Altitis

As usual, we’re finding out that the barebones behaviour of yet another ability is pretty poor. In order to make the brand new ranged paladin taunt more efficient, here’s a macro you can use:

#showtooltip Hand of Reckoning
/cast [target=mouseover, harm][harm] Hand of Reckoning

Bind it to a key.

This enables you to either taunt your current target or simply hover with your mouse over another foe to taunt with a simple keypress.

A more advanced version if you focus one specific add, eg one which gets CCed (to avoid having a mage or priest sandwich after sheep or shackle runs out):

#showtooltip Hand of Reckoning
/cast [modifier:shift, target=focus, harm] Hand of Reckoning
/stopmacro [modifier:shift]
/cast [target=mouseover, harm][harm] Hand of Reckoning

If you’re holding down shift, it will taunt your focus, otherwise behave just as the other one.

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Here’s the Frost Death Knight’s equivalent to the pallie’s Bubble + Bandage macro:

#showtooltip
/cast Hungering Cold
/use [target=player] Heavy Frostweave Bandage

Useful when things start getting out of hand with an AoE pull.

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Here’s a cool macro template to get your rune strike into your opponent’s face:

#showtooltip Blood Strike
/cast [nomodifier] Rune Strike
/cast Blood Strike

Make one for each of your relevant runic abilities (not RP, only runes) and you’ll be sure to dump RS whenever the opportunity is up.

If you need to conserve RP for Dancing Rune Weapon or a Gargoyle, simply hold down any modifier key and the spell will be cast without RS. Oh, and make sure RS is first in your macro, the other abilities are on a cooldown, which would prevent RS from being cast on the same keypress otherwise.

On Similar Matters

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If you’re leveling unholy, and have specced Master of Ghouls, you may be familiar with the following situation:

There’s a group of mobs relatively close by. Your plan: pick one out with Death Grip, load him up with diseases so that by the time any adds follow, you can hit pestilence and spread the infection around for AoE goodness.

You hit Death Grip… and while your pull flies to you, your Ghoul leaps to its former position, pulling the rest with it and getting trounced fast. Your clean pull is now a bit of a mess.

The macro solution requires two macros.

For Death Grip:

#showtooltip Death Grip

/petautocastoff Leap

/cast Death Grip

Then for your first disease (I usually use Icy Touch when DG is on cooldown for the ranged pull)

#showtooltip

/petautocaston Leap

/cast Icy Touch

Why not enclose Death Grip between autocastoff and autocaston? Apparently the server doesn’t really handle the player cast and the toggles in their proper sequence, that means Leap is toggled off and on before Death Grip is executed and the Ghoul still leaps. Silly, eh?

Anyway, the above works pretty well too.

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Reviewing search terms used to reach you is always amusing. Now why I don’t have any leave-children-behind searches to puzzle about, the above search term still stands out.

I had posted a needlessly complicated Polymorph (Sheep) Macro before as a template for generic CC spells. Here’s a shorter version:

#showtooltip
/focus [target=focus, nodead, harm] focus; [harm][target=mouseover, harm][target=noexists] target
/clearfocus [modifer:alt]
/stopmacro [modifier:alt]
/cast [target=focus] Polymorph

Why not reuse the /clearfocus stuff I had before? As one of my blogging peers once remarked (and damned if I remember who it was, apologies in advance if you recognize yourself), /focus when you have no selected target clears your focus, and no sheeping will happen. (edited – no, with the conditionnals you actually get an error message that way)

So simple I’m way too dense to find it out myself.

So how does it work? If you have a focus, it will resheep it. If you have none, it will try to focus the enemy you are mousing over and sheep it, and if it can’t, it will focus your current target and sheep it. One caveat, if you have both a hostile target and are mousing over another hostile, the mouseover will always dominate.

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Kirk from Priestly Endeavors has an in-depth series on macros running, the latest post going into the meat of things. There’s plenty of good stuff in there, regardless of whether you’re a priest or not, including basic explanation of how to write working macros and gotchas.

Of course, if you are a pallie you have a lot of your work cut out simply browsing the Altitis archives but Kirk goes really to the heart of the matter, true to the old saying, he teaches you to fish so you can feed yourself for the rest of your life. A definite must read.

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• Unholy Death Knight Macro: Suppressing the Death Grip Ghoul Leap (10)

OK, so there appears to still be quite a lot of confusion on what the changes in patch 2.3 in regards to /stopcasting actually mean.

