Frankenstein's monster of macros, addons, and hardware

[Jheusse]

I've started multiboxing and gotten the basics down, I've climbed the learning curve to where things start to get complicated, and am edging away from hotstrings, or at least not 9 million of them.

Thing is I have too many options and combinations available to step up from the basic "push 3 to follow party1, push 4 to assist party1, spam 2 to bolt the target or 5 to shock" to make sense of it all. I start to have a grip but it all just starts unravelling.

I'm RAF leveling 4 shammies atm on an RP server with keyclone on a dual core XP32 4 GB 8600 GT 2 HDD box and a 22" monitor. Eventually I'll group the 4 with a feral, pally, or mage on my main account. I hate arena and currently just tolerate BGs (feral struggles, maybe the shammies will improve my outlook), so I can stick with software.

I have a Belkin n52te speedpad I've been trying to configure so I can be more effective raiding with my feral but still be able to swap to my 61 prot pally or 64 mage without major changes.

Now my wife (who rocks) got me a Logitech G15 keyboard and a fairly studly wireless mouse (a VX? or something similar) for my birthday. I've got a viable Keyclone setup that I like.

I've been reading up on Jamba waiting for it to have that degree of polish and "we've killed all the big bugs" to put it in, as I'm not coder enough to troubleshoot it intelligently. Better to wait for it to mature, I think it's about there.

From my reading I like the Focusless leaderless setup for PvE, it will give me the flexibility I want in changing leaders on the fly but don't have to litter my keyboard with "over 9,000" keybinds. Can also be used later when I bring in a true tank, the shammies can dps the target while the tank targets and pulls the next mob.

The place where I stumble is in the "let's staple all of this together", trying to run a Jamba based shammy team with a speedpad, G15, new mouse and a focusless leaderless macro set. I can layer macros on top of macros and never make anything work if I'm unlucky.

I admit I'm mostly getting myself confused in the theory/setup rather than just jumping in to DO it. Thing is, my time to play is limited at home (small children) so I've often weighed the decision of "start fighting with the settings and hardware" vs. "just keep using the crude and simple arrangement you have for now" and went for simple. This is because I don't want to waste too much of my 90 day RAF and because the constant interruptions from my kids means it's hard to have that unbroken stretch to figure out the setup.

I have tons of HD space, so I have 5 folders for my 5 man team (which is currently only 4 man) and a separate folder for my main account and my raiding toon with all the extra addons.

Anyone got any insights or run a similar setup and have some tips?

[Jafula]

From my reading I like the Focusless leaderless setup for PvE, it will give me the flexibility I want in changing leaders on the fly but don't have to litter my keyboard with "over 9,000" keybinds. Can also be used later when I bring in a true tank, the shammies can dps the target while the tank targets and pulls the next mob.

The hotstrings for keyclone really scare me. It seems like a lot of work; you have to build a set of hotstrings and macros (long ones!) for each team you want to run (I believe). But once setup, seems like it would be very nice.

I'm going to try and "sell" you another system and if you don't like it, I hope I've given you a little more food for thought.

I'm a relatively new multiboxer and I came in starting with the focusless "/cast [target=targettarget,harm] yada" macros. But having run with that system from 0-60; I've gotten annoyed with the toons dropping target and constantly having to hit the "target the leader" button before I can cast. Using this system I've completed every instance up to BRD (except for one encounter in RFD).

I have moved to the focus as leader system with "/cast [target=focustarget,harm] yada" macros. What I like about this system, is focus is very constant. Accidently changing focus is very hard to do. When casting these spells, my toons don't actually have a target, so this leaves target free for "other" uses. Although I don't actually use target for these "other" uses (yet). And I'm wondering why I didn't change sooner. As for shaman melee, /assist focus takes care of that. And if I need to solo on a toon, I just set its focus to itself.

I have 5 keybinds setup for switching leader. The keybinds and associated macros are exactly the same on each toon, so they all execute the same macro.

Key Macro
F8 /focus Yaswar
F9 /focus Yasprie
F10 /focus Yasmage
F11 /focus Yasham
F12 /focus Yashan

Now these keys are also setup using hotkeynet to swap wow windows around, so that when I press a key associated with a toon, I get that toons window as my main window.

