Trying to figure how to tweak Assisting focus a bit with this setup

[caffiend86]

Ok for my pally tank, 3 mage and holy priest party I'm trying to figure out how to tweak this a bit. All of my macros start with the following line below so I my mages and other DPS types use focus for assisting but also check to see if its helpful, thus allowing for focus sheeping as needed. The key reason I do this is so I can change who everyone is assisting by using other macros to change the focus and thus who my multibox party is assisting. The problem is when I pass focus in this means the current leader gets stuck with sticky targetting, ie the mage tries to assist itself first and picks up its old target (as it hasn't updated yet). Wondering if any of you guys have any thoughts on how to tweak this. I thought about using stopmacro, however I don't see that working as who the target is has to be pretty early in the macro or else your casting in thin air.

/a [target=focus,help] focus; Party1

So bottom line anyone have any ideas about how to do the above, but not assist when focus=player?


Full example of one of my mage macros this one for Fireball with Trinkets + Fire Blast on Alt cast

#showtooltip Fireball
/a [target=focus,help] focus; Party1
/stopcasting [mod:alt]
/use [mod:alt] 14
/use [mod:alt[ 13
/cast [mod:alt,harm] [target=targettarget,harm,mod:alt]Fire Blast; [harm][target=targettarget,harm]Fireball

[zhenyalix]

Heheh i have the exact same setup pally tank priest healer 3x mage dps <3 <3 dunno if it helps but i dps with:

#showtooltip
/cast [exists,harm,nodead] fireball
/stopmacro [exists,harm,nodead]
/assist Party1
/cast [exists,harm,nodead] fireball

If you don't have a target... or current is dead then it will pickup your current target (party1 is the pally tank) to sheep i have two macros... first to grab focus:

/assist party1
/focus [target=focus]
/p --== Focus is on "%f" ==--

(on my main i have three keybinds one for each mage furthermore each key also sets a raid icon - the luckycharms symbols so i can verify there wasn't any lag and each have the right focus)

then to sheep...

#ShowTooltip
/cast [target=focus] Polymorph
/p --== Sheeping "%f" ==--
/target Party1

i added the retarget at the end just as a catch22 if my mages ever were attempting to dps the wrong target (stuck on someone in the distance cause i hit the firball key on accident etc) so i can just spam a fake sheep on each mage to get them to reset and assist me again (you prob could put this in a seperate macro all together but it hasn't been bad for me yet and i try to minimize the ammount of buttons i need :p

[zhenyalix]

if your curious i do heals like this - unbind the f1-f5 hotkeys on my main so i never lose target while dps'ing and can easily just hit F1-F5 to send a heal on whoever needs healing... add some modifiers for if you want a flash heal instead of greater etc and your good to go

#ShowTooltip
/cast [mod:alt,mod:ctrl,target=party4] [mod:alt,target=party1] [mod:ctrl,target=party2] [mod:shift,target=party3] [nomodifier,target=player] Greater Heal

the trick is (and i assume u can do this with keyclone etc - i wrote my own version of keyclone just to practice programming so i'm not positive) but i have my priests window hit the macro differently based on which f1-f5 hotkey i hit - IE if i hit F5 the priests window will send alt+1 (greater heal is the 1st macro on my hotbar) and then my priest will cast greater heal on the last member of the party :p

then on my main i have ctrl+f1-f5 be the same logic except it hits a macro on the priest for renew (2nd macro) all again with the same logic only diff is the priest then hits alt+2 etc etc :P hope that wasn't too confusing >.<

[Djarid]

catfiend can you give more details on what you mean by "but not assist when focus=player?"

what are you trying to achieve?

[caffiend86]

Actually after monkeying with this for days and thinking about some of the stuff written above I think I found a solution that makes this whole thing work...

Edit:
Well I thought the one below was working, however while it does prevent the retargetting problem of a character trying to assist itself, it doesn't allow for focus sheeping as the mage will attempt to fireball its hostile focus..... Argggg... more work ahead.

#showtooltip Fireball
/a [target=focus,help]focus;[target=focus,exists] party1
/stopcasting [mod:alt]
/use [mod:alt] 14
/use [mod:alt[ 13
/cast [mod:alt,harm] [target=targettarget,harm,mod:alt]Fire Blast; [harm][target=targettarget,harm]Fireball

To paint the picture my typical party = tanking pally Maivis, Mages Neeva Nynia and Tyia and Holy Priest Mirdyn. Other macros are in place to change their focus to specific characters when activated (as listed below).