First, let me stress this again, patch 2.3 doesn’t remove the /stopcasting command, it introduces a mechanism which removes the need to use /stopcasting to chain spells faster than what the normal latency between your client and the wow server allows for.

What it really fixes is the risk of canceling a spell if you hit /stopcasting too soon, which is a risk on long cast times, as the latency Quartz displays is an estimate based on the time it took between the moment you hit a spell command in your client and the server sent back an acknowledgment that it had begun casting.

But as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s illustrate all this. Figure 1 to the right shows what happens today:

1. The player hits a spell button, the global cooldown (GCD) triggers on the client
2. The command hits the server, the spell starts casting “for real”, and an acknowledgment is sent back to the client
3. The client receives the acknowledgment and now starts its own cast including animation. Quartz and similar addons have measured the gap between 1. and now, and display that at the end of your casting bar
4. If you use /stopcasting here, the client will believe you have interrupted your current cast and send a new one to the server
5. Due to the latency, however, the /stopcasting reaches the server after your spell is fully cast, and a new spellcast is immediately started. You will, in practice, have gained up to half of the red bar.

Now the weakness, in particular on long casts, is that latency can change very rapidly. If you have a long roundtrip from 1. to 3. when you start casting Pyroblast, for instance, 5 seconds later the latency may suddenly be a lot better, and you risk sending a /stopcasting too soon, canceling your current spellcast.

The change in 2.3 fixes that by removing the need to use /stopcasting to achieve such an effect. Right before we illustrate the new behaviour, let me stress this again: patch 2.3 doesn’t prevent you from continuing with the same /stopcasting methods as today, it simply gives you an alternative removing the risk of canceling if you make a timing mistake.
On Figure 2 you see the new behaviour as described by Slouken on the US UI & Macros forum:

1. As before, you hit your spell button and the global cooldown begins immediately.
2. The cast command reaches the server which acknowledges it is starting to cast. Further, the acknowledgment also tells the client that triggering the GCD was justified.
3. The acknowledgment hits the client, the casting animation starts on the player end, the GCD finishes, Quartz estimates the duration of the round-trip and colours the end of the bar in red like before.
4. You send a new /cast command without /stopcasting. The GCD gets triggered and the spell starts its trip to the server
5. If the previous cast is finished, the new one starts and the acknowledgment gets sent back. If however you are too soon, the signal will be sent back that the spell failed and the GCD will be reset on the client
6. If all went well, you’d get the acknowledgment back and your spell animation would start in your client.

Again, the key difference here is that the client will send the new /cast command to the server early even if it believes that its current spell isn’t yet done with, but it will trigger the GCD immediately as well.

Now some people have interpreted the announced changes as an incentive to buttons-mashing, like Girl Meets WoW (note to self: need to read more on her blog, looks like there’s plenty of interesting stuff here). But reading into Slouken’s explanations on the intended behaviour, what really happens if you mash is depicted on figure 3:

1. You start your first cast as usual
2. The cast starts on the server, the acknowledgment comes back to the client
3. The acknowledgment is received by the client and the client begins its casting
4. You hit the next spell too soon, the global cooldown triggers, preventing you from mashing or doing any other spell action tied to the GCD
5. The server receives your command, sees that it’s too early, sends back a denial
6. The denial is received by the client, the GCD is interrupted and you get an error message. You can cast again, triggering the GCD
7. The new spellcast reaches the server, which sees it has not action going, and you’re back to step 2.

The key thing here is, during the GCD, the client will no longer accept any casting commands from your side until a) the GCD has run its full course or b) it has recieved a notification from the server that it wasn’t actually legit and stops the GCD. Basically, button-mashing, which is possible nowadays, will actually carry a higher penalty than today on spells with cast times longer than 1.5s

Therefore, don’t mash in 2.3

EDIT: In the meantime, the mechanism has been adjusted by Blizzard. At the time of this belated edit (May 2008), there is no mash penalty anymore.

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Funny forum post, one player asked for a macro because he had seen another warlock “cast all DoTs instantly”, to which a reply was that the guy was certainly using /stopcasting

Doesn’t work that way. Of course, it begs the question, what is /stopcasting and why use it in your macros?

/stopcasting interrupts whatever spell is currently being cast. The normal usage was, initially, to allow you to abort a long cast in a macro in order to replace it by a short cast if needed, for instance a mage could have (fictional example)

#showtooltip
/cast Pyroblast
/stopcasting [modifier:shift]
/cast Polymorph [modifier:shift]

This would start charging up a 6-seconds Pyro but if something happens, hit the macro again wile holding the shift key and you cast a 1.5s poly instead. Or blink, or whatever.

