Shaman Matrix Casting

I have an idea I'm going to try tonight. Perhaps others are already doing this and I'm a Johnny-come-lately, but here it is.

The idea is to setup /castsequence macros to create just 3 buttons to control my Shaman for casting Lightning Bolts and Healing at the same time as a group. One button will do Light Healing, another Medium Healing and a third Heavy Healing. Each /castsequence will list 5 different spells for each toon. These buttons would be used in those battles where I need some level of constant healing, otherwise I will just spam LB's and whatnot and throw in heals when I need to.

Here are the matrices:

Light Healing Matrix (heavy damage)
Resto LHW LB LB HW LB
Elem1 LB LB LHW LB LB
Elem2 LB LB LB LB LHW
Elem3 LB LHW LB LB LB

Medium Healing Matrix (medium damage)
Resto LHW HW LHW HW LHW
Elem1 LB LB LB LHW LB
Elem2 LB LHW LB LB LHW
Elem3 LHW LB LHW LB LB

Heavy Healing Matrix (light damage)
Resto HW HW LHW HW HW
Elem1 LB LHW LB LHW LB
Elem2 LHW LB HW LB LHW
Elem3 LHW LHW LB LHW LHW

After 5 presses I will have gone through 20 total spells.

Pressing Light Healing 5 times results in 15 Lightning bolts and 5 heals in those 20 presses with the heals spread out among the Shaman helping to even out mana usage.

Medium Healing 5 times results in 10 bolts and 10 heals.

Heavy Healing 5 times results in 6 bolts and 14 heals with a few more of them being HW's than with Light and Medium.

I would bounce around between these keys depending on the situation. So maybe at the start of a heavy pull with my Pally tank -- say a 4 lobster pull in Heroic Slave Pens -- I'd do a couple of Heavies, then sneak in a Medium or Light to get in more DPS. As mobs fall I would be able to slack off on Heavy and go down to Medium or Light and get a lot more damage done.

I wouldn't even care if the cast sequence macros got out of sync between the toons, I would still get the effect of Light, Medium and Heavy healing anyway.

Between those presses I'll kick in some shocks and maybe even chance Chain Lightning if I have a good hold on aggro. But I think this might reduce decision making during the heat of a battle and have an overall positive on the outcome with less effort and stress.

I'll see how this goes and report on it.

Anyone already doing this?

I'm almost certain that you can't cast damage spells and friendly spells in the same cast sequence.

I believe the script will be to static. When you are fighting a certain mob you will just overheal, which is just useless mana burn...

It just won't be effective in the long run. But i like the idea.

Cool idea.

couldn't you put conditions like [target=focus,help][target=focustarget,harm]? or would it not select the right spell in the sequence? The sequence would have to check it's conditions every cast. I don't know how that aspect of the castsequence macro works.

I would just have the usual DPS button, be it just lighthing bolts, or a sequence of LB CL or whatever, and have another set of castsequences for heal, with lots of blanks
Toon1 LHW,,,,
Toon2 ,LHW,,,
Toon3 ,,LHW,,
Toon4 ,,,LHW,
Toon5 ,,,,LHW

For the targetting issue I have two castsequence statements in the same macro. It works. Not sure if pointers are being tracked separately for the cast sequences or just one pointer for the macro. Regardless, it works to interweave friendly and harmful casts.

/castsequence reset=15/combat [target=party1] healing wave, ,lesser healing wave, ,lesser healing wave

/castsequence reset=15/combat [target=party1target] ,lightning bolt,,lightning bolt,

[quote='Blokus',index.php?page=Thread&postID=86698# post86698]/castsequence reset=15/combat [target=party1] healing wave, ,lesser healing wave, ,lesser healing wave

/castsequence reset=15/combat [target=party1target] ,lightning bolt,,lightning bolt,[/quote]this is genius, I see it work best with "brain" setup like this one [url='http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=6290']Oooh new assist without focus macro!![/url]

so you can have:
/castsequence reset=5/combat [target=target-target, harm] ,lightning bolt,,lightning bolt,
/castsequence reset=5/combat [target=target-target-target, help] healing wave, ,lesser healing wave, ,lesser healing wave

but personally I would rather rely on focus and have independent heals for party members
but I do see it usefull even in my setup like:
/castsequence reset=5/combat [target=party1] healing wave, ,lesser healing wave, ,lesser healing wave
/castsequence reset=5/combat [target=focus-target] ,lightning bolt,,lightning bolt,

but still independent macros much simpler and less confusing to remember to use right one, and just count how many macros you have to do for this setup
separate macro for each party member times 3; that's 15 macros just for healer...

