Beacon of Light Macro

Author’s note: I have quit playing WoW before patch 3.0.5. Warcraft-related content is no longer being updated, and information in this post may not reflect the live game anymore
The risk when you’re running as a healing / tanking / DPS hybrid (paladin) with a DPS / tanking hybrid (DK) is that you’ll end up having to heal your buddy who’s tanking to ensure the core of an instance PUG is covered.

We wanted to do the amphitheatre of Anguish last night, and you guess where it ended, I finally bit the bullet and respecced Holy.

And while I will readily admit that the wrath healadin is better than the TBC healadin, despite the new toy (Beacon of Light) or the improved old toys (6 seconds Holy Shock, and no, I’m not really using it unless things get hairy, and long distance judgement of Light), it’s a lot less fun than Ret or the Death Knight.

That being said, I somehow managed to get us through Amphitheatre of Anguish, Gun’Drak and Violet Hold, clobbering together about 1070 spell power and 11k mana out of spare kit I had been assembling in prevision of this very situation, two AH purchases and a couple of well-timed drops in the above instances.

Fun situation: in VH, the run was 4DK + me. A tanking cloak drops off the Aroakka boss (if memory serves). A level 73 DK needs because he wants it for his tanking set. I need for the same reasons. And after I win the roll, he starts whining that I stole it since I’m holy spec.

Memo to the clueless whining noob with a misplaced sense of entitlement: the healer has the same right to need on off-spec gear as a DPS, and if you have an issue with that, you make sure you get really good with combat bandaging. Especially when said healer blew over 200g in respec and AH gear cost to drag your underleveled arse through the instance.

Beacon of Light is an interesting spell. Using it properly at the right time is probably a bit of a learning curve, but I’ve been tossing it on anyone taking a HP dive at the same time as Steptoe (the tank, duh) and it seemed to work OK.

That being said, it took me a moment to figure out how to macro it properly to speed things up, and here’s what I came up with:

#showtooltip Beacon of Light
/cast [target=mouseover, help][help][target=player] Beacon of Light

Binding the macro to a key then allows me to hower over an unit frame to cast, or select a target, or if nothing else is selected, cast it on myself at one single keypress.

That did the trick.

Later, I went outside and tried to kill something with my holy spec. And wept bitterly. Never gonna make 80 with holy spec. I hope the bloody dual spec feature doesn’t get delayed too much, it’s really becoming a must-have feature (and we haven’t even tried it out yet…).

Related posts:

1. Armchair Theorycrafting: the lackluster Wrath Healadin
2. About the Difficulty to Write Steady Wrath Beta Commentary: DK Tanking Talents
3. More Complex Comparison of +Crit vs MP5 for Healadins
4. Wrath Paladins: Significant Changes in Healing Techniques Ahead?
5. My Damage Meters says Other Healers are Slackers