Another common use is to insert it between instant actions / spells which do not trigger the global cooldown, like eg

/use trinket1
/stopcasting
/use trinket2
/stopcasting
/cast Pyroblast

Now take note that the need for stopcasting in this scenario will be removed in patch 2.3

More or less around when TBC got released, certain then-popular castingbar add-ons started adding an estimate of the amount of latency to the spell casting time. But in the big add-on breakage and reshuffling that happened at that time, nobody caught on another usage to /stopcasting.

Enter Quartz, a newer Casting Bar Addon which had a lot of additional Bells and Whistles, and really emphasized that casting latency. At some point this Spring, people started realizing that when the latency is big enough, commands you send to the WoW client will reach the server with a sufficient delay that you can start overlap certain things.

Thus a third usage was found for /stopcasting. Casters would now prepend all their important spells like this:

#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/cast Shadow Bolt

Now if you hit that macro while your current spell is casting, you’ll simply interrupt your cast, that’s the first example above. But here’s the trick, if your latency is big enough while you are casting, if you hit the macro near the end of your own cast, it will stop whatever you were casting on your client while, get this, the spell finishes casting on the server before the interruption of /stopcasting gets sent back. With a bit of practice (and caution), experienced raiders are now able to generate more DPS or more HPS over a long fight simply because they are chaining spells end-to-end while bypassing some of the network latency.

It’s a risky deal for MT healers to a point, which is if the Quartz estimate is too pessimistic (displaying a big latency at the beginning of the cast) and you hit your macro too early, you will effectively have cancelled a heal which could mean a wipe. For DPS it’s less risky… as long as you keep controlling your aggro.

But no, despite all the advantages, /stopcasting does not, under any circumstances, actually remove the global cooldown.

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Ah, Monday mornings, where the amount of coffee required to write up a coherent thought is amplified tenfold.
My tummy wouldn’t stomach this much, though, so here’s a series of more or less non-related snippets.

• I was overly optimistic in my last post about instance runs on our belowed Ghost Town server. The weekend late evening is still a no-play time, apparently. I’m also back in the good old situation where there’s a lack of tanks while I’m specced holy, but I know perfectly well that if I respec, tanks will abound while healers are in high demand.
• Back to Arena with Steptoe, 7-3, 60 more rating. We were both rusty, and could probably have won another of these. We got spanked twice by a pallie-priest combo, seems like we have to work more to overcome this kind of duos. Nice evening, though.
• Got hit with boredom farming for that epic flyer (I currently only have access to the two Skettis dailies, so it’s mining to make up for the rest – yay for groupless Ghost Town server), levelled a new shammie, now 13, started another lock during a short hour.
• While cleaning up the mailbox of one of my lowbie rogues, I noticed the latest gold seller shenanigan: every single green armour piece in the level 10 to 20 range which wasn’t either crafted or “of the pervasive spirit bonus” has been listed by one single thug at 4g50 buy / 5g BO. It’s becoming really tiresome dealing with those shameless bastard RMT companies in the game, not to mention the accelerated rate at which the spammers regenerate a fake advertising char. Wish Blizzard would come up with a smarter way to filter those out than human reporting. Something like parsing low level char communication strings for certain telltale expressions and then making it so that their chat is only fed back to their own client instead of the server.
• Kirk over at Prieastly Endeavors requested a linkback to this post, so here we go. Hello Kirk, unfortunately you’re already listed on my blogroll so you won’t really gain much through this.
• The good thing about that though is that I discovered Kestrel’s Aerie, another worthwile wow blog. Check out his review of Infobar Add-Ons while you’re at it, and get FuBar
• Amusingly enough, the most-used search term to reach Altitis is bubble hearth macro. Well, sorry to disappoint you guys, my stance hasn’t changed from last time. If you really need a bubble-hearth macro, you’re playing the wrong game.

And this concludes this rag-tag assortment of a post. See you when I have woken up.

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Quick note about macro options and conditionals in patch 2.2.x: they have become case-sensitive, only lowercase is recognized.

The macro below works:

/castsequence reset=target Spell, Spell

The macro below doesn’t:

/cast reset=Target Spell, Spell

Note that spells and items themselves are still capitalized.

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