Druid Tanking Macros

[Boylston]

I am trying to get as close as possible to a "one button" druid tanking macro. I have a great one for my Pally, but I think I'm going to use a Druid tank instead. My current attempt looks something like this:

/castrandom Mangle - Bear, Lacerate, Swipe, Swipe

It is pretty basic, but I'm sure there's room for improvement. Any suggestions? I plan on mouse clicking other needed abilities, and I pull with a Faerie Fire button. I'm a button masher, FWIW, and I have this macro bound to all my shammy DPS keys.

Team setup is 4xShamans, all elemental for now (and level 73ish). Druid tank is L80, and has an "interesting" set of gear from Naxx tanking drops to greens/blues all the way down to a couple of spellpower items that have a lot of Stam. (Druid was/is healer for my hunter team, so he was primarily spell damage geared before I respecced him yesterday).

I've been running Nexus to check out the setup and learn this different tanking style, and so far I've had no trouble keeping aggro. It's hard to say whether this is a result of a great macro setup or the fact that the druid is L80 and naturally does a lot more threat (even with his hodge-podge gear).

Elsegundo-- I know you run a Druid+4xShammy setup. Any tips you'd like to pass along?

[Kicksome]

I used this tanking macro for my bear druid. It's a month or so old, but it should still work. I tanked naxx etc... got GREAT dps.

/use Sphere of Red Dragon's Blood
/cast maul
/castsequence [combat] reset=9 Demoralizing Roar,Swipe,Mangle - Bear,Lacerate,Swipe,Swipe,Swipe; [nocombat]Attack, Faerie Fire (Feral)

[genocyde]

I personally have better luck with /castrandom than /castsequence on my druid but I also use the /cast maul at the beginning of my macro.

I also tend to put a shift modifier rotation on all of my toons on my dps macro like

Tank:
[mod:shift] Taunts, major threat gain spells, stuns, etc.

DPS:
[mod:shift] shed aggro, heal mobs target

Healer:
[mod:shift] Oh shit heals

That way if stuff does go wrong my whole group blows recovery spells at once and I only have hold shift rather than hunt for other buttons.

[elsegundo]

its kinda hard to do this macro since the druid has several things you will want to do depending on the situation.

for multiple targets, just do swipe with the occassional demo-roar.
i wish i can really help you, but my macros for the tank are actually spread through four different buttons.

one is to mangle bear and lacerate. ( /cast [mod:alt] lacerate; mangle - bear)
the other is to maul or swipe. ( /cast [mod:alt] maul; swipe)
one to demoroar and challenging roar. (/cast [mod:alt] challenging roar; demoralizing roar)
and the last is to bezerk and charge. (/cast [mod:alt] bezerk; charge)
thats pretty much all i use while tanking. im not sure of the proper spelling of the spells. i think charge has a cat/bear form charge. i cant recall right now.

i also have those buttons hotkeyed for my slaves as well, but they only activate if i hit shift or ctrl. actually just ctrl, but you can add shift in there for things like emergency self-heals, etc. and i do have many of the other abilities on click, potions, barkskin, frenzied regen, FFF, etc.

i also use a nostromo n52, so the buttons are set up so i can easily hit my slave's dps and healing buttons. and oh, i wish i had four shammies. hehe. i might get two more accounts if this economy gets better!

with your macro though, remember if you're fighting one boss, keep lacerate up at 5 stacks as much as possible, and always keep mangle up. i usually start with mangle, then lacerate x3, then mangle again, then lacerate to fill up to 5. swipe with more than one mob, maul for a rage dump. i also have glyph to maul two mobs. i actually am more involved with my tank than my healer/dps. so i try to avoid the 1-button approach as much as possible. hope this helps!

ps. and yes, you are holding aggro like a champ because you're doing much more damage at 80 than you are at 73.

[Boylston]

I'm not hell-bent on a "1-button" approach, I guess. I think part of the reason I was mentally thinking that way is that my Pally+Resto+3xElem setup only required one macro for the tank, which I mapped on top of multiple DPS macros for the shammies.

I can certainly flip that around so that I have 2-3 tanking macros also mapped to a generic shammy DPS macro. I like to heal the tank using modifier keys embedded in macros, that way I can still have the resto shammy pump out some DPS if it's a trivial fight.

I'm strongly considering trying a /castrandom macro setup on my shamans for DPSing, once they get Lava Burst. I know I can hit peak DPS better without it, but it might be fun to just put DPS on total fire-and-forget mode. Plus, I like Hachoo's method of using 4xElemental shamans and having everyone's cast timers intentionally spread out so that he can switch to mashing a heal button and get from 1-4 LHWs going off on the tank, depending on how long he mashes that button.

I think I can certainly put together a set of three macros that would be a.) strong single-target/boss threat, b.) AoE trash threat builder, and c.) some utility/debuff stuff (Growl/DemoRoar/Bash). I think I'm sticking to keeping things like Frenzied Regen, Berzerk, Feral Charge, etc on mouse-click only buttons above my main bar.

Thanks for the feedback, I'd love to hear other ideas and experiences as well. I had a 64 DK and a L70 Prot Pally as other options, but decided to go with what is probably not the biggest min-max tank in my druid because I like playing druid at end-game, and the druid is also the healer for my 4xHunter team. I am uninspired by Pallies lately, even if they are a ridiculously simple multibox tank. I probably won't do oodles of heroics either, since the main goal for now is just to get the Shammies up to L80 while my hunter team farms Icecrown dailies for a while.

Putting /cast Maul or Mangle at the head of several of these macros will be a nice bonus. I'm also considering a macro like the following into the mix:

/castsequence [combat] Feral Charge, Growl; [nocombat]Attack, Faerie Fire (Feral)

[elsegundo]

not sure if that last macro will actually work. but thats the fun of playing with macros!!

yea do keep us updated as to what you'll end up doing. dual boxing is a big experiment and some things you find that fits perfect for you might not for someone else. its always changing as we progress. perhaps you'll end up hating castrandom and castsequence macros altogether. =]

[Doostin]

i have 3 buttons i mash for my tanks
1 button = single target dps (makes the mages all nuke with just frostbolt)
2 button = aoe tanking (makes mages cast stuff like cone of cold, frost nova, ae)
3 button = boss all out dps tanking (usually the same as number 1 maybe with some minor changes to optimize dps)

*Note: If copy pasting these macro's, make sure you change the Rank of faerie fire to match taht of your current max rank.

here would be my 1 button (single target dps)
/start attack
/cast Maul
/castsequence reset=target/combat/40 Faerie Fire (Feral)(Rank 5), Null
/castrandom Mangle - Bear, Mangle - Bear, Lacerate

2 Button (aoe tanking)
/startattack
/cast Maul
/castsequence reset=target/combat/40 Faerie Fire (Feral)(Rank 5), Null
/castrandom Swipe, Swipe, Mangle - Bear

3 Button (All out single targte dps)
/start attack
/cast Maul
/castsequence Faerie Fire (Feral)(Rank5), Berserk, null
/castrandom Mangle - Bear, Mangle - Bear, Lacerate

[Doostin]

i'd actually never tried those before on my druid but just copy pasted them and gave them a shot and they work great, except the faerie fire, for some reason its not working. anyone know what i did wrong? typo'd somethin, can't figure it out...

nm messed around for a bit and figured it out, apparently you need (Rank 5) next to it for it to work, i've never added (Rank) to a spell for like 2+ years in macros, but apparently this one needs it. i'll edit the above macros for copy pasting purposes.