Pally Macro using /click and castrandom

[Simulacra]

Having been a long time proponent of not using macros for my pally and being reasonably vocal on the subject on this board, here's my about turn lol. The macros presented here for tankadins just didn't seem to cut it for me as there were pretty big gaps where HS just didn't come up, so with no more further ado, here's my 1 button 9696969 tanking macro :) any thoughts appreciated

With a tanking macro I don't want any randomness, I want HS to be always up and I want spells cast as soon as they're ready so that 96969 is carried out. It has to be mashabble.

My rotation is:
Holy Shield,Avenging Wrath,Hammer of the Righteous,Judegement of Light,Shield of Righteousness,Consecration,some instant cast random spell

approach:
you need to create 8 macros, 1 for each spell and 1 /click controller, I put all these macros on the right side bar except for the controller which is just bound in bindpad

controller macro

/click MultiBarLeftButton1
/click MultiBarLeftButton2
/click MultiBarLeftButton3
/click MultiBarLeftButton4
/click MultiBarLeftButton5
/click MultiBarLeftButton6
/click MultiBarLeftButton7

and the macros in order

1 - Holy Shield
/startattack
/castrandom Holy Shield,

2 - Avenging Wrath <-- instant cast so doesn't affect the rotation too much
/castrandom avenging wrath,

3 - Hammer of the Righteous
/castrandom Hammer of the righteous,

4 - Judgement
/castrandom Judgement of Light,

5 - Shield of Righteousness
/castrandom Shield of Righteousness,

6 - Consecration
/castrandom consecration,

7- a little instant cast macro I grabbed from somewhere on this board
#showtooltip
/castrandom exorcism, cleanse, hammer of wrath, Avenging wrath, Avenger's Shield,divine plea,

place these on the right action bar in the same order and bind the controller to the same key as your team DPS key. I've found that this works pretty well. The nice thing is that you can see your rotation and easily swap in/out spells without changing macros by just swapping in another spell on the bar.

A typical boss pull for me is to manually Avengers Shield, Consecrate and SoR to build threat - then just start mashing this macro.

edit: it's important to remember to put a comma at the end of the castrandom otherwise /click won't move to the next spell

[Spatulor]

why the /castrandom in macros that only contain one spell? why not just a castsequence macro? or does this let you skip past spells that can't be cast right now, for whatever reason?

edit: I see why not a castsequence macro. this allows you to essnetially have multiple spells in one non-castsequence macro, so it'll go down the list and cast whatever's available, in order. is this also the reason they're /castrandom? (I've never used /castrandom before, excuse my ignorance.)

[Greythan]

I think it will move past the current /castrandom every time it tries to cast the <blank> spell. Otherwise, it would stay stuck on the first macro even if the spell was on cooldown. It seems though that you have a 50% chance of moving past the first spell even if it hasn't cast yet?

[Starbuck_Jones]

If I had to guess a castsequence will halt if the spell is cast unsuccessfully.

[Spatulor]

If I had to guess a castsequence will halt if the spell is cast unsuccessfully.Yup. Been playing with it for the last hour or so now, it works well.

[Simulacra]

sorry for the lateness of the reply :) yes it allows you to drop through to the next available, hopefully in order and allows some flexibility with spells without having to change your macro

[Greythan]

So Sim, I'm assuming you aren't concerned about maintaining a cast order with the 50% chance of moving through each step without casting that step's spell?

I'm interested in getting my Pally heroic tanking macro into a single button. I'm using 2 atm and only using 4 spells in total between them.

[Simulacra]

not so much no, as long as it grabs the next available 6 or the next available 9 then it's ok, I'm mashing this like crazy - I've definately seen an improvement over the other pally tanking macros - the collosus in grundrak was alway a bit of a pain for me and there was a 40%ish chance I'd wipe - not now as I'm keeping the threat up nicely. The reason I switched from controlling the pally manually was that my shaman dps wasn't what it could be and have seen an real improvement there now that I don't have to think about what the pally should be doing next, also there's a lot of flexibilty being able to throw in the odd HoJ without breaking the sequence too much.