Where Jamba comes in, is that it can automatically update the leader based on who has the current focus (as of 0.2b currently in testing). So my warning messages, etc, all come to the main window as well; my toons all follow the new master for quests, taxi etc. It works in combat, its pretty much instant. It's great!

Anyway, this system is simple to set up, compared with the hotstring/macro madness of the other lot. You can change leaders on the fly. Given you are RAF'ing I assume you've not hit 60 yet. IMHO just questing you really don't need focus; and I never used it for instances. YMMV.

And if you do quest and are currently managing quests individually on each toon, I do encourage you to give Jamba a go. The quest side of the addon really does take some of the sting out of questing as a multiboxer. I'm very willing to answer any PMs you may wish to send my way about Jamba.

Anyway, good luck with your "setup" endeavours.

[lacitpo]

Read most of what Jafula said and my experience with him is that he has a pretty good grip on what he's talking about. Seems about at a similar point in his boxing as I.

Now more about my setup.

I box on a mac so hotstrings are not an option for me. Seems like you are interested in PVE content if I read your post right. Seems like you want to run instances solo.

Here is my setup. I liked a focus free setup at first using [target=targettarget] on all my spells. I disliked this because for any dps macro containing a castsequence it had to be reset with a modifier and that was just one more thing I'd have to think about. I've moved over to this current setup.

All of my dps macros start with this line.

/target [target=target, harm, exists, nodead][target=mainassist-target, harm, exists, nodead]

My hunter who is my mainassist looks like this

/target [target=target, harm, exists, nodead][target=tank-target, harm, exists, nodead]

When I hit my dps bigbutton once, my hunter grabs my tank(my brain)'s target. I hit it again and that target gets passed to my 2 other DPSers. They will continue to target that mob until the mob dies allowing me to switch targets on my tank all I want and know that my DPS toons will continue to dps their mob till it's dead. This allows for intelligent castsequences not to constantly be reset, or to not be reset upon a new mob being dps'd.

I am lvl 44 now on my toons and have yet to come across a situation where this "sticky" targeting structure caused me any problems. If you believe you will have issues, just bind another key that clears targets on all your guys.

As for making this setup leaderless, that has to do with hotstrings which are a lot of config from what I've read, but very usefull once configured. I'd recommend something like Bartender or another action bar addons. I'd arrange 5 sets of actionbars and work out all your macros across the bars so that bar 1 means toon one is the leader, bar 2 means toon 2 is the leader, etc. This makes your keybinds easy to setup in a logical manner. Hope that helps. I feel like i'm not making a ton of sense today.

As for hardware, here's what I wish I had.

• Dedicated button for innervate
• Dedicated button for each "oh shit" ability (Divine Intervention, Rebirth as wipe recovery, Psychic Scream, etc)

Outside of that, I have found that a normal keyboard suits me find for PVE purposes.

As for configuration options, I would highly suggest looking into symbolic links for your wow directories. They allow you to only have to keep one wow directory really up to date and spread your config files across multiple other directories making updating addons a breeze. My current setup is one main wow directory that I use for my Brain. With a little copy and pasting, any toon I log onto as my brain has the same UI and setup. 4 Slave directories that all link to a single WTF config folder making it so that no matter which wow instance I use, as long as it's a slave instance, it has the UI and setup for slaves. This makes it so that keybindings from my brain config don't carry over to my slave instances.

[Jafula]

When I hit my dps bigbutton once, my hunter grabs my tank(my brain)'s target. I hit it again and that target gets passed to my 2 other DPSers. They will continue to target that mob until the mob dies allowing me to switch targets on my tank all I want and know that my DPS toons will continue to dps their mob till it's dead. This allows for intelligent castsequences not to constantly be reset, or to not be reset upon a new mob being dps'd.

Hmmm, a main assist; this idea, I like very much, thanks for sharing. Jheusse, sorry, don't mean to ninja your thread...

[Jheusse]

No worries on the ninja, it's food for thought, and a mild ramble helps me figure out the intersection of jamba and keyclone from the guy who made it suits me fine.

I like your idea on using function keys to nail down the focus, since I'm using F8-F12 to do my PiP window swapping within keyclone, if the jamba functionality also piggybacks on that I might be a lot closer to done. I raid as a feral, which isn't one of the classes that you have to master focus or you're a poser, so I can stand to occupy the focus slot.

My thoughts on the focusless leaderless approach is based on the work listed by OLIPCS here Focusless, targetless, 'leaderless' setup. and some of the other variants discussed on the following pages.