Now the fireball macro does some very specific stuff based on criteria below
if focus exists and is helpful, assist focus and cast fireball, if focus exists and is not helpful (harm or neutral) assist party1 and cast fireball if no focus exists cast fireball on current target without trying to assist anyone... if alt is pressed do the above but cast fireblast instead of fireball and activate trinkets.
Focus pass to a different party member by name used by all party members except Neeva

Focus Pass #3 (bound to ctrl+alt +3)
/focus [target=neeva,exists,nodead] Neeva
/Script ChangeActionBarPage(1);
/script SetView(3);
/stopmacro [nomounted]
/follow focus

However on Neeva that macro reads as follows, so with above fireball macro not trying to assist anyone if focus does not exist, she will fireball her current target with impunity and the rest of the party follows her cast...

/clearfocus
/script ChangeActionBarPage(2);
/c ky Set and in Charge
/script SetView(3);
/stopmacro [nomounted]
/follow focus

What was happening previously was Neeva was setting her focus to herself, so Neeva's focus = Neeva. When trying to cast a fireball after changing targets quickly, the macro would attempt to assist itself and pick the old target resulting in having to wait a second after changing targets in order to cast fireball on the intended target (generally meaning a quick death in pvp). So after retooling a bit all my mage macros work fine after passing focus quickly :)

Note because of the inclusion of [harm][target=targettarget,harm] the mage could assist a healer in the process of healing someone and still fireball the target of whomever the healer is healing...

[caffiend86]

catfiend can you give more details on what you mean by "but not assist when focus=player?"

what are you trying to achieve?Bottom line what I'm trying to accomplish is assist focus if focus is helpful, assist party1 if focus is harmful, and not assist anyone if focus doesn't exist or a character's focus is itself (ie Neeva's Focus = Neeva). End result is to allow who dps is following to be changed quickly by changing the focus pointing other toons and still allow for focus sheeping....

[Djarid]

ok, got you.

Now what problem are you having with a character trying to assist themselves? I don't have this problem at all, although I used to have main target assist issues before I started using options in my macros.

I think the on assist, all characters query the server for the target of the main. Yes even the character that is assisting itself. So the server delay applies to the brain/main in the same way it applies to the followers.

I used to have a manual assist key and would hit that after selecting a target. Sometimes, if I was a tad hasty, the mains target would shift when this button was presses.

I now use trinity and every spell is actually a trinity macro with


/cast(sequence) [harm][target=focustarget,harm][target=party1target,harm] spell

the harms can be helps for beneficial spells. This means it will use the characters target if it can hurt it, it will use focus as the brain if the focus's target can be hurt, if it can't (i.e. focus is not the brain) then it will use party1target's target if it can be hurt.

I see one glaring problem with your macro... you have a stop casting on mod:alt but you also only cast the Fire Blast if alt is press... therefore you will never cast a fireball.
Assuming you want the trinkets to trigger on fireball and not fireblast due to the greater % of +dmg fireball gets can I recommend


#showtooltip Fireball
/use [nomod] 14
/use [nomod[ 13
/cast [mod:alt,harm][target=focustarget,harm,mod:alt][target=party1target,harm,mod:alt]Fire Blast;
/cast [nomod,harm][target=focustarget,nomod,harm][target=party1target,nomod,harm]Fireball

you could put both spells on one line but that will only save 5 characters.

using this macro, you have have Neeva have herself as focus, as the spell will still have the correct target.

if the clones have a harm target they will trinket and FB that target (if alt is held, no trinkets and Fire Blast is cast instead) If the clones have no harm target but the focus has a harm target then FB will be cast at the brain's target if the clones have no harm target and the focus has not harm target (normally if no focus is used) but the party leader has a harm target the clones will FB the party leader's target.with this, even if neeva is the focus of neeva, if neeva hasa target, then neeva-target = focustarget

[caffiend86]

Djarid, thank you for the above, it worked but with one fatal exception. When I attempted do do focused sheeping, ie set a hostile mob to be a mages focus so I could keep resheeping it, the mage would keep attacking their focus target instead of assisting party1.

So upon further review and trying to starting fresh I came up with the following thats working pretty well...

#showtooltip Fireball
/a [target=focus,help]; [target=focus,noexists];party1
/use [mod:alt] 14
/use [mod:alt] 13
/cast [mod:alt]Fire Blast; Fireball

Key difference is the second clause in the assist line, if there is no focus the mage won't assist anyone as its effectively Assist []. This allows for assisting a friendly focus, focused sheeping and doesn't suffer from the mage clearing or picking up its old target when she's giving instructions to the rest of the party. Another nice side effect is I don't need to change these macros when I'm in singlebox mode :)

The only downside is when a mage is assisting a healer it won't do target of target harm checking, but thats something I can live with.

Thx again for your assistance, at some point when I streamline these macros a bit more I'll post the full set of what I'm using, etc...