[Tizer]

i use something silimar to this:

Pally 1 button Tank macro ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=179494#post179494')

I have 3 buttons in total for my macro.

Works a treat, never have issues generating threat.

it results in a 1 button spam fest on every fight, if i need healing i press "1".

So i've basically cleared half a dozen heroics using two buttons. "Q" and "1". Easy. :0

[Bigfish]

If that's working for you and you're happy with it, more power to you. I am moderatley curious how efficient that ends up being, since judgement and consecration are so far behind I don't see them firing off as often as the should. (I estimate Judgement has only a 1/16 chance to cast and consecration a 1/32). Personally, I have more or less 2 buttons for the whole thing: 1 that includes the /click for the other button while having a 50% chance of firing off a long cooldown ability, and the one that gets /clicked that is a 96969 rotation.

[Tizer]

I have moved the spells around a little with my click macros, i know consecration fires off as soon as its ready, but all i really care about is the first consecration working since its this one thats going to get the pull agro. Sometimes i just click it myself so it gets skipped in the spam.

[wowphreak]

/castsequence reset=combat Holy Shield, Hammer of the Righteous, Judgement of Light,Shield of Righteousness,Consecration, Hammer of the Righteous, Holy Shield,Shield of Righteousness,Judgement of Light, Hammer of the Righteous, Consecration,Shield of Righteousness

works great no need for castrandom
perfect 9696 rotation

[wolpak]

I think it will move past the current /castrandom every time it tries to cast the <blank> spell. Otherwise, it would stay stuck on the first macro even if the spell was on cooldown. It seems though that you have a 50% chance of moving past the first spell even if it hasn't cast yet?

It doesn't work like that. You mash the button once and there is a 50% chance of casting HS or moving on. But you aren't hitting the button once, you are hitting it like 10 times a second. For it to stay on the first spell for 1 second, with 5 presses would occur 3% of the time. That is fairly efficient.

The problem seems that it would skip the initial HS 50% of the time on the first press, which means that you'd have to wait for the GCD to finish before having another 50% chance of casting it again.

I wonder if for important spells you want cast, it might make sense to do

/castrandom Holy Shield, Holy Shield,

That was you have a 66% chance to cast it and you just have to mash like 13% faster to keep it clean.

[Memn]

With the macros as you have them above, you have a very low chance of actually casting anything other than Holy Shield or Hammer of the Righteous. If you look at your meters, you will probably see that you cast HotR way more than SoR and in a good rotation, they should be fairlly even. Here is what your cast chances equate to by my math:

Each click of your button results in an attempt on the below spells, with the attempt distribution percentage below.

Holy Shield 50%
Hammer of the Righteous 25%
Judgement 12.5%
Shield of Righteousness 6.25%
Consecration 3.125%
Exorcism, et al. 1.5625%

I would recommend a single cast sequence such as the one wowfreak listed (nearly identical to what I use), or break it up into two sequences on 2 buttons such as

Button 1 - The spaces allow padding to by used by button 2. Number of spaces may need to be adjusted for your spam press rate.


/castsequence reset=combat Holy Shield ,,,,,,, Judgement of Light ,,,,,,, Consecration ,,,,,,,


Button2 - Add spaces if you have buttons with actoins afterwards


/castsequence reset=combat Hammer of the Righteous, Shield of Righteousness


If what you have is working for you, then disregard what I say... but I am certain your putting out way less threat than you could otherwise.

[wolpak]

Holy Shield 50%
Hammer of the Righteous 25%
Judgement 12.5%
Shield of Righteousness 6.25%
Consecration 3.125%
Exorcism, et al. 1.5625%

This is assuming no cooldown. He will absolutely not be casting HS 50% of the time. HS has an 8 second cooldown. The GCD is 1.5 seconds which leaves 6.5 seconds of button mashing to cast other spells before HS is active again. HS then has a 50% chance of activating the next time the button is pressed and it is off of the cooldown.