My current assist macro (half stolen half cobbled together from the wiki) though I just select the target on my main and hit the button.

/target [target=focus,help,nodead][target=party1,nodead]
/assist


Currently I can go 2 hours nuking stuff and questing and turning in quests without ever losing follow, but stoneclaws won't save me on overpulls as I level anymore, and getting one mob every time won't always be the case.

I like having a target populated so I can see that everyone has acquired it, it also allows me to see if I'm in range and since I use quartz I can check for the cast bar. If I were ever to get into arena then I'd have to adjust away from targeting so I could target one enemy and then use focus to sap someone else after the enemy ramped up to heal my target.

I do plan primarily to run instances and such solo, it got too annoying trying to get my 61 pally ramps runs to get HH rep to honored before questing HH. I also plan to run a mixed group up after these guys hit 60 and gift them to 60 so I can have single 60s for lock, priest, hunter, etc. If time and convenience allows I might run up a second team of something, but my time is a little limited due to small people and wife aggro.

I've considered the symbolic link route, but I need to get familiar with the basics first. Also since I have 2 hard drives with 2 of my MB folders on one and 3 on the other (actually 3 on each so I can reconfig as needed) that may be a little tougher.

I do plan to bring Jamba into my setup, because I have been manually completing quests. At least using 600:450 resolution makes the text and notifications almost legible if I squint a little.

I have more thoughts but this is getting long and I need to go help with dinner.

[lacitpo]

Notes on jamba being "complete" enough to be usable.

i'd say your golden man. Majority of the features that Jafula is working on are Icing to go on the big old Jamba cake he's made us.

• Automated Quest completion and accepting.
• Minor annoyance removal like selling junk, denying duals, auto accepting group invites from your master ect are all there.
• Auto follow after combat.
• Auto restocking water/arrows/food at merchants
• Auto repairing
• Follow break alerts

there are more but the bread and butter of simplified boxing is already there. I'd recommend you go ahead and take the time and install it. You might be amazed at the time it saves you not clicking 5 windows of quest text and accepting.

Hmmm, a main assist; this idea, I like very much, thanks for sharing.

Hunter is great for this since he has to be targeting the mob anyways. I use main assist because I have this idea that game lag might cause problems in the following situation if all of my guys pulled their targets off the tank.

Tank is quickly switching between targets to keep them all under control. I switch targets at almost the exact time that I mash my dps big button so all my guys look to my tank to aquire a new target. However, due to game lag, clonedkeys lag, or whatever lag, 2 toons get one target and 1 gets another target. Since my targets sticky, I'd have split DPS till both mobs died. Having a main assist just ensures that whatever my hunter is killing, so are my casters.

One more note. I love my hunter. Saved my ass a 100 times when my lock and priest ran out of mana and good old hunter and his pet just keep on DPSing. Saved my ass.

[aboron]

I have been developing my 5 box methods bit by bit over the 5 or so weeks since I went whole hog on the RaF x5 thing and the 5x shammies being my second set to 60 have benefited quite a bit from the errors i made with the first bunch.

I also have the nostromo and have used it for wow since the start - it just fits my hand so much better than anything else out there. My mouse hand will give out before the nostromo hand. (they should give me a % for that plug )

I use keyclone keymaps but for only 2 keys, '[' for "target my target", and ']' for "target me" - that way i can set up new group combinations very quickly and still allow for leader swaps on the fly.

My '[' macro on ToonD looks like this (with the missing toon subbed in where the toon and the macro it is on line up):

/target [mod:ctrl,mod:shift,nomod:alt]ToonA;[mod:ctrl,mod:alt,nomod:shift] ToonB;[mod:alt,mod:shift,nomod:ctrl] ToonC;[mod:ctrl,nomod:alt,nomod:shift] ToonE
/assist [noharm]

The ']' macro looks the same without the /assist and adding the toon itself back in.

/target [mod:ctrl,mod:shift,nomod:alt]ToonA;[mod:ctrl,mod:alt,nomod:shift] ToonB;[mod:alt,mod:shift,nomod:ctrl] ToonC;[nomod] ToonD;[mod:ctrl,nomod:alt,nomod:shift] ToonE

That's about as complex as i let it get right now.

