Hi There, as you can see I am another newbie needing help with macros.
At present I am using a macro, copied from examples target the enemy when I am attacked.
/targetenemy [dead] [no harm]
/cast ( any weapon or spell)
What I would like included, if that is possible, is that one is always facing the enemy as one always has to face the enemy to either attack or defend and that uses precious time turning to face the enemy if attacked from behind, which seem to be quite frequently.
Blizzard does not want an addon (or macro) to know what direction a target is in.
Make sure you are using the mouse to turn, and not the arrow keys. You turn a lot faster with the mouse, which will greatly minimize the downtime when turning to face an enemy.
There are bosses that you have to face away fromâŚthat would not be goodâŚ
Looks like a steep learning curve comming up. Thank You all for answering.
For ranged dps, mouse movement isnât nearly as critical as it is for, say, rogues, but youâll find a lot of folks who more-or-less insist that if you donât use the mouse to move, youâre a fool.
If you play primarily using the mouse, by all means, use the mouse to move, but I have yet to run into a boss I canât turn away from or turn towards fast enough with reasonable self-placement on the field of battle.
For ranged, pull your camera as far back as you can for the environment youâre in (it varies, dependingâŚ) and lower your camera just enough that you can see the entire battlefield. Set the camera to âhorizontal only while movingâ and adjust the speed to something comfortable.
You should be fine.
Sounds like someone hasnât seen Mythic Jadefire.
Bear in mind, Elvie, before you play the âUber gamers do it this way and if you donât, well, you must just not be very good at this gameâ card - Iâve been doing this since 2 weeks into vanilla release in 2004.
I donât play melee DPS (although Iâm looking at Survival Hunter very closely for my Magâhar toon). I donât play rogues at all. Iâve tried, several times in several different XPACs. I loathe the play style. Itâs everything I hate about playing RPGs. Too much twitchfest activity.
At one time or another in my WoW career Iâve raided, spent weeks on end in battlegrounds, owned an undefeated arena team (back when we had dedicated, named teams with fixed membership), run most end-game content while it was current (M+ in Legion was a losing game for BM Hunters - I stopped at about +7 or +9 because of a gear-scaling problem - we got seriously hosed there and I just stopped messing with it, but that was less to do with facing in combat than it was that a DPS-only class with the same iLvl gear as three other DPS-only classes went from doing 40-50% of the total group damage in M+ in groups that all had what might be considered entry-level M+ gear run to 8-12% of the total group damage in the best gear available about 2/3 of the way through Legion (and it only got worse as gear got better), participated in individual and world PVP, and generally participated in every available game activity and did it reasonably well.
Iâve slowed my play a little in the past year or two because of health issues and because Iâm finding that I really enjoy exploring the lore of this XPAC more than I have any previous one, but Iâve done most of what there is to do in this game.
I did all of that as a masher (primarily). I canât think of more than four or five times in all of that time that I actually needed to face my toon with the mouse to avoid taking damage or to get in on a fight quickly enough to have an impact on it.
To be honest, click play is terribly rough on your shoulder complex. An ergonomicist will tell you that any computer action you can avoid using the mouse for, you should.
When you use the mouse, you hang the weight of your entire arm on very few muscles and then make micro-movements, sometimes for hours without a significant break in a long raid or cat-butt session of âI bet I can get to max level in one day.â
Yes - padded wrist rests - they do provide some relief but theyâre not intended to carry the full weight of your arm and the balance is carried by your shoulder complex.
With numpad play, I can rest my arm at multiple points (wrist and forearm) and the movements needed arenât arm movements, theyâre finger movements.
Yes, I still need to be careful about RSI but with a strongly tactile keyboard and long key throws and supplemental cushioning on the keys (o-rings so the âbottom outâ impact is reduced) I can play for hours (days) without injuring myself or fatiguing my fingers/hand/arm.
It wonât work well for rogues - theyâre very twitchy and very much in need of the sort of instant facing and detailed combat movement that the mouse provides.
There are probably other melee DPS classes that it wonât work well for (I donât know - I havenât played a melee DPS class other than as a novelty in more than ten years).
Since most healers are clickers (in my limited experience with healers) rather than mashers, I suspect that most folks who play healers regularly probably prefer mouse movement on all their toons (muscle memory and habit).
But for ranged DPS toons, there is no significant disadvantage to keyboard movement. You can get just as stunlocked by a rogue who gets his first hit in while stealthed while clicking as you can while mashing. It doesnât make a bit of difference if you TRY to move with the mouse or the keyboard if youâre prevented from moving at all anyway.
There are additional advantages to keyboard movement.
Using your mouse for movement, targeting, and ability activation (something Iâve seen a lot of clickers do) means that you have to constantly be swapping the purpose of what youâre doing with the mouse. In effect youâve overloaded that input device with three separate functions that can compete with each other for priority.
