Castrandom Change

[HPAVC]

Might be worth finding out of there are any reset verbs

/castrandom reset=1 spell, list, here

[Simulacra]

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.

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.

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

[Khatovar]

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.

[lans83]

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.

[kadaan]

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. "

[lans83]

Might be worth finding out of there are any reset verbs

/castrandom reset=1 spell, list, here

Tried this tonite on my hunters and it did not work for me. the macros I made were:


/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.

[shaeman]

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. "

So - how long do you think the /click alternative will remain unchanged?
The reasons they quote for changing castrandom seem equally applicable to the /click way of doing things.

[Otlecs]

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

Where macros cross the line is when they are making the decision instead of the player.
<snip>
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.”

[Ishar]

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.

[shaeman]

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.