On the shammies I _could_ just add regular spells to the action bar and map 1-9,0,-,= onto the nostromo and go from there. This is my current nostromo mapping with the green shift having all my pip swap buttons and discreet buttons to tell each toon or all at once to /focus their current target:

Profile: wow3
Controller Type: Nostromo n52 Speedpad2
Normal Mode:
Button 01                       == Mapped To ==>                   1 Key (1 Key) 
Button 02                       == Mapped To ==>                   2 Key (2 Key) 
Button 03                       == Mapped To ==>                   3 Key (3 Key) 
Button 04                       == Mapped To ==>                   4 Key (4 Key) 
Button 05                       == Mapped To ==>                   5 Key (5 Key) 
Button 06                       == Mapped To ==>                   Tab Key (Tab Key) 
Button 07                       == Mapped To ==>                   6 Key (6 Key) 
Button 08                       == Mapped To ==>                   7 Key (7 Key) 
Button 09                       == Mapped To ==>                   8 Key (8 Key) 
Button 10                       == Mapped To ==>                   9 Key (9 Key) 
Button 11                       == Mapped To ==>                   0 Key (0 Key) 
Button 12                       == Mapped To ==>                   - Key (- Key) 
Button 13                       == Mapped To ==>                   = Key (= Key) 
Button 14                       == Mapped To ==>                   LeftCtrl Key (LeftCtrl Key) 
Button 15                       == Mapped To ==>                   ] Key (] Key) 
Circle Button                   == Mapped To ==>                   [ Key ([ Key) 
Scroll Press                    == Mapped To ==>                   S Key (S Key) 
Scroll Down                     == Mapped To ==>                   Space Key (Space Key) 
DPad N                          == Mapped To ==>                   UpArrow Key (UpArrow Key) 
DPad E                          == Mapped To ==>                   RightArrow Key (RightArrow Key) 
DPad S                          == Mapped To ==>                   DownArrow Key (DownArrow Key) 
DPad W                          == Mapped To ==>                   LeftArrow Key (LeftArrow Key) 

Green Shift (Scroll Up):
Button 01                       == Mapped To ==>                   F6 Key (F6 Key) 
Button 02                       == Mapped To ==>                   F7 Key (F7 Key) 
Button 03                       == Mapped To ==>                   F2 Key (F2 Key) 
Button 04                       == Mapped To ==>                   F3 Key (F3 Key) 
Button 05                       == Mapped To ==>                   F1 Key (F1 Key) 
Button 06                       == Mapped To ==>                   F8 Key (F8 Key) 
Button 07                       == Mapped To ==>                   F9 Key (F9 Key) 
Button 08                       == Mapped To ==>                   F4 Key (F4 Key) 
Button 09                       == Mapped To ==>                   F5 Key (F5 Key) 
Button 10                       == Mapped To ==>                   F10 Key (F10 Key) 
Button 15                       == Mapped To ==>                   F11 Key (F11 Key) 
Circle Button                   == Mapped To ==>                   F12 Key (F12 Key)

And the main macros i use on the action bar are:

Round-robin heal your focus target:
/target focus
/castsequence chain heal,,,,
/targetlasttarget

Or the same for just the current target
/castsequence chain heal,,,,

Lightning rotation on current target:
/castsequence reset=6/combat Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Lightning Bolt

Everyone heal themselves (first hit drops a mix of mana and healing totems on everyone):
/target player
/castsequence reset=combat Mana Spring Totem,Healing Wave,Healing Wave,Healing Wave
/targetlasttarget

Damage mitigation totems (I use the side buttons on the mouse for shift and ctrl)
/cast [mod:ctrl] grounding totem
/cast [nomod] stoneclaw totem

Follow target, and if i hit it again fast, then mount up:
/follow
/castsequence reset=2 ,whistle of the violet raptor

So to follow a new leader i just hit ']' and then the above. For normal PvE i just let Jafula's mod do the auto follow leader after combat thing though, since it's easier in 99% of the cases (Thanks for the great effort Jafula) .

The rest of the buttons are just dragged from the spellbook.

[Razman]

I'm a relatively new multiboxer and I came in starting with the focusless "/cast [target=targettarget,harm] yada" macros. But having run with that system from 0-60; I've gotten annoyed with the toons dropping target and constantly having to hit the "target the leader" button before I can cast. Using this system I've completed every instance up to BRD (except for one encounter in RFD).

