Well, my DPS isn't near what it was but at least I can still down all the heroic bosses i could before the change. So maybe I'm not leaving just yet. :)
Printable View
Well, my DPS isn't near what it was but at least I can still down all the heroic bosses i could before the change. So maybe I'm not leaving just yet. :)
I dont find that I need to metronome myself at all, its just a matter of figuring out roughly how much you spam (or don't) and putting in the proper padding in the form of commas.Quote:
Originally Posted by Moorea
I've entered the heroic HOL to get my first 2 Emblems of Triumph, and i just had to go out after the first two packs. This change to /castrandom has serious impact on my mixed team. I've enjoyed the very relaxing way to play this game (the mash button was associated to 'mousewheel up')
For balance druid or holy priest it's not big hit, there are just few spells on CD, so /castsequence was always the option.
For my other three classes, prot paladin (everything has CD), elemental shaman and destro lock, it's fatal impact as /castsequence is not useable (paladin) or just very gimped for them, due to spells that have CD. Puting spells with CD into castsequence is just possible when done carefuly and it results in significant DPS loss.
I've tryed to se up the /click macro yesterday, but with no luck. I'll try again if this still has the same function like before 3.2.
Maybe it would be possible to implement 'randomizer' feature to Keyclone, that should allow to send for one keypress one random key (from user defined list) to all clients. I guess the value of the software would be one step higher.
I just got redirected to this thread. WOW, no wonder! My Shaman spend more time standing around looking at each other now.
Personally I tested and retested /castrandom vs. /castsequence on the dummies in SW. Large majority of the time my /castrandom gave a higher dps and total dmg. But different people get different results. It's a long ongoing disscution, , well it WAS ongoing.....may be over now ;o)
Not to derail the thread, but if you put a series of /click commands into a single macro will they every get stuck/held up? Been awhile since I messed around with click, but what happens in this case:
main macro
/click button1
/click button2
/click button3
Does it try to press 1,2 and 3 simultaneously or do I have to press the main macro button three times to get button 1, 2 and 3 to go off in sequence??? I never managed to figure it out when I was trying to optimize my arcane mage macro.
For the mixed team this is a challenge too.
My paladin is on a 696 castsequence macro. No impact.
My priest doesn't random or sequence anything. All direct called spells.
My shaman was using a castrandom to get chain lightning in the mix for trash pulls. I'll either go castsequence back to flame shock/lvb/lb/cl or a straight lb spam.
My mage uses a gimped castsequence anyway because I haven't cared to try to optimize. 3 arcane barrages followed by an arcane blast and arcane missles (hoping to take advantage of the mage missle proc).
Warlock is demo specced so I've been using a straight shadowbolt spam + Felguard on him. Suboptimal I've noticed, but no impact here.
I clear Gundrak in under an hour without wipes.
My point is for grinding badges in heroics, this is not a death blow. For optimizing DPS in raid or other "stretch" settings.... it probably hurts a bit.
I noticed this bug/change when i tried playing my multiclass team today.
/castrandom was unable to cast anything at all for me, even when i tried to make it cast random pally blessings, so i replaced all my castrandoms with castsequences and /cast's.
My paladin uses:
#show Holy Shield
/stopmacro [mod]
/click MultiBarBottomRight10
On MultiBarBottomRight10, I have:
#show Holy Shield
/castsequence reset=8 Holy Shield,Hammer of the Righteous,Judgement of Wisdom,Shield of Righteousness,Consecration,Hammer of the Righteous,Holy Shield,Shield of Righteousness,Judgement of Light,Hammer of the Righteous,Consecration,Shield of Righteousness
The second macro is 255 characters long, so this runs fine even without any addons. Honestly, I'd like double Judgement of Wisdom, but Light is a character less then Wisdom and I'm at the 255 character limit.
My shammies have:
#show Lightning Bolt
/Click MultiBarBottomRightButton9
/Click MultiBarBottomRightButton10
On 9, I have:
#show Lightning Bolt
/castsequence reset=8 Lightning Bolt,,,,,,,,,,,(comma's to 255 limit)
On 10, I have:
#show Lightning Bolt
/castsequence reset=8 Flame Shock, Lava Burst, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Lava Burst, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt
With their level of haste, this gets me 1x Lightning Bolt and then Flame Shock refreshed just after it expires, with two Lava Bursts along its duration. Lightning Bolt spam in between. The reason for the first LB is to give my pally a moment to build a bit of aggro.
For the pally, I'm clicking a simple sequence, with each ability clicked at about the point it is clickable. For the shammies, they're going 1 LB, and then a castsequence.
I personally spam at 2 presses per second. For this team, I'm not really utilizing /Click to the fullest. Will definitely need to adjust my hunter in the mixed team - was using the /click's posted in the /Click thread.