You canât be placing a reticule for a trap and changing facing at the same time, for example.
If you move with your keys and target/attack with your mouse, youâve removed one of three high-level functions from that potential bottleneck. Thatâs still a lot of mouse-work, but splitting movement away from routine mouse use means that you have removed something from that priority list for the mouse.
I tend to move with my left hand (WSAD+QE) and also handle tactical but non-offensive abilities (self heal, revive/mend/call/stance change/command pet), non-tactical utility abilities (mounting, triggering glider kits), and defensive cooldowns.
There isnât any or at least there isnât much conflict there because most of those things canât be done while moving anyway and those that can are handled with keybind choices that are near enough to my movement keys that I donât lose more than 1/20th of a second or so activating the action (and can usually do that while still moving forward or backward - only turning and strafing gets compromised for that 1/20th of a second).
I tend to use my right hand, on the numpad, for rotational combat abiltiies and even there I have a certain pattern that I use between toons and between specs on a given toon.
Nearby, I have Aspect of the Cheetah on the UP arrow and Disengage on the DOWN arrow (more âOh Crapâ stuff usually, but also just utility use as well)
I do use my mouse for certain things - itâs unavoidable.
I have reticule-placed abilities there as well as copy of my interrupt abilities (there is one actual interrupt and one sort of pocket interrupt involving my pet). I Pet-Move-To macroâd for use there (I pet tank a LOT and itâs important that I be able to face bosses in the right direction so moving my pet to where I want the boss to be looking and then growling at it seems to do the trick pretty well). I have an @cursor version of my biggest single-target ability there (A Murder of Crows) because sometimes you want to fire-and-forget at some troublesome mob without changing your current target and that seems to work pretty well for me.
Between MOSTLY keeping my arms and hands in the same, well-supported positions and making only light, only-when-necessary use of the mouse, I keep the strain down on my shoulder and back and I split movement, targeting, and mouse-necessary functionality across three devices (Iâm counting the numpad as itâs own device here) and both arms/hands avoiding potential bottlenecks.
As I mentioned earlier, youâll see a lot of folks who feel that mouse movement is the only REAL way to play this game correctly. I suppose there are people out there who think McDonaldâs sells food, too, but that doesnât make them right.
You play how you feel comfortable playing and work to play that way to your best ability and youâll be fine.
While you may have adapted (in part by not playing classes and specs that are as heavily impacted slower turning) the reality is that mouse turning is significantly faster than keyboard turning. The OP specifically complained about the time it was taking them to turn. If I do a jump turn with the keyboard, I can maybe get 1/3 of a revolution in. With the mouse, I can spin several times in the air before landing. Itâs not a matter of preference, one option is objectively superior for gameplay.
Now, Iâm with you on the RSI thing. (Iâll sometimes use a keyboard bind for right mouse functions to take some of the load off the mouse hand.) Iâd love it if theyâd add in a way to adjust the keyboard turn speed so I could get it on par with the mouse turn speed. Itâs definitely fair to make the decision to keyboard turn due to RSI concerns. But donât give the impression that itâs not an inferior choice when it comes to gameplay that requires compromises like never playing melee (or really any spec that canât keep things always at distance â which when you donât have a tank around, is most specs, really.)
I wouldnât worry about mouse turning until you become interested in top-tier content: rated pvp, mythic raids, 15+ mythic plus keys, especially if you are a ranged dps.
Learn everything else well and mouse turn vs. keyboard turn wonât matter for a long time. But once you are ready to take things to the next level of end-game, unbind your left turn key, right turn key and backup key. Then use mouse + strafe left/right for turning and going backwards. Kind of tricky to get used to but you turn and move much faster.
lol I was just yanking your chain but damn thatâs a big wall of text.
In all seriousness one of our core healers plays with a trackpad and heâs able to keyboard turn fine in all situations except the full 180 turns that occasionally happen during MSS in that fight.
I absolutely agree that certainly for rogues and probably for all melee DPS, mouse movement is likely far more necessary.
But sometimes when someone says, âMy socks are too tightâ the answer is âWear sandals.â
A warlock isnât a melee class and can benefit from almost everything I posted about playing a Beast Mastery hunter. The two classes share a lot of similarities not the least of which are relatively full-time pets which do substantial amounts of damage.
Hanging back at maximum range, paying attention to timers, using strafe-and-shoot, angling so that you can turn away very quickly (not facing directly at the boss, but getting him only into the edge of your forward cone) - all of those, done well, mean that there is no compromise to DPS or to mobility during play.
The very few situations that absolutely require instant turnaround, yes, grab the mouse and go for it, preferably with some understanding that this need is coming.
But for day-to-day, moment-by-moment play (even in high-end content), mouse movement is not necessary.
Because of the potential bottleneck among targeting, reticule placement, attack selection, and movement, it can actually slow you down.