Macro is life?

You don’t actually play Classic, do you?

In game right now.

stop cast Macros for interrupts and stuns are a must

yeah, that doesn’t work…at least for my druid buffs mark and thorns.
did i wrote it wrong?
#showtooltip
/castsequence Mark of the Wild, Thorns

OP, the simple answer is that creating and using good macros increases your ability to react quickly to events in game. This is the beginning and end of the discussion.

You want a warrior tank specific example? Here is a perfect example of why warrior tanks SHOULD be using macros.

You are tanking a boss. A paladin who meant to cast Blessing of Protection on a dps player accidentally casts it on you. This causes you to temporarily drop all threat, and you are unable to attack the mob until you locate the specific buff in your buff bar and right click to remove it. In the meantime, the mob is beating the crap out of your party. By the time you find the buff and right click to remove it, 2-3 of your raid members have died from being one-shot.

Instead of assigning Heroic Strike to your hotbar, you assign the following macro to your hotbar:

/cancelaura Blessing of Protection
/cancelaura Blessing of Salvation
/cancelaura Divine Intervention
#showtooltip
/cast Heroic Strike

Every time you hit this hotkey for heroic strike, you will automatically cancel Blessing of Protection, Divine Intervention, and Blessing of Salvation from your character if it is present, and you will use your chosen attack. So if a pally accidentally buffs you with an undesirable spell, you’ll dispel the effect before you even realize you had it. Copy this macro for sunder armor and any other ability you want to use while tanking, and suddenly you are 99% immune to trolling/sloppy paladins.

If I want to raid heal without macros (or addons), my movements look like this:

  1. Move mouse cursor to target needing healing.
  2. Mouse click.
  3. Press hotkey bind for healing spell.
  4. Move mouse cursor to next target needing healing.
  5. Mouse click.
  6. Press hotkey bind for healing spell.

While the amount of time between steps 2 and 3 can be extremely small, it must be present. If you have self-cast disabled in the game settings, those two steps can happen in either order, but there will always be a short delay between your two clicks.

With a mouseover macro, my movements look like this:

  1. Move mouse cursor over target needing healing.
  2. Hotkey bind for healing spell.
  3. Move mouse cursor to next target.
  4. Hotkey bind for healing spell.

Across the span of a long boss fight, this results in 33% less physical actions required of the player in order to do the same amount of work, which reduces mental fatigue. If you can perform a fast repetitive task in 2 steps or 3 steps, it is always better to perform it in 2 steps.

Another example:

As a paladin, there are times when I need to quickly bubble and then immediately drop the shield in order to clear a debuff. To do this manually, I must:

  1. Click the hotkey for Divine Shield.
  2. Move my mouse to the top right corner of my screen, locate the DS buff among all the other active buffs I have at the time, and right click to remove it.

With the following macro, all I have to do is tap a hotkey twice in rapid succession to achieve the same effect:

/cancelaura Divine Shield
#showtooltip
/cast Divine Shield

As a quality of life improvement, you can add /dismount to the start of all your attack macros so that you don’t have to manually keyboard/mouse click the keybind for your mount in order to attack a target. This can be of great benefit in busy areas that have players competing for tagging mobs, as you can be running towards a mob on your mount and tap your charge hotkey twice in rapid succession to instantly dismount and engage the mob.

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Ok that explains a lot!! Thanks
But this still doesn’t work:
#showtooltip
/castsequence Mark of the Wild, Thorns

It only cast motw on me, why?

If you want to be a lazy player. Macros are the way to go.

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You press the macro once for mark of the wild. Then press it again for thorns. It still requires two button presses, but you should see the tooltip change to thorns after the first button press.

I tried it just now with the following and it works for me:

#showtooltip
/cast Blessing of Wisdom, Blessing of Might

Also make sure that the macro icon is the big question mark, first option in the list. Otherwise it won’t show the proper tooltip.

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Design your own interactivity. That’s the beauty of macro work. I’m telling my keyboard how my hands are going to drive the character. It doesn’t make it easier, it lets you do more in the same time frame. I’m in group with warriors who are tanking and can’t manage to change stances enough to charge then switch to defensive stance. Meanwhile, as dps, I’ve got full command of all three stances. It’s Kindergarten vs pro.