Well, at least thats what I'm trying. It doesn't seem to reset right. Gotta keep playing with it to see what I can do. Good idea I guess, execution just full of flaws at the moment LOL. If anyone else experiments with this, let me know how it comes out.

I am almost positive you can't have two castsequences in a macro and expect them to both work. Only 1 will work, or worse, both will reset. Oh, sure you can physically type them in, but they will turn into casts, not castsequences. And yeah, you can't have 2 conditions for castsequences and expect them both to work, so you are left with 1 button for DPS and 1 button for healing.
Like others have mentioned, what if you need 4 heals in a row? In your way, you will be trying to cast LB and heal at the same time. And what if you need 000 heals, you will be overhealing a lot even if 1 person heals. Just do like 8800 other people do and make a macro for DPS and one for healing. You can space out the healing like a few examples up so only 1-2 heal at a time.

Well hell, I'm not giving up my regular macros, just trying stuff. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. (Looks like no gain in this case, oh well)

Another thing you can try is to use the /click command to click another macro. My shammies are only lvl 48 at the moment, so I don't have much use for the matrix macros yet, but I tried it out and its possible to do the following:

Macro 1:

/castsequence [target=focustarget] Lightning Bolt,,Lightning Bolt,,Lightning Bolt
/click Bongos3ActionButton36

then in Bongos3ActionButton36 (or wherever else you want) you have Macro 2:

/cast [target=focustargettarget] Lesser Healing Wave

It always tried to cast macro 2, but only succeeds when theres a gap in the macro 1 castsequence.

I haven't tested this thoroughly yet, but I think it can be made to do what you're looking for.

Since two /castsequence commands in one macro didn't work too well ... sorta works, but mostly doesn't ... I switched to using the /castrandom command to try to get a similar effect. With the castrandom, I've found that if a blank spell is chosen it still allows the cast lightning bolt command to work on the next line. The castsequence command doesn't do this ... a blank spell is treated like a global cooldown and disallows other spells with global cooldowns to work.

Light Heal: This will choose Lesser Healing Wave 20% of the time but otherwise cast Lightning Bolt.
/castrandom [target=party1] lesser healing wave,,,,
/cast [target=party1target] lightning bolt

Medium Heal: Lesser Heal 50%, Lightning Bolt 50%
/castrandom [target=party1] lesser healing wave,
/cast [target=party1target] lightning bolt

Heavy Heal: Lesser Heal 80%, Lightning Bolt 20%
/castrandom [target=party1] lesser healing wave, lesser healing wave, lesser healing wave, lesser healing wave,
/cast [target=party1target] lightning bolt

Heavy Heal: Lesser heal 80%, Lightning Bolt 20% -- same as above but written differently and shorter
/castrandom [target=party1target] lightning bolt,,,,
/cast [target=party1] lesser healing wave

Its easy then to make all kinds of variations on these and to get different percentages and effects. Add more commas and/or commands to fine tune the percentages and mix up different spells. For example:

Theoretical Heavy Heal for my Resto: 60% Healing Wave, 30% Lesser Healing Wave, 5% Lightning Bolt, 5% Earth Shock
/castrandom [target=party1] healing wave, healing wave, healing wave, healing wave, healing wave, healing wave, lesser healing wave, lesser healing wave, lesser healing wave,
/castrandom [target=party1target] lightning bolt, earth shock


I realize of course that the percentages really only work out to be accurate over the course of many fights. In any given fight 3 Light Heal presses, for instance, might yield no heals or I might get 3 heals in a row from a Shaman. Since 4 Shaman are doing this at the same time, the overall effect may still be satisfactory. The idea of the Light Heal is that the tank isn't taking a whole lot of damage but I need a few heals scattered among all the keypresses until the mob is down.

Similar thing with the Heavy Heal. I mainly need a lot of healing against something that hits hard, but with a little damage scattered among those heals to take down the mob.

I tested this in a complete non-heroic Shattered Halls run last night and it worked pretty well. I did find that my Shaman used mana more evenly than with my previous macros where certain Shaman were designated to heal and others to damage. This was one of my main goals in this, but as someone said this may not stand up over time and may fail miserably in Heroics which I'm not quite ready for (close though).

Mainly I'm just goofing off and having fun with the macros!

After reading the last reply, got me thinking. Would the following work?

/castsequence [target=focustarget] Lightning Bolt,,Lightning Bolt,,Lightning Bolt
/cast [target=focustargettarget] Lesser Healing Wave

It seems to work in my (very) simple tests between healing party members.