What we need is someone to parse their combat logs, see how many times each spell was cast and then you can compare.

[Greythan]

What we need is someone to parse their combat logs, see how many times each spell was cast and then you can compare.
Agreed.

I am a button masher so this appeals to me, but I don't want to toss efficiency out the window either.

One thing's for sure: the macros taht require a steady tapping won't work for me now. I'd have to adjust my dps button spam and if the cast random and /click method let's me keep spamming: sign me up. :)

[wolpak]

Are there any takers? I would, but I am too green in the pants to have have most of those spells ;)

[heffner]

I am a total spaz button masher. This is what I worked out [all based on the posts on this site of course] after running it on a target dummy with nonstop button smashing:

Main Macro
/startattack
/click BT4Button85
/click BT4Button87
/click BT4Button86

First Macro Button
/castsequence reset=target Avenger's Shield,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,,,,

(all the commas are due to my button smashing)

Second MACRO Button
/castsequence reset=9 Holy Shield,Shield of Righteousness,Consecration,Hammer of the Righteous,Judgement of Light,Shield of Righteousness,Holy Shield,Hammer of the Righteous,Consecration,Shield of Righteousness,Judgement of Light,Hammer of the Righteous

Third Macro Button
/castrandom Cleanse, Exorcism, Hammer of Wrath, Avenging Wrath, Hammer of Justice, Holy Wrath
/use 13
/use 14

(this used to be my Second macro but I found that it was better to have this after the 6969. Also, not sure if putting my trinkets here is optimal, but I don't think it matters)

I think I need to work on it some more though, but so far it seems to be working, as long as I get the initial aggro anyway :P Although, I really think I need to determine if this is actually working better than a simple /castrandom OR if I need to just put my 6 and 9 second spells on two separate buttons and do it manually.

[Memn]

This is assuming no cooldown. He will absolutely not be casting HS 50% of the time. HS has an 8 second cooldown. The GCD is 1.5 seconds which leaves 6.5 seconds of button mashing to cast other spells before HS is active again. HS then has a 50% chance of activating the next time the button is pressed and it is off of the cooldown.

What we need is someone to parse their combat logs, see how many times each spell was cast and then you can compare


I never said that he would cast those percentages... I said that is the percentage of cast attempts he would get per click.... 50% of all clicks attempting HS and only 3.125% attempting to cast Concecration is a problem... especially considering that a good 80% of his clicks will be blocked by a global cooldown or spell cooldown...

I don't need to see the combat log parse tell me how well this macro would perform. Wowfreak's macro from this thread is vastly superior, and is similar to what I use. Heffner's is pretty much equivalent (his button 2 is doing most of the work, and is pretty much the same as wowfreak's) from this thread (which is also very similar to heffner's last post)

[wolpak]

This is assuming no cooldown. He will absolutely not be casting HS 50% of the time. HS has an 8 second cooldown. The GCD is 1.5 seconds which leaves 6.5 seconds of button mashing to cast other spells before HS is active again. HS then has a 50% chance of activating the next time the button is pressed and it is off of the cooldown.

What we need is someone to parse their combat logs, see how many times each spell was cast and then you can compare


I never said that he would cast those percentages... I said that is the percentage of cast attempts he would get per click.... 50% of all clicks attempting HS and only 3.125% attempting to cast Concecration is a problem... especially considering that a good 80% of his clicks will be blocked by a global cooldown or spell cooldown...

I don't need to see the combat log parse tell me how well this macro would perform. Wowfreak's macro from this thread is vastly superior, and is similar to what I use. Heffner's is pretty much equivalent (his button 2 is doing most of the work, and is pretty much the same as wowfreak's) from this thread (which is also very similar to heffner's last post)

Ok, so you don't need any evidence, you jsut take it on what you assume? Ok, good to know.

[Memn]

Ok, so you don't need any evidence, you jsut take it on what you assume? Ok, good to know.

