Are there any good mage macros?

Guides UI and Macro
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I’m a new player, messed around with a few classes before starting on my Arcane Mage. I’m level 45 and I’m starting to feel a little overwhelmed with all these spells because I’m coming from League of Legends where there’s roughly six abilities.

I’ve heard people talking about Macros in world chat or major city chat and I figured maybe I should try a few out. I don’t want ones that cast all my spells for me, but if I had one that did something like:

Press this button and have it cast: My Shield then Presence of Mind followed by Touch of Magi then finally Arcane Power. Would something like this be ok do you think?

Thanks in advance, any help or suggestions are appreciated! :slight_smile:

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So Macros are helpful but I don’t think they are the most significant factor when it comes to making your rotation more streamlined and manageable.

Basically, most of the addons I’ve ever used have been stuff like Mouseover macros to just change how my abilities target stuff by default, or macros to include some off the GCD items and Trinket procs to certain key abilities so I don’t have to press them manually. I also often use some macros for things like setting Target Markers, or making sure my pet attacks the whatever target I’m currently attacking if I’m playing a pet class etc.

I would consider making several mouseover macros for sure as a mage, converting most of your spells into mouseover variants of themselves, and get used to using them, but other than that and maybe some trinket + arcane power combo macro for burst windows, I wouldn’t worry about them too much. You really won’t get that much more value out of them than this in general. Using one ability after another, after another isn’t really advised, but if you really want to go that route you can check out Gnome Sequencer Enhanced addon (I just learned about it today in fact and watched some youtube on it, it pretty much lets you create 1 button macros to cast multiple things in order, I’m honestly still not convinced it’s allowed by Blizz but yet, this addon has apparently been a thing for many years…)

Instead of that though, I would encourage you to check out WeakAuras and ShadowedUnitFrames and just use your abilities manually, but with a more efficient UI to help you stay focused. These essentially place all the important information in the center of your screen so you aren’t dealing with the Blizz default of putting your CD’s at the bottom, your Life and Resource bars at the top left, and your Target at the top of your screen etc. The default setup splits all the important info away from your character in the center which is where your eyes need to be the whole time and it just makes playing the game way more difficult than it needs to be.

Weakauras are particularly amazing because you can set them up to give you very helpful Visual ques as to what abilities are ready, what abilities are down, and what your priorities basically are at that moment. If you’re really so inclined, you can basically set up weakauras to detect what is on cooldown for you, and baically prompt you with an icon of the optimal ability to use next in terms of your specs priority list, it’s up to you how to program it all. Again, you should aim for not needing these priority list prompts, but I’d be lying if I said they weren’t very useful and potentially good training wheels to get you familiar with what an optimal rotation actually feels like. Once it’s muscle memory, you can turn those prompts off and start adapting on the fly.

Now with that said, Weak Auras is a very steep learning curve in how to use it, and can often feel like programming with all the “If statements” so I would only go for this if you feel ready to do so, but the rewards are amazing and it can make playing the game feel a million times better IMO, probably a far bigger help than a couple macros at least.

Basically youtube WeakAuras a bit, see how you feel about it. You can probably find some user created setups already out there that you can just import without making anything manually at all.

1 Like
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I strongly recommend staying away from castsequences and GSE. The former are buggy as hell, the latter is just doing you a disservice as a player learning the game.

The good news is, most classes boil down to 4-6 rotational abilities so don’t feel too daunted by the 6 bars full of buttons as you won’t be using most of them on a regular basis.

What type of content are you doing/planning on doing? That will determine which types of macros you’re after. eg. arena target macros for interrupts/cc in PVP

From a PVE standpoint, if you haven’t already, I’d recommended visiting Wowhead and also hitting up the Mage Discord, Altered Time https://discord.gg/makGfZA

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Macros are very useful, but they aren’t meant to automate your rotation.

There are cast sequence macros, but they are deliberately limited, as Blizzard doesn’t want you to be able to automate gameplay.

I’m also going to discourage GSE.

I won’t lie, I’m surprised GSE still around, as it pretty clearly does stuff Blizzard doesn’t want done. I suspect they haven’t figured out a way to break it that doesn’t break everything else yet. And I should point out that the more popular it gets, the more likely they’ll be willing to have collateral damage in order to break it.

You know, like the fact that we can’t have custom friendly nameplates in instances because some people couldn’t resist using them to replicate a functionality that Blizzard had just broken.

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Yeah fair enough, I had a bad taste in my mouth when I watched that GSE youtube video haha. It really did look like borderline cheating, but then the people making those videos mentioned they were disabled and I was like, “oh… well this just became more complicated.”

It’s definitely a slippery slope, and it’s gotta be hard to draw the line, but I would also prefer they just took a hard stance against it than allow automation of any sort in this game.

Alas, I only mentioned it because OP seemed to ask for something exact along those lines and well, like I said, I just heard about it today for the first time, was fresh in my mind and hard to ignore given how perfectly it answered OP’s request. I’ll agree on discouraging it though, 100% agreed. It will teach bad habits and long term ruin the fun of the game.

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I personally only recommend GSE to players that have a physical need for it: injury, limited mobility etc.

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Thank you for the great response. I’m not sure if I’ll use mouseover macros, but I’ll definitely be looking into some of the add-ons you’ve mentioned. I did some searching over on the /r/wownoob subreddit and found more things like ElvUI, Details! and a few more. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I think I’ll just find some good add-ons and try to customize things to make it a little easier for me instead of using macros. I’ll be doing all kinds of content like PVE, PVP, Crafting and Dungeons (just to see how far I can push myself).

I’ll be joining that discord later today, thank you! :slight_smile:

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Well if you do find yourself in need of macros this post covers most of the common (non-castsequence) templates:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/useful-macro-templates/42937

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I had no idea what GSE even was, I only had an idea of what I wanted to do. I think I’m just going to customize my UI with things like elvUI, Weakauras and things like that.

I can see why Blizzard doesn’t like it though, there’s lots of opportunity for bots.

Thanks for your reply! :slight_smile:

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Thanks! :slight_smile:

You’re doing a great thing for new/older players!

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I completely agree that using GSE or /castsequence for a rotation is a bad idea

but i do find both to be helpful for combining very specific kinds of spells, abilities and use items into one keybind such as a panic healing macro or interrupt macro. and GSE is great for macros that have a tendency to get stuck

but if you use them to think for you then it will be a major crutch