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  1. #1
    Member luxlunae's Avatar
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    Default Heal the Tank Big Button guide (ISBoxer)

    Cross-posted from my multiboxing blog Multi-Bucks (part 1, part 2):

    Part 1

    I think I got the idea that I needed to do this after I came back to wow from playing Rift. In Rift, as in Wow, I played a clothie healer. In Rift as in Wow, I had multiple cooldowns and ways to heal myself, and in Rift, as in Wow, I definitely had times people and npcs were trying to kill me and I was trying to use those cooldowns and self heals to get away.

    Rift, unlike Wow, has a great way to deal with that. I’ll demonstrate what I mean using Holy Priest spells from Wow.

    In Wow, (we’ll disregard the fall through macros we all use with more or less success) macros are designed to do more than one spell, in a predefined order. When it reaches the end of the list, it starts over at the beginning, unless you end it with “null”. That order gets stalled if one of the items is on cooldown and it will keep trying to fire but failing until that spell comes off of cooldown.

    /castsequence Prayer of Mending, Renew, Heal

    In the example above, the priest will cast Prayer of Mending, Renew, and then Heal every ten seconds and then sit waiting for POM to come off cooldown. This order of things is fantastic for many of the things we want to be able to do as multiboxers.

    In Rift, there is no sense of predefined order, but you can put a stack of spells on top of each other, and the macro will keep falling down until it finds one that is off cooldown. If a wow priest had a healing macro like this they wanted to spam it might look like this:

    /cast Divine Spirit
    /cast Power Word:Shield
    /cast Prayer of Mending
    /cast Flash Heal

    Such a system would try to use the cooldowns but ultimately fall through to the boring, non-instant heal that is Flash Heal.

    Both macros only do one thing per keypress/cooldown

    When I returned to Wow, yes it was nice to get back the wow style macros, but at times I missed the easy power button that was my self heal macro in Rift.

    Fortuneately ISBoxer is your friend and wants your life to be easy enough that you can play five characters without ripping your hair out. Lets look at a couple of ways we can deal with this using Gkey 16 as our :OH NO DAMAGE HAPPENED button. For part one, we’ll only look at this the way a solo boxer would. In the second part of this article, I discuss how to apply this principal as a boxer, coordinating multiple toons.

    Keys/Macros bound to character:
    1: PWS [@player]
    2: Divine Spirit [@player]
    3: Flash Heal [@player]

    The priority of these spells is the same as they are listed above. We prioritize PWS because its instant and gives us a way to heal ourselves in a way that doesn’t blow our 3 minute cooldown unnecessarily. DS is the second priority if the shield you triggered first couldn’t save you, and flash is something you only want to cast if the other two aren’t available.

    Isboxer Solution 1:
    G16 >
    Step 1 > Send 1,2,3 > self

    This method sort of works, but it could conceivably not get the priority the way you want it.* (edited)
    Isboxer Solution 2:

    G16 >
    Step 1 > Send 1 > self
    Step 2 > Send 2 > self
    Step 3 > Send 3 > self

    This is much better, because it lets us have a hard priority and respect that priority.

    A couple of simple changes make it even better.

    Make sure you use the advanced setting “reset to step 1 after 10 seconds”. The whole point of having a priority is that you want your first priority to be the first thing triggered in an emergency, so you don’t want to let it permanently cycle so that you start on step 3.

    The other thing that will make this better is to add a “do not advance for five seconds” to the final step. This is because, in the case where you really need this macro, you probably are going to want to cast flash heal more than once, the way it is currently set up to cast flash heal would take 3 key presses, and then 2 more keypresses through abilities on cooldown before you get back to flash heal again. Who needs that carpal tunnel. It would be better to have it “stick” on flash heal for a few seconds casting that over and over until the debuff for PWS wears off.
    Last edited by luxlunae : 08-23-2012 at 11:03 PM Reason: Fixed Text Color

  2. #2
    Member luxlunae's Avatar
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    Part 2: Applying this concept to the team as the team gets together to do that important multiboxing step KEEP THE TANK ALIVE

    For this exercise I’m going to explain the keybinds that I actually use. I will also be using the same characters that make up my primary team, a Prot Paladin, Holy Priest, and three Elemental Shaman. I like to reserve the numpad for wow named macros and I like to (somewhat) use the same keys for the same purpose across all toons. For example I use numpads 7-9 for dps rotation macros (I use a four-step macro). For concepts where I want to have more than one (like mana regeneration) I use numpad -4 and numpad – shift 4. I use numpad 1 for a tank heal, 2 for a healer heal, and 3 for a self heal, across all toons. I use named wow macros, and do not actually have these keys set up as keybinds/maps in wow, they are always triggered by the real key maps.

    Lets look at the keybound macros (set up through innerspace) and then at the actual use of those with the “Heal the Tank” hot key

    Draenai DPS ATG:
    WowNamed [Heal the tank1]
    N1:
    Code:
    /cast[@player1] Gift of the Naaru
    “Gift of the Naaru” actually heals quite a bit on a tank level health pool (20% of HP over 10-15 seconds, every three minutes). You’ll note that I don’t put any kind of stopcast in this… if the Draenai is free to cast the spell they will but its not crucial enough to sacrifice dps by interrupting a lava burst or anything else that generates dps. I use player1 because Jamba ensures that my master is always my leader, and my dps do not keep the tank focused because I need their focuses (focii?) for CC.