I don't need evidence to support my opionion or my math. I have provided much more "evidence" than you have.

The initial macro looked nice aesthetically, but it will result in very poor threat output... If you need "evidence" to prove that to yourself... use it.. after the wipe, try the macro wowphreak posted.. I suspect you will hve all the evidence you need without parsing a combat log.

[Bigfish]

Well, you could work out the theoreticals of chance of what fires off when concerning cool downs and the GCD. Bottom line though, you're going to end up with such a broad range of potential action trees you won't get much more than "sometimes it works, some times it doesn". What ISN'T going to work is a cascading /castrandom with high cooldowns on the front end. Things will fire off, but you are looking at progressively lower chances of a successful cast, which means long periods of dead-space between when the GCD is up and when an action fires.

What you end up with is an unpredictable up time on holy shield, cooldowns being up on most other abilities, and an exponential macro-lag growth (from .1 to .2 to .4 to .8 seconds and so on) getting tacked on to your effective GCD.

[Simulacra]

Ok, so you don't need any evidence, you jsut take it on what you assume? Ok, good to know.

I don't need evidence to support my opionion or my math. I have provided much more "evidence" than you have.

The initial macro looked nice aesthetically, but it will result in very poor threat output... If you need "evidence" to prove that to yourself... use it.. after the wipe, try the macro wowphreak posted.. I suspect you will hve all the evidence you need without parsing a combat log.after the wipe lol - what wipe would that be? check out the gloves --> armory link http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Caelestrasz&n=Aztrid
nuff said

[Memn]

All I am saying is that daisy chained /castrandoms is very inefficient, and that there are better options. My tankadin is my main, and I know the class pretty well... If it works for you, that is great - but I know that it would not work for me... And I don't need to parse combat logs to know....

My Pally has nice gloves too... Masochista ('http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Misha&n=Masochista')

[Simulacra]

All I am saying is that daisy chained /castrandoms is very inefficient, and that there are better options. My tankadin is my main, and I know the class pretty well... If it works for you, that is great - but I know that it would not work for me... And I don't need to parse combat logs to know....

My Pally has nice gloves too... Masochista ('http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Misha&n=Masochista')yes they are nice :) gratz!

if all you were saying was that "daisy chained /castrandoms is very inefficient, and that there are better options" I would have thought fair enough, but what you actually said earlier was : "If you need "evidence" to prove that to yourself... use it.. after the wipe, try the macro wowphreak posted"

it's the dismissive "after the wipe" comment that rankles

I did more than try wowphreaks macro, it was the first macro I used on my pally when I decided to switch from manual control and although it was fine it simply didn't work that well for me, I did numerous runs of H Grundrak with it and wiped a lot, maybe I was doing something wrong I don't know. So I came up with the method in the OP (see below) and suddenly HG was a walk in the park. Maybe you should give this method a go and tell us what you think instead of just dismissing it without even trying. We can theorycraft till the cows come home but until you actually use it why say anything negative? try it, you might like it.

a bit on how I came up with this: I didn't wake up one morning, create this method in 5 minutes and go do an heroic. It took hours of experimentation, dead ends, some successes and finally some fine tuning (probably need more). In the early phases I used it against normal mobs, you know those guys near ebon blade. Once I could smash through those I went to various instances and worked on trash mobs, once satisfied I ran HG and downed 4 of the bosses without issue and I mean WITHOUT ISSUE, no deaths, no wipes it was a first for me, I did wipe on the last boss a few times but that was just learning the encounter. He's down too now.

But I think people are missing a major point of this method, flexibility. With this method you can swap macros in and out of rotation with a drag from the macro editor without making ANY code changes.

[Memn]

I was being dismissive to wolpak, who had been dismissive to me. Not to you Simulcra. Look at my first post in the thread...

As far as keeping Holy Shield up 100% of the time... it is not as important in WotLK... it was vital in BC because you needed ti to push crushing blows off the hit table. They aren't on there, and if you have 540 defense, then criticals aren't either... so the only thing constant block capping provides you is pushing hit off the table (in exchange for block). While this is great for fast hitting bosses, it does little for hard hitting bosses. And your macro, as provided above, is going to have alot of deadspace, and alot of abilities off cooldown...

