Paladin Tanking macro

[Bigfish]

Recently I decided to switch to a 96969 rotation, just because I had so many thing in my previous castrandom macro that it was starting to bog down what would fire off and cool downs were ending up finishing before something else was firing off, leading to abilities that may or may not have been firing like they should. Still needs tweeking though. Will probably include a /castrandom before the sequence to get off things like Divine Plea or Avenging Wrath, but ideally not bog down the macro to the point the sequence doesn't fire at all.

[sp000n]

So that's 5 buttons and funnily enough I have 4 fingers and a thumb on my xkeys pro. Now if that was in a macro then that's still 5 pushes of a button but in a macro you have no control of where you are or may lose track of where you are in the sequence. For simple grinding maybe, but for instances - well I might want to Cpt America again as soon as it's up or not even use Cpt America for this pull or deem it not necessary to Consecrate or whatever or righteous hammer (how do I love thee), I might want to do something different.

The tank is at the pointy end and needs the most flexibility, the tank is the char you are actually playing (most of the time - except for that guy who plays a priest with a tank up front >.< the support team of course needs to be macroed, but the tank? - go separate buttons imho

I agree with your main point that the tank requires the most flexibility. However, if all four fingers and your thumb are tied up by that tank, what exactly is left to go mashing for the DPS & healer macros? I'm struggling with that right now.

[elsegundo]

So that's 5 buttons and funnily enough I have 4 fingers and a thumb on my xkeys pro. Now if that was in a macro then that's still 5 pushes of a button but in a macro you have no control of where you are or may lose track of where you are in the sequence. For simple grinding maybe, but for instances - well I might want to Cpt America again as soon as it's up or not even use Cpt America for this pull or deem it not necessary to Consecrate or whatever or righteous hammer (how do I love thee), I might want to do something different.

The tank is at the pointy end and needs the most flexibility, the tank is the char you are actually playing (most of the time - except for that guy who plays a priest with a tank up front >.< the support team of course needs to be macroed, but the tank? - go separate buttons imho

I agree with your main point that the tank requires the most flexibility. However, if all four fingers and your thumb are tied up by that tank, what exactly is left to go mashing for the DPS & healer macros? I'm struggling with that right now.

that's what alt/ctrl/shift are for.
i havent contributed to this thread simply because i dont use castrandom spams. but there you go. with the inclusion of alt/ctrl/shift, you dont have 4 buttons, you have 16.

and then you can add alt+ctrl, then alt+shift, then ctrl+shift, and that's 12 more buttons. total 28 possible combinations.

[Simulacra]

So that's 5 buttons and funnily enough I have 4 fingers and a thumb on my xkeys pro. Now if that was in a macro then that's still 5 pushes of a button but in a macro you have no control of where you are or may lose track of where you are in the sequence. For simple grinding maybe, but for instances - well I might want to Cpt America again as soon as it's up or not even use Cpt America for this pull or deem it not necessary to Consecrate or whatever or righteous hammer (how do I love thee), I might want to do something different.

The tank is at the pointy end and needs the most flexibility, the tank is the char you are actually playing (most of the time - except for that guy who plays a priest with a tank up front >.< the support team of course needs to be macroed, but the tank? - go separate buttons imho

I agree with your main point that the tank requires the most flexibility. However, if all four fingers and your thumb are tied up by that tank, what exactly is left to go mashing for the DPS & healer macros? I'm struggling with that right now.

I have my shaman castrandom dps macro linked to 2 of my pally buttons - avenging wrath and shield, I mash these buttons all the time in instances. For grinding outside I just press the avenging wrath as the pally will only cast this on mobs with <30% health so it rarely even gets used, so no mana issues. The shammies will usually kill something with 2 presses of the button.My heals are on the 2 side buttons of my mouse, the forward button gets all shammies to heal the pally or the pallys target if friendly, the back button cast a self heal on the shammies - I dont use chain heal, I find that lesser healing wave from all shammies works fine as I can get between 9000-12000 health in one hit. A right click of the mouse wheel casts cl and a left mouse wheel a lb, I don't have cl in the dps macro. It's a pretty simple setup that allows me to concentrate on tanking.

[Khatovar]

Bump.

I'm working on refining my spam paladin macro. Any further thoughts from those who were experimenting with the cast sequence and cast random ideas near the end of this thread?

I don't play a tankadin, but I have been messing around a bit with castrandom and castsequence trying to figure out how to best abuse the crap out of my hunters {my main is a healadin, I haven't really got the luxury of manual weaving }.

With castsequence, I had no way to really account for procs, haste buffs made things messy, and I was really limited with some of my utility.

With castrandom, I had no control whatsoever, making DPS rotations a total mess, and my DPS was suffering from missing chimera shots.

Now, I'm using both. I have a castsequence that reads roughly /castsequence reset=target Hunter's Mark, * Sting, Chimera Shot {x6 or so, depending on the hunter} and a /castrandom Aimed shot, Steady Shot, Multi-shot, Tranquilizing Shot, Arcane Shot blah blah blah.

Then I use PAB to watch their cooldowns. Open up with a few presses of my castsequence button, spam the heck out of my castrandom until PAB shows my Chimera Shot popping. Not the most elegant or graceful solution, but it seems to get the job done.

[OogaJiggaWooga]

Bump

[Greythan]

Bump again.

Just dinged 80. Now, finally, truly, looking at refining my pally macro. Currently using a two button system with castrandoms. Just too many buttons. I need my primary taunting down to a single button.

Fur, et al.... any further thoughts on this thread?

[Starbuck_Jones]

One thing also to remember with a paladin is all of the tanking/agro/aoe spells are instant cast. That means the loss of DPS by using a castsequence over a cast random (lag confirmation delay) is removed because its done during the global cool down. I recently swiched from a cast random on my paladin to a cast sequence and its been a huge increase in dps and survivabilty by having holy shield up 100% of the time. Im not high enough level and havent speced a point in judgements to get a real 969 rotation but the one I did have when I fought a target dummy useing wisdom seal, judge and blessing allowed for a constant spam of about 9 minutes with a 4k mana pool before going oom. That and with all wisdom buffs it took about 40 seconds to just melee swing back to full mana. In real use I found that I never went oom or even close when pulling in an instance and I havent been in a fight against a single target boss that lasted 9min.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Someone needs to put a sticky someplace that castrandom DOES NOT skip spells that cannot cast or are on cooldown.

It picks a random spell and tries to cast it period, if it can't cast it for anyreason then it just does nothing on that key press.

[Greythan]

Sam, agreed. That comes up over and over again.

I think I'll just have to play with this. It really became pronounced last night. I tanked Heroic Gundrak with my pally solo (group of guildmates). I'm not quite 20k hp and just over the hitcap so I'm as squishy a heroic tank you'll find atm.

My smashing of three buttons to taunt really is almost too much overhead when playing solo. I've got to get a reliable, single button taunt macro set up.

I'm thinking I'm going to play with a 969 cast sequence macro.