Due to this change and the effect it has had on my dps, I am canceling three out of five accounts. I may continue to still multibox my healer and tank, but I'm not sure.
I'm aware that there may be other ways to make my characters still work, but I'm not really interested in changing after 2 years + of playing them the way I was.
I don't really know how you guys feel about it, but I find that this stealth change by Blizzard is poor form. It is as if they knew it would be grossly unpopular, and wanted to hide it as if no one would notice. It's a pretty big change from how things were done, and it affects more than our admittedly small comunity here. The crying on the wow forums, both for and against, demonstrates this.
When I found out how badly my characters were performing following the patch, I got a distinctly unpleasant feeling in that place you don't talk about at parties.
This is a low point for me in my multiboxing career. No other changes that I've dealt with have made such a difference to me as a multiboxer. With that actually typed out, I fear I may be over-responding, but the sick feeling remains.
make sure you express all that in your cancellation form now
cuz we ain't gonna do anything about it
Might be worth finding out of there are any reset verbs
/castrandom reset=1 spell, list, here
It's bizarre isn't it? I really haven't noticed any difference by removing castrandom. I just removed all castrandom from the team, replaced with castsequences. All good, no drop in dps and I don't need to mash my keyboard a 1000 times a second. BTW, I'm totally going to steal Ualaa's macros above - looks good.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nuclearone
And to finally answer your post: Yes you are over responding. Very much so. lol.
/castrandom is dead - oh well bye bye - it did always feel a little like an exploit to me anyway
Annoying, yes, but enough to cancel over? Not for me. Castrandom never stood up to castsequence or click macros, it was utility for things I didn't feel like weaving in. Now I'll just throw them in to my macros in other ways, probably just longer, more elabortate /click usage.
I stick with castsequence macros on all my toons. The only ones I've setup castrandom on were my hunters. I used their melee attacks in the castrandom but only when the targets get too close. That way they would all get a chance to hit Wing Clip on the targets at different intervals. Guess I'll have to change that up now. All my dps macros are all set to where they'd hit right when the cooldowns are reset on the spells. And then just in time to reset my hunter's stings and such.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...260&pageNo=1#0
"We allow players to use macros for convenience, especially when automating tasks that they do often. Where macros cross the line is when they are making the decision instead of the player. In the old-days, there were addons that would essentially target a player with a debuff and cure it. That crossed the line for us – the mod was playing the game instead of the player.
In the /castrandom case, players were sometimes using these macros to cast the ability that wasn’t on cooldown without having to recognize this fact or hit the right button. Players using this system had an unfair advantage against players that weren’t. Instead of having to cope with the complexity built into the class, players could just spam one key and have the game “do the right thing.”
We recognize that in some cases, certain classes are probably over complex or else the default WoW UI doesn’t provide the information you need in a form where you can quickly notice that say an ability has proc’d or another is on cooldown. In these cases, we would like to fix the class or UI problem, not require all of our players to use macros to get around the limitation. You can help us identify those situations where you feel overly-dependent on a /castrandom macro so we can start to address those problems.
We also recognize that players sometimes used /castrandom for options that were truly random and with no gameplay consequence, such as picking a random polymorph animal, companion or mount. In these situations, we want to give you specific commands you can use to get the desired functionality. We have no problem with you rolling the dice in this manner. "
Tried this tonite on my hunters and it did not work for me. the macros I made were:Quote:
Originally Posted by HPAVC
/assist focus
/castrandom Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, Wing Clip, Counterattack
kept hanging up when it would reselect the same spell again after being cast
/assist focus
/castrandom reset=1 Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, Wing Clip, Counterattack
wouldn't even recognize the first spell and didn't even give me an error message
So I redid this macro to the following:
/assist focus
/castsequence reset=combat Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, Wing Clip, Counterattack
it works, but slaves stop attacking if it gets caught up on a spell that's on cooldown. Gonna add into each macro /startattack and see if this will make them autoattack when in melee range.
I changed the order of Wing Clip on each slave so that they cast it at different times as to keep it on the target after one ends.
So - how long do you think the /click alternative will remain unchanged?Quote:
Originally Posted by kadaan
The reasons they quote for changing castrandom seem equally applicable to the /click way of doing things.
The change is definitely intentional. I read a blue post about it a couple of days ago. The WoW forums are all down at the moment, so I can't link, but if you head over to somewhere like http://blue.cardplace.com/search.html and search for "castrandom" there's confirmation right there.
I'm a bit puzzled as to why most people are so upset really (in fact, I'm amazed they ever allowed castrandom to skip abilities on cooldown). I changed my shammy and hunter teams from castrandom to castsequence in a matter of minutes and there's really no appreciable difference in their damage output.