Yes and yes. I had a big problem fighting the last boss in Sethek halls. After he did his arcane missile attack i would use a target healing wave macro on all my shammys to heal the damage then start to dps again. However I wouldnt be dpsing my guys would be sitting there. This fight has a lot going on in it and having to remember to hit an extra key in the middle of it after every healing wave was a wipe fest. Im planning on a heal focus and a targettarget dps set up. One less thing to remember in a boss fight is a damn good thing.Just hope it works. I have a tank so target healing is fine with my resto as I use targettarget dpsing its just when I want a mass heal from all my shammys going on because of an AOE boss fight like this one I run into problems.

[ZorbaTheGeek]

When I hit my dps bigbutton once, my hunter grabs my tank(my brain)'s target. I hit it again and that target gets passed to my 2 other DPSers. They will continue to target that mob until the mob dies allowing me to switch targets on my tank all I want and know that my DPS toons will continue to dps their mob till it's dead. This allows for intelligent castsequences not to constantly be reset, or to not be reset upon a new mob being dps'd.

Now this is precisely where I started a few months ago with a Pally/Shaman duo. The combination of "main assist" targetting and a tankadin is truely superb. I've since graduated to a quad boxing setup, starting initially with 4xLocks for ease of play and speed of levelling. The massive dps and single class nature of the group made my targetting macros obsolete.

My second group was 4xMages, again under RAF I was looking for fast levels as I originally intended to discard accounts 3 and 4 and just use the gift levels on my main two. At this point I read about the targetless, focusless, leaderless system and took more than 8 hours of "played" time trying to get my head around its complexities with a newly purchased copy of Keyclone.

I'm now into my 4th group (I have discovered I LOVE the levelling) and back to my initial and favourite setup a Tankadin, and this time, 3xShaman. Now I am feeling the loss of my original targetting system, on a multiple pull it's hit and miss which target a lightning bolt will hit if I've had to grab threat with the pally. But, I think I have the solution.

Leaderless, focusless (I use focus for CC) but not targetless system. You just modify the orignial leaderless macros to /assist rather than /cast [target=targettarget], remove the /targetlasttarget from the end and your slaves will retain the target you told them to shoot. It's now a simple matter to add the [harm,nodead] conditionals into the beginning of the modified macro creating a superb tank/dps control system.

It's just as leaderless as it always was, should the tank die just mouse into a different window and continue as though nothing had happened and better yet the other DPS will continue to destroy the target originally allocated by your, now deceased, leader.

Due to the sheer number of alts I now find I have it's important to me to keep my macros, UI & hotstrings as generic as possible. In fact changing from one group to another simply requires copying of WTF folders for the initial UI setup, changing spell names in macros and then adding/modifying the names in a single "do everything" leaderless assist macro which all other macros /click. Hotstrings, once created, never change.

I can make the initial setup for a new group or toon combination in 5 minutes and be killing almost immediately. Once I've finalized and tested my ideas for a "Target-and-Hold, Leaderless, Focusless" macro system I'll try to clarify the thought process and write it up for any that may be interested. As it will only require the changing of a single "Assist macro" it could easily be swapped in and out between teams or even back to temporary targetlessness(!?!) for "target obscurity" in PvP.

[Jheusse]

Zorba I for one would be very interested in your writeup, the ability to throw together a new team for the hell of it appeals to me, I've always been prone to altitis, RAF and a system that adapts in 5 min for a non coder would be more addictive than (censors obscene comment). Having a couple of one class teams (like mage, shammy, lock) and some single toons would allow me to do silly combos just to see what they're like. Fast and simple is best, like a good girlfriend in high school.

aboron that's a great contribution, I might steal a lot of that. Are you using [ and ] with the hotstrings approach from the ftl setup? Is that the full setup or only part of it for [ and ]?
The nostromo is a gret tool, but it gets so frustrating to train myself to use it, I have no background in fps twitch games, so I don't reflexively strafe, and sometimes I like steering with just my left, having a beer, food, or a child in my other hand.


Minor hijack of my own thread:

Trinity or Bongos or Bartender or other? Balancing ease of use, flexibility to go solo or not, ease of working with the Belkin speedpad, memory usage, compatibility and likelihood of it being updated.

Was debating making a new thread but I've made enough of those lately. Also debating the Pitbull vs. X Perl vs. grid or whatever as well, but not seriously.