Macro Discussion

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

I have some concerns which I discuss below, but the tldr is how will developers enable players to prune their ability bars, stance dance macros in particular for warriors, and implement the old ability to have more than 1 GCD ability per bind such as Charge Hamstring or Revenge Sunder.

I noted the developer comments relating to macro functionality that was essentially removed in 2.0 where the entire rotation could be scripted and agree, however some of these abilities are to me quality of life and reduce clutter. The keybind space required to bind everything individually in Classic would be untenable.

Vanilla macros could include such functions as:
/script if (UnitMana(“player”)<14 then UseAction(32); end
where 32 was the number of your action bar with Heroic Strike.
The macro makes the descision to Heroic Strike for you. You chain a number of these together, say:
/script if not buffed (“Battle Shout”, ‘player’ then CastSpellByName(“BattleShout”;end

In Classic Heroic Strike was off the GCD, however unlike TBC through Legion Hamstring and Pummel for example were not.

Through to Legion launch the following would work as I believe it should in Vanilla:
/cast Charge
/cast Hamstring
A warrior could Charge with first press and hamstring with second press. Vanilla the functionality is the same, the syntax was different. If in melee range the macro doesn’t stop at the charge unavailible and proceeds to Hamstring. Such a macro does not work on live. You need a modifier or another bind. It only worked because post Vanilla and pre Legion Hamstring was off the GCD.

With off the GCD abilities warrior could chose to
/cast Mortal Strike
/cast Heroic Strike
This would simultaneously MS and queue Heroic Strike but potentially leave him ragged starved as it lacks decision making power. IMO this is fine. Heroic Strike should be a player descision based on rage.

If you’ve made it this far here is the grey area:
The following will not work in the current game:
/Cast Revenge
/Cast Sunder Armor
This is becuase both are on the GCD. In Classic the equivalent worked in that if Revenge was unavailable the game went to the next line and used Sunder. The issue here is now you have a priority list. If my revenge hasn’t proc’ed spam Sunder Armor.
Is it game breaking to allow an essentially mindless filler between Revenge Procs to free up some action bar space?

What is and isn’t allowable is also going to potentially affect stance dancing.
I think something like this in the modern syntax should function as a 2 button press dance macro, but there is no way to test with stances removed:
#Showtooltip Overpower
/cast [noStance 1] Battle Stance; Overpower
would work or could be made to work switching a warrior to Battle Stance on first press and casting Overpower on second. Replace stance with Beserker and ability with Beserker Rage, or Whirlwind. Also use for Defensive Stance, Equip Shields and Shield Wall.
To those that may claim macros take something out of the game there is still a considerable degree of descision making, most notably how much rage will I loose, when pushing that button versus the offensive/defensive gain. I have 100 rage in Zerker with MS and WW off cooldown
but am at <30%
should I go Defensive stance to Disarm or Battle Stance to Overpower
well it depends
but point made I hope!
I’m hoping there will be some further comment in the form of patch notes style “here’s what we’ve done” from the developers.

2 Likes
2

I think the reality is this will end up being a ‘wait and see what they do’ thing.

Macro writers will have to adjust with what’s allowed in the API and how spells are coded for Vanilla (hopefully faithfully with respect to the 1.12 data).

My concerns are long-term, when in the Live game the API changes and Vanilla inherits/suffers those changes because reasons that don’t necessarily apply due to said issues in the Live game. Like how PvP and PvE changes end up spilling into each other historically.

3

Wait, this doesn’t work in retail anymore? This worked all the way up to Wrath if I’m not mistaken (latest I played)

Oh god


I had a dream. And now that dream is gone for me


1 Like
4

Great questions and mentions above.

I personally didn’t use macros that much until TBC came out but i did know a hunter that would use macros to run all the damage he would do. it made it so he would only ever need to press 1 button EVER! i thought this was a very cool feature to have back then.

I was a healer so having a heal macro to rotate heals as a druid made life crazy easy.

that being said
 i think either way, having adjusted macros or the setup from back in the day would work. to me it seems to be a “how do you want to play” sorta option.

i wouldn’t say its breaking the game (maybe just me thinking this). i think having the “fillers” could be important. just however the player chooses to go about it. shrug

5

Cant you just make a Cast sequence macro? On live I use #showtooltip
/castsequence reset=2 Vanish,Garrote

You have to push the keybind twice but is this what your asking for?

6

Macros with multi abilities still work fine assuming they’re either all off the GCD or the GCD ability is the last ability in the macro.

What you’re asking about is what abilities will be on the GCD and the answer should be whatever was on the GCD in 1.12.

7

As far as I know the Macro/addon API won’t be nearly as exploitable as it was in Classic because the system on the back end has been highly redesigned and think that’s an aspect of the game that’s going to change in how it works top down. People might be expecting to do something but it’ll be radically different when the game actually launches.

8

At some point they made macros follow a priority system, rather than each line being run at the same time. For instance, Nature’s Swiftness macros used to be single-press. At some point, they made it to where you needed to press the key for each line in the macro.

So, say if I wanted to make a macro that casted NS then max-rank Healing Touch, I’d have to make the following:

/cast Nature's Swiftness
/cast Healing Touch

Then press that key twice. Once to activate NS, then to activate HT. I want to say this was a late-vanilla change, or maybe 2.0, because I remember high-end players being able to use the latency to catch NS macros halfway through with some kind of CC. I just don’t remember if it was in by 1.12 or not.

Or maybe they added NS to the GCD. I’ll have to look it up when I get home.

9

Blockquote
Cant you just make a Cast sequence macro? On live I use #showtooltip
/castsequence reset=2 Vanish,Garrote

Possibly in the case of Revenge/Sunder, however in the case of a stance dance it would cast Battle Stance while in Battle Stance dumping any rage over 25 (assuming 5/5 Tactical Mastery).

Blockquote
What you’re asking about is what abilities will be on the GCD and the answer should be whatever was on the GCD in 1.12.

Not exactly. I know what was on the GCD. Abilities wise basically everything that wasn’t queued up on next attack. Pummel and Hamstring were. Heroic Strike was on next swing and not on GCD. Equipping items certainly was. Most trinkets and on use items (rocket boots etc.) were off the GCD but most trinkets shared 30s cooldowns, similar to how potions share the 2min Cooldown.

My questions are directed more to how Macro syntax will be implemented. Will we get modern 7.3 client syntax or be resorting to addons like Supermacro to make thing work.
How are they implementing the breaking of one button DPS rotations while maintaining a playable experience that doesn’t involve 38 individual carpal tunnel inducing key bindings/modifiers (36 is total warrior spells less ranks and exclusive 31 point abilities not including consumables, trinkets, mount) from having to bind Battle Stance to one key and Overpower to another while keeping Defensive Stance (GCD) and Shield equip (GCD) and Shield Wall readily availlible and accessible.
Before someone suggests modifiers AFAIK when you have to add Mod:Shift you lose the ability to have both keybinds 1 and Shift +1, same goes for Alt and Ctrl.

10

I’m also fairly curious about this. I started using macros HEAVILY in WOTLK after watching Brang (he taught me how to use modifiers).

I’ve looked, but have found conflicting sources stating if modifiers worked in the original vanilla code. Does anyone have experience with this?

For instance, one of my bread and butter macros I use daily looks like this


/cast [nomod] mutilate
/cast [mod:ctrl] vanish
/cast [mod:shift] fan of knives

Could you make macros that look like this in classic? Or would you have to write the code to look different than this? Would another macro from the classic code be able to be written to look like this?

Thanks for the answers!