That’s ridiculous. As a mage you’re not really interested in macros except for

/castsequence reset=Arcane int, dampen, ice shield, mana gem1, mana gem2, conjure food, conjure water

Or
/stopcasting
/cast counterspell

Oh sure, I didn’t mean to trash macros. Plenty of useful things you can do with it. I just generally use it for basic stuff, rather than to optimize my play, but I certainly respect those that do!

lol going the have a staring contest in pvp? Everything is mapped to a key bind.

And were the "disabled"ones. :hugs:

I hear ya, and sometimes feel the same.

Not a must. All things you can do with macros, you can do without macros. Some may say that macros make things easier.

Here’s an example (not warrior specific). Let’s say you want to look for a group to run Deadmines, and you want to ask in the following channels:

  1. General
  2. Trade Chat
  3. Looking For Group

You could type, LF4M heals/dps for Deadmines in each of those channels, or you could make a macro to do it for you.

Here’s what the macro might look like:

/1 LF4M heals/dps for Deadmines
/2 LF4M heals/dps for Deadmines
/4 LF4M heals/dps for Deadmines

You can then use that macro as you would any other skill, and put it on an action bar. That can either be assigned to a keybind or you can click it.

For warrior tanking, for example, you may wish to begin a pull by using Charge. In Classic WoW to use Charge as a warrior, you must be in Battle Stance. There are 3 stances, 1. Battle Stance, 2. Defensive Stance, 3. Berserker Stance (order is significant).

If you would like to make a macro that will cast Charge for you (or if you are not in Battle Stance, it will put you in Battle Stance first), you can do so pretty easily with the following macro:

/cast Battle Stance
/cast Charge

You might want the macro to show the icon from Charge. To do so, you could either look for the Charge Icon in the list, or you can add #showtooltip Charge to the macro, like so:

#showtooltip Charge
/cast Battle Stance
/cast Charge

Then you might think, “Oh hey, that’s OK, this macro will put me in Battle Stance if I am not in Battle Stance. Then it will Charge (if I am in Battle Stance), so I want it to show the Battle Stance icon if I am not in Battle Stance and I want it to show the Charge icon if I am in Battle Stance.”

OK, then to do so, you can say something like if in stance 1 (which is Battle Stance), then cast Charge. Otherwise, cast Battle Stance.

/cast [stance:1] Charge; Battle Stance

And then do the same thing for the #showtooltip part:

#showtooltip [stance:1] Charge; Battle Stance
/cast [stance:1] Charge; Battle Stance

You be the judge! Like a lot of things, macros can be a helpful tool, and are not so difficult once you know a bit about how they work.

I put together a warrior tanking guide that also includes a section on some macros. Maybe that’s of some interest to you.

Good luck out there!

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great explanation ty!
ill look into your guide it looks great, but what are the talents i should use? right now i put 3 points at rend (arms tree).

Do i put any points in prot right now? or should i wait to 60 to re-spec because i want to lvl up fast. and i do want 2h spec and axe spec for lvling (unless i should use talents as prot tank but ill lvl up way slower i think).

Can help with carpal tunnel syndrome

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I’ve found myself using WAYY more macros in classic.

The big 3 being

/Dismount
/Startattack
/Cancelform

I do a lot of / cast spell / shoot wand stuff

Stuff to make grinnding 2 buttons

Macros, make life soo much easier, do you know how to copy and paste? I look online for cool useful macros and when I find one I make it in game.

Ctrl-C is copy and Ctrl-V is paste

highlight what you want to copy and go to town.

There’s even a macro for the undead to /cannibalize and /drink at the same time with one button click! how fast is that.
There’s another macro that allows you to increase the visible range of nameplates.

Once you get into it there’s a ton of stuff you can make

This is really up to you, and your playstyle. A lot of people spec into a deep arms build with some points into fury, some go deep fury, and some decide to go deep prot.

For leveling, I’ve been using a deep Arms build (31 in Arms, up to Mortal Strike), and have put points into Prot. This has worked well for me, as I have increased armor, and blocking, plus Last Stand, while maintaining a good amount of dmg with Sweeping Strikes, and Mortal Strike, while also having Tactical Mastery, which is helpful for maintaining a small amount of rage (25) when stance dancing (though dumping range prior to a stance change can work fine).

A Fury Prot build would be more optimal, and if only I were facing any issues with threat, dmg mitigation while tanking, or damage output while dpsing with my current build, I would experiment a little more. I strongly recommend the Fight Club Warrior discord as a good source of information for Classic Warrior theorycrafting, and build advice: https://fightclub.academy/

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