Heal the Tank Big Button guide (ISBoxer)

[luxlunae]

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.