single target spell (CC!) macro'd into AoE

[dodar]

mentioned this trick in another thread, but then realized that it made more sense as its own topic. not sure how many people are doing something similar to this, but i haven't seen it in my perusal of the forum, so here goes. i'd love to hear about other experiments into this type of thing.

i just levelled up four balance druids with r-a-f, which is tons of fun, and have just started bgs and am loving it. i had developed a trick for locking down multiple adds at once while levelling up, and it's proven to work great in pvp. with this set up i'm able to cc 3-4 targets with one key.

so, first step is getting all the toons to target the same target. obviously, many people use different techniques for this(focus targeting and assisting the leader being the most common i believe). i use a FTL system, but that part isn't important for this trick. assuming your toons all now have the same target...

on my leader, when i hit the '6' key, it will run

/cast Entangling Roots

to entangle his target. my second toon then runs this macro:

/targetenemy
/cast Entangling Roots

then the third runs (the '1' tells it to tab backwards through her target list, same as hitting shift-tab):

/targetenemy 1
/cast Entangling Roots

and the fourth (this is slightly ghetto since you can only have one /target command per macro) runs:

/targetenemy
/castsequence reset=5 ,Entangling Roots

so, when i tap '6' once, if three targets are in 'tab-able' range of all my toons, then all three can get entangled. if i double tap the '6', the second tap causes the last toon to entangle the fourth target, if there is one. basically, he tabs twice and then entangles.

if you had a fifth clone, you could have them run

/targetenemy 1
/castsequence reset=5 ,Entangling Roots

and conceivably tangle five targets at once (they'd have to be bunched up pretty well to all be in range, but this happens a lot in bgs).

one weakness with this system is that i am pretty sure that each toon's list of potential targets (the list that you tab through) is individually computed and not strictly based on location (my cows are generally pretty close to one another) and therefore not always tabbed through in the same order. however, it works great for such a fast move, and at worst doubles up cc casts on some of the targets.

once i hit 70, i'll be adding the same system for cyclone. but really this technique could work for any ability that you'd prefer to spread out, rather than all cast on the same target. for instance, i use it for fairie fire since it doesn't stack. i'm also thinking of trying out the new /targetenemyplayer macro for pvp to avoid targeting snakes and such, but that would skip pets, and keeping pets locked down is often a good idea too.

[Xzin]

If you double up CC - does it not invoke diminishing returns faster?

[Code]

Yeah... so technically if you used this macro on the same target, and there were no resists, the root effect would last 25% as long as it normally would, and the last one will render future root attempt useless for 15 seconds (the overlaps' sum is probably negligible). Great for numerous mobs around you though

[Suvega]

Did 3.0 change targeting in macros? because I DEFINETLY can target 26 times in one macro...
My Reveal macro for PvP:
/tar a
/tar b
/tar c

etc....

[Multibocks]

reveal macro??? Enquiring minds want to know!

[dodar]

ah, i think you are right, suvega. does your macro reveal all of the toons (excepting all but the first found with a name starting with a letter) with one key press? if so, then i'd assume that it was targeting each in turn. i read on wowwiki (http://www.wowwiki.com/Making_a_macr...2Ftargetfriend) that the targetenemy and targetfriend macros could only be used once, and erroneously generalized.

though, now that i know about the 'instant' diminishing returns, i may want to make this all based on multi-press, such that one click is for one target, and two for two targets, etc. that way i can spam the key when there is a crowd, but otherwise scale it to the number of targets in front of me.

thanks for the feedback. sadly, i had to send my beastly laptop(i use it to run three of my four instances...it has a quadcore!) in to have its dvi-d port repaired, leaving me with only my dual-core pc with which to play. it can handle two instances at pvp friendly framerates, but can only run four well enough for pve. so, it may be a few weeks til i can test out the scalable version of this macro in pvp.

on the bright side, with the new caster/healer gear euality act of '08, i was able to respec my shammy healer to deep elemental and have been having a 'blast' thunderstorming alliance off cliffs, often sending multiple at once to their hilarious doom. also enjoying the new marksmen talents on my hunter. once i figured out how to disarm ret pallies from range, they became pretty worthless. of course, they still crush when they roll thick-- which since the alliance seems to be made up of 50% pallies-- tends to be the case these days. every dog has its day, i suppose. =)