[Simulacra]

I was being dismissive to wolpak, who had been dismissive to me. Not to you Simulcra. Look at my first post in the thread...

As far as keeping Holy Shield up 100% of the time... it is not as important in WotLK... it was vital in BC because you needed ti to push crushing blows off the hit table. They aren't on there, and if you have 540 defense, then criticals aren't either... so the only thing constant block capping provides you is pushing hit off the table (in exchange for block). While this is great for fast hitting bosses, it does little for hard hitting bosses. And your macro, as provided above, is going to have alot of deadspace, and alot of abilities off cooldown...ahhh sorry /slap me - I hate the interwebz sometimes lol

I've been thinking about this today instead of working :) wowphreaks macro works for him and you and lots of other people so why not for me? I think it may be a case of expectation management. I'm looking for a macro combo that will replicate me, which is what mine nearly does and wowphreaks doesn't for some bizarre reason. I'm going to give his macro another go and report back. But that'll be awhile as I'm over in the UK for work and only have my work laptop >.< so I'll just be levelling my lock.

[Memn]

tbh, I think your macro works for you because your tank really needs the extra mitigation that 100% Holy Shield provides... once you get more gear, this will be less of an issue.

You could try something like:

/castrandom Holy Shield,
/castsequence reset=combat ,Consecration,Hammer of the Righteous,Judgement of Light,Shield of Righteousness,,Hammer of the Righteous,Consecration,Shield of Righteousness,Judgement of Light,Hammer of the Righteous,Shield of Righteousness

This still tries Holy Shield 50% of the time, but it distributes the other 50% of attempts to a normal 9696 sequence

[Simulacra]

tbh, I think your macro works for you because your tank really needs the extra mitigation that 100% Holy Shield provides... once you get more gear, this will be less of an issue.

You could try something like:

/castrandom Holy Shield,
/castsequence reset=combat ,Consecration,Hammer of the Righteous,Judgement of Light,Shield of Righteousness,,Hammer of the Righteous,Consecration,Shield of Righteousness,Judgement of Light,Hammer of the Righteous,Shield of Righteousness

This still tries Holy Shield 50% of the time, but it distributes the other 50% of attempts to a normal 9696 sequencethx I'll give it a go. This is spammable? I'm a real button masher.

[Greythan]

thx I'll give it a go. This is spammable? I'm a real button masher.
Should be.

/castrandom will only cast holy shield if a) the global cooldown is available, b) holy shield's cooldown is available, and c) the LOCAL random number generation results in an attempted cast.

/castsequence will, by definition, only move to the next spell in the sequence once the prior spell has been successfully cast.

The only limitation here would be the statistically anomoly resulting in a massive series of random numbers ALL trying to cast holy shield. If you are a masher like I am, the odds are probably pretty low that you'd get "lag" due to this.

[Greythan]

Okay, so I use Bartender4 and don't want to switch to Macaroon. The 6969 macro is over the limit. Any way to break this into multiple macros? I'm thinking I may be forced into a /castrandom setup because of this limitation.

EDIT: Had the macro coded wrong. Its exactly 255 with my using Judgement of Wisdom for a caster-heavy group.

Wowphreaks 6969 works great. I'm even glyphed for improved consecration which extends the cooldown to 10 secs. Watching testing dummy looked like spells were firing on all cooldowns or at least very close. Not sure this has to be perfect anyway, but easy. :)

I don't follow the coding of avenger's shield in so many people's macros. Its a pull tool for me and not something I envision in a sequence anyway. So, I have it on its own button. Really would be a two step macro for me.

Next question: In Hefner's macro, it is safe to presume that the third click will fire if the second macro (the 6969) is skipping a global? Otherwise, the castsequence in the second button (6969) would always fire a spell never getting to the third click, right?

