Addon Idea

Let me start by giving you the background that makes me want to write this addon. I am currently playing with 3 accounts. My primary goal will be for PVE. I would be filling my group with a Tank and a Healer. The tank and healer will mostly be certain players but that will not be exclusive.

Currently We are pretty much forced to use named characters follows and assists, and generally that works fine. Where it does not work is when I want to heal party members without changing targets. If you use the Party1 to 4 variables, it will always get Party1 and 2 wrong.



This is where my idea for an addon comes in. Basically the addon would be active on all the characters you have. You will set a Master then X number of Slaves that would connect (Sync) to it. The master automatically sets the order of the party based on his party layout, or possible based on a UI config option. Once this is done, it creates global variables that represent each party member. So if the Masters Screen shows that Player 2 needs a heal, you know who that is and can assign the macro on the slave,

/cast [target=P2] heal



I am really not too sure if I have explained this clearly. To those that understood my rambling, what do you think?

Several problems, some workable, some not...

First, party1 is different for everyone in the party, no guarantee that it's the same person. This is easily identifiable by creating some form of other tracking system and broadcasting data as such...

Beyond all that, the targeting system is protected, so as far as making macro's that support custom [target=???] I don't believe it's possible.

Zanthor is correct.

You can actually game the system a bit. I've done this with mod/macro combos of my own. Basically you wait on the event that triggers going into combat, at this point you take a macro template that is stored in a mod and write the correct names in the placeholders. Then you can store this into a macro with a specific name.

very pseudo code

Code:

---

list={"sometarget"="bob"}
template="/cast [target=<sometarget>] Chain Heal"
macro=generatemacro(template,list)
writemacro("macroname",macro)

---

Obviously you could have very complex templates set up. Maybe you always want ctrl-1 to heal party1 as seen on the master, all the clones would write out the correct macro to map this properly.

I think I may have worked out a way to get around this without a Mod. I only ever have 2 Masters, Razorbaxftw and Razorslax.

Focus Macro for Slaves.
/assist [target=Razorbaxftw, exists] [party, raid] [target=Razorslax, exists] [party, raid]
/focus
This will set the slaves focus to my Masters target assuming that my Master Exists and his target is in the Party/Raid.

I believe this will allow me to just use the standard focus controls. All I do is set the focus while a master has a Target.

This is only theory until I get home tonight and try it;)

The only thing this does not really help with is my button heals that heal a specific party member, since I use 10 keys (2 spells per party member) to heal the 5 party members.

Now if I change this to be target based, it may slow down combat a little, as I will have to click on the target I want healed, but it will save me lots of buttons on my X-Keys Pro.

So my new healing macro will be
/cast [target:focustarget] healing wave

It’s good enough for me;).

I did write an AddOn i called MultiBox. It was kind of like Multibox, only the same AddOn ran on all accounts, and you changed the settings on the clones from the main. All you needed to do with the clones was to set the master. I have been thinking i should give out the code for that one even though it's not really finished and i don't think i will work on it a whole lot more. Perhaps it could be of use anyway. I usually run out of interest right after the main code is completed, the nitty bitty things aren't for me :-) It does have a working structure and sticky follow and i think something else. I had plans on adding auto sharing of quests on the main, since the clones already have auto accept. There also seems to be a way to automatically establish follow after a clone have been feared. Which would pretty much rock.

Oh yeah, it also automatically set all the clones to follow he main and established a group with all the clones in the correct order. As in on the main the clones was listed in the order Char1, Char2, Char3, Char4, Char5 in the left hand corner. It just bugged me when they where in random order.