yet," or else creating a new macro for it.
  • Abolish Poison and Remove Curse become combined as Remove Corruption; frees up one keybind slot as well.
  • Remove Gift of the Wild. The original Mark of the Wild becomes a full party/raid-wide buff.
  • Mangle becomes Mangle(Cat Form) and Mangle(Bear Form). It is still feral-only; non-ferals will still use Claw in cat form.
  • Feral Charge becomes Feral Charge(Bear Form) and Feral Charge(Cat Form). It is still a feral talent.
  • Swipe becomes Swipe(Cat Form) and Swipe(Bear From)
  • Put Soothe back on your bar; is not "Soothe Animal," just Soothe, and is now used to dispel enrages. It can only be used in caster form, so priority on casts should go to restos (and maybe moonkin, didn't test if it deshifts them) first before cats and certainly least by your bear tanks.
  • Put Insect Swarm on your bar (though the ptr wouldn't let me learn it from the trainer)
  • Put Skull Bash(Cat Form) and Skull Bash(Bear Form) on your bar, most likely as a macro.
  • Put Pulverize on your bar (feral only)
  • Ravage does not always require [stealth], if talented as a feral.

Personal Keybind Changes


The addition of several new and important abilities into the feral rotations has me combing across my keybinds to figure out how best to map them. Skull Bash, Bash, and Maim all share similar use so could probably be macroed together into a CC button, along with Feral Charge if you can reach the modifier keys easily from the keybind. Something along the lines of:

/cast [mod:shift,form:1] Skull Bash(Bear Form); [mod:alt,form:1]Bash; [mod:shift,form:3] Skull Bash(Cat Form); [mod:alt,form:3] Maim; [form:1] Feral Charge(Bear Form); [form:3] Feral Charge(Cat Form); [mod:shift] Entangling Roots; [mod:alt] Hibernate; Cyclone


...but I'm not sure I can comfortably use such a macro, personally, as it'd require me to drastically alter my current keybinds.

I'm rather happy that my main spec has rather limited changes! I am just hoping that the lifebloom-in-a-macro bug is fixed by the time the patch is released ;)

7 comments:

Erdluf said...

2 Lb's, one for ToL and one regular one.

Try
/cast 33763
and see if that works (not tested).

Kae said...

Adding the number into the macro doesn't seem to work, though I see what you mean.

Zy said...

I'm internally debating if I should delete my ravage/shred macro with the changes to ravage. I'll probably need the macro slot cause I still haven't figured out where some of the new buttons are gonna go.

Virile said...

Glad to see I didn't go mad after all. I was having the exact same issue with Lifebloom.

Cuantro said...

Hey Kae, I have a beta key. Let me know if you have any questions or want me to try anything out. All I have really done so far is pvped a little bit.

Kae said...

Zy,

I was toying around with this castsequence macro for feral charge:

/castsequence reset=8 Feral Charge(Cat Form), Ravage, Ravage, Ravage, Ravage, Ravage, Ravage, Ravage

Sometimes the game refused to remember that I could cast ravage unstealthed after leaping across the room to an unsuspecting target dummy, but in most cases, the macro worked very well.

Karalana said...

Two ways around the borked same spell name issue (LB treeform vs LB caster form).

One is to cast by spell id:
/script CastSpell(spellId, "spell");

And the other is via Macro Branching / Multibar click, explained here:
Wowwiki: Macro Branching with click