I imagine it's more a problem for people who run classes with procs you have to actively respond to though.
edit: ah, the forums are back now.... here you go:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...geNo=1&sid=1#0
Quote:
Originally Posted by bluedude
I think what people meant by /click alternative fur, is specifically /castsequence macro's where comma's are used to emulate delays. For instance, refreshing a dot every 20 seconds or so. /click doesnt necessarily enable this, but it makes it cleaner. I really foresee an eventually /castsequence nerf; since it seems like their whole intention is to create a MMO version of whack-a-mole. (I refer to the fact that they think every class should watch every cooldown like a hawk, waiting for something to pop up, or an ability to proc, etc. while simultaneously dealing with all their gimmicky things such as dodging cones and spikes and whatever silly mechanic they came up with for fight xyz.)
"In the /castrandom case, players were sometimes using these macros to cast the ability that wasn’t on cooldown without having to recognize this fact or hit the right button. Players using this system had an unfair advantage against players that weren’t."
the "refresh sting evry 15 second' macro is an example of /castsequence enabling a player to not have to pay attention to their stings at all, much less when to reffresh them. (also used I'm sure for many many dots and Hots)
Additionally, if you chain together many /castsequence macros of the format /castsequence chain lightning,,,,,,,,,,,,(approximately 5 seconds or whatever of comma's) together, the whole /click sequence allows the player to press one button and have that button decide to cast abilities that are off cooldown, without the player haing to recognize this fact.
Its their game, so they can do what they want. I suppose we could still graph out abilities and make really long /castsequences that don't rely on comma spacing. But then, that is pretty similar to the dot refreshing every x seconds too...you could simply fill the intervening x seconds with regular abilities. So, by their logic, /castsequence makes decisions for the player as well, although its a predictable sequence like playing a piano, so they might think that aspect of castsequence is ok.
I'm not 'freaking out' or anything; just saying that after reading their logic, i'm thinking /castsquence might be headed for a nerf as well. because sooner or later the masses will figure out how to use /castsequence; and there will be 'all in one' /castsequence macro's all over wow-wiki; which will bring down the ire of blizzard. lol.
maybe by then some other interesting game will be out. I really don't want to have to hit 10+ keys on my keyboard just to do my DPS rotation, while trying to target and move about/heal/etc.
Ishar
Edited for typos.
Ishar,
you hit the nail on the head, this was my point with the /click spam technique.
They could "fix" this in a second by disallowing empty clauses in castsequence.
However after giving it further thought it's not a huge issue even if they did remove it.
We all multiboxed perfectly well before it became a common technique (I'm multiboxing perfectly well without it already :) )
Okay, it might mean that a team won't sustain flawless, maximum DPS 100% of the time but unless the content is very challenging to you, you don' t need maximum DPS all the time.
cast sequences do not offer the same hands off approach that Blizzard found issue with in castrandom. Our castsequence and click macros do not decide anything. Everything they do is explicitly mapped out in advance.
Now, take a normal person, playing one character. Would you tell them to use a massive /click sequence in order to raid? No, you wouldn't because they would put that player at a disadvantage to players who use shorter castsequences and watch their timers for refreshing debuffs/stings/hots/whatever.
There is nothing gained in a longer castsequence or use of commas and usually people who depend on them give up some flexability. That whole "refresh stings every X seconds" castsequence is all well and good....what happens when you miss? What happens when the poop hits the fan and you have to spam some other keys for a bit? Now your timing is all off.
There was none of that tradeoff whatsoever with castrandom. There was no reason at all not to use it, and you didn't have to plan out or think about anything. Just throw all your random crap that you occasionally might find useful or never remember to use into one long castrandom and never worry about it again. This is why they changed it. It made using cooldowns and situational abilities essentially free passive DPS.
Gerneally speaking, I'm not too happy with the cast random nerf. Not that it broke anything ground breaking for me, but its this notion that Blizz values their whack-a-mole mechanics more than making tedious tasks less annoying.
The really annoying thing is its the fault of Blizzard to begin with with stupid mechanics like MC bosses who curse an entire raid, or procs that amount to mashing a button when a light turns on.
I don't see /click being on the chopping block. /Castsequence likely is though. Can't have people not manually timing their button presses you know.
/bump only because I've been playing strong but have been away from Dual-Boxing.com for a few months. I was poking around yesterday and found this thread. Thankfully I use mostly of /click macros anyway but some of my toons are screwed. (poor prot warrior)
Anyway, anyone coming back needs to see this.
Thanks for the discussion guys.
I take a couple months off to enjoy being outside and learning how to fly RC planes, and come back and my glorious macros just don't work anymore... Damn, just damn... :(
/click macros gave my DPS a 20%+ boot over the /castrandom! And for that I <3 FursphereQuote:
Originally Posted by robtest