[wowphreak]

I was being dismissive to wolpak, who had been dismissive to me. Not to you Simulcra. Look at my first post in the thread...

As far as keeping Holy Shield up 100% of the time... it is not as important in WotLK... it was vital in BC because you needed ti to push crushing blows off the hit table. They aren't on there, and if you have 540 defense, then criticals aren't either... so the only thing constant block capping provides you is pushing hit off the table (in exchange for block). While this is great for fast hitting bosses, it does little for hard hitting bosses. And your macro, as provided above, is going to have alot of deadspace, and alot of abilities off cooldown...ahhh sorry /slap me - I hate the interwebz sometimes lol

I've been thinking about this today instead of working :) wowphreaks macro works for him and you and lots of other people so why not for me? I think it may be a case of expectation management. I'm looking for a macro combo that will replicate me, which is what mine nearly does and wowphreaks doesn't for some bizarre reason. I'm going to give his macro another go and report back. But that'll be awhile as I'm over in the UK for work and only have my work laptop >.< so I'll just be levelling my lock.

Whats not working if yeh spam it'll nail every gcd shield should up all the time as with consecrate.

here a great example someone made a vid of what suppose look like when yeh do it manually they hit every gcd which means there getting the max dps/tps they can get out of the pali.
http://www.pinkraidframes.com/blog/?p=317
here's a great explanation of it http://www.pinkraidframes.com/blog/?p=73

Greythan: if yeh really against adding another addon, I can understand why, yeh can use

/castsequence Holy Shield, Hammer of the Righteous, Judgement of Light,Shield of Righteousness,Consecration, Hammer of the Righteous, Holy Shield,Shield of Righteousness,Judgement of Light, Hammer of the Righteous, Consecration,Shield of Righteousness

It really doesn't matter where yeh start in the chain only problem will be yeh might not be cover by Holy Shield up to 6-7 seconds of the beginning of the fight.

[Simulacra]

OK - remembered why wowphreaks macro didn't work that well for me, it was because I was using a modified version as the original one wasn't within the 255 char limit (258 long) and my modified version was crap - so, sorry about that wowphreak :)


/castsequence reset=combat Holy Shield,Hammer of the Righteous,Judgement of Light,Shield of Righteousness,Consecration,Hammer of the Righteous,Holy Shield,Shield of Righteousness,Judgement of Light,Hammer of the Righteous,Consecration,Shield of Righteousness

So the question is what are you putting this macro into so that it fits? I could probably sort something out in bindpad maybe, I don't run BT4 or macaroon

[wolpak]

I was being dismissive to wolpak, who had been dismissive to me. Not to you Simulcra. Look at my first post in the thread...

As far as keeping Holy Shield up 100% of the time... it is not as important in WotLK... it was vital in BC because you needed ti to push crushing blows off the hit table. They aren't on there, and if you have 540 defense, then criticals aren't either... so the only thing constant block capping provides you is pushing hit off the table (in exchange for block). While this is great for fast hitting bosses, it does little for hard hitting bosses. And your macro, as provided above, is going to have alot of deadspace, and alot of abilities off cooldown...

Forgot about this thread. Show me where I was dismissive? I asked for people to test out the macro and you said it ain't gonna work.

[Greythan]

I was being dismissive to wolpak, who had been dismissive to me. Not to you Simulcra. Look at my first post in the thread...

As far as keeping Holy Shield up 100% of the time... it is not as important in WotLK... it was vital in BC because you needed ti to push crushing blows off the hit table. They aren't on there, and if you have 540 defense, then criticals aren't either... so the only thing constant block capping provides you is pushing hit off the table (in exchange for block). While this is great for fast hitting bosses, it does little for hard hitting bosses. And your macro, as provided above, is going to have alot of deadspace, and alot of abilities off cooldown...

Forgot about this thread. Show me where I was dismissive? I asked for people to test out the macro and you said it ain't gonna work.
Let's just drop that part or take it to PM's. The content in this thread is actually pretty interesting. ;)