    Healer:
    WowNamed [Heal the tank1]
    N1:
    Code:
     /castsequence[@focus] reset=5 Greater Heal, Flash Heal, Flash Heal
    WowNamed [Heal the tank2]
    Shift+N1:
    Code:
    /cast [@focus] Guardian Angel
    My priest healer is holy and as a holy priest there is a talent called “Serendipity” that stacks a buff each time you cast flash heal, up to 2 stacks, and with those two stacks a greater heal takes the same amount of time to cast as a flash heal. My usual healing rotation macro casts a flash heal at the tank every 10 seconds (after prayer of mending), so in an emergency I always have the hasted Greater Heal charged and ready to go. This is obviously a strategy that is only afforded at my current mana pools and you might want to adjust your strategy accordingly.

    Tank (Paladin):
    WowNamed [GainMana]
    N4:
    Code:
    /cast Divine Plea
    WowNamed [HealMyself]
    N3:
    Code:
    /cast Word of Glory
    WowNamed [HealMyself2]
    Shift+N3
    Code:
    /cast Guardian of Ancient Kings
    No real explanation necessary for the tank self heals, except that Divine Plea refills my holy power so that my word of glory can’t “fail” for lack of charge.
    As in our first “Heal Myself” example, our “Heal the Tank” hotkey will reset to step one if you don’t use it for a few seconds. It will also stick on the last step for a few seconds

    Step1:
    GainMana > Tank
    HealtheTank1 > Healer
    HealtheTank1 > Draenai Dps (round robin within target).

    On our first hit of this macro, the priest starts a hasted Greater Heal, and the tank Divine Pleas to prepare for Word of Glory. One of the three draenai dps casts Gift of the Naaru, if it happens to be off cooldown and they happen to be not casting anything else.

    Step2:
    HealMyself > Tank
    HealtheTank2 > Healer

    On step 2 the healer does her move that both saves the tank if its going to die in the next few seconds but also preps it to multiply future heals (Guardian Spirit is great that way). The tank takes this chance to use her low cooldown self heal (WOG is a 30 second cd)

    Step3:
    Healymyself2 > Tank
    HealtheTank > Healer

    This key we want to stick for a few repeats so that the healer can continue to spam that flash flash greater sequence and that we can be sure the tanks 5 minute GOAK cooldown gets used (50% less damage).

    Thats it! A button that can handle 80-85% of the times that your tank takes damage thats a little too much for the healers regular rotation to handle.
    Obviously this example is rather class specific but it will hopefully give you ideas about using the synergy of your whole team in an emergency so that you’re not worrying about click healing and hitting your tank cooldowns at the same time.
    Last edited by MiRai : 08-23-2012 at 01:40 PM Reason: Fixed Text Color

  3. #3
    Member Alge's Avatar
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    Default

    This method sort of works, but its cheating (more than one keystroke per keystroke)
    No it isn't. You can press 3 keys on your keyboard simultaneously. The GCD ensures that only one of these actions gets performed, unless one of the actions is off the GCD, in which case you are meant to be able to activate them simultaneously anyway.

  4. #4

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    What Alge said. The scattershot setup is what some people have been using for DPS for a while. With the changes I've seen in beta, a lot of people are going to be doing either the scattershot method or using a ton of steps for everything. Or a combination of both.
    Blog : Herding Khats
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    Newbie Guides : Multiboxing Vol. 1 - Multiboxing Vol. 2 - HotKeyNet - Jamba
    The Almighty Lax made a liar out of me, apparently I DO get prizes for it.
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  5. #5
    Member luxlunae's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Khatovar View Post
    What Alge said. The scattershot setup is what some people have been using for DPS for a while. With the changes I've seen in beta, a lot of people are going to be doing either the scattershot method or using a ton of steps for everything. Or a combination of both.
    My current dps rotation is actually four step at the moment, I guess that means I'm ready?

  6. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by luxlunae View Post
    My current dps rotation is actually four step at the moment, I guess that means I'm ready?
    That's going to depend on your macros. Fallthrus aren't going to work very well, if at all, which basically doubled the number of steps I'll be using. It's still possible that whatever is making fallthrus suck on beta won't make it to live, of course, but I guess we won't know until it's live. I'm hoping it's just screwy on beta, but this wouldn't be the first time macros got nerfed for us with an expansion.
    Blog : Herding Khats
    Team : Kina - Çroaker - Messkit - Lìfetaker - Wìdowmaker
    Newbie Guides : Multiboxing Vol. 1 - Multiboxing Vol. 2 - HotKeyNet - Jamba
    The Almighty Lax made a liar out of me, apparently I DO get prizes for it.
    *Commences Wielding the Banhammer like there's piñatas up in here and I'm Lady Thor*

    _ Forum search letting you down? Use the custom Google search _

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