◊ Cireena

My Warlock is only 17, yet I can and have advised multiple people on how to play and gear a level 70 warlock. I don't have to play a class to read the other posts here and learn from them.

This has a some what valid point. You should take a step back and ease down just a bit Pyre, even though the information you are giving is correct you can be a little less confrontational about it. That being said there is no place left for 1 button tanking, period. Doing so only lowers you performance and TPS. If you want to discuss multiple situational macros that can improve overall perfomance that is another story but 1 button tanking died the death it deserved long ago.

 

Pyre

I tend to respond in kind, but point taken. I'll let this thread resolve itself. My apologies to all.

 

Senerius

Hrmm, I can see how it would be similar. I thought that using cast sequence might avoid "That ability isn't ready yet" style errors, but I guess it's not really a significant step to just avoid some error messages. Oh well. Thanks for the feedback!

 

wiseman

I'd love to discuss situational macro's just as much as I'd like to discuss a 1 button concept. Any knowledge I can gain on macro's at this point would be a huge gain for me.

And while I agree the ease at which 1 button macro's that were equal in efficiency or better in efficiency to a good player has disappeared, I'm sure there are ways to automate a good chunk of the button pressing.

I seem to recall seeing an addon that allows you to call macro's from other macros. I read a discussion centered around this addon that talked about it making certain advanced and removed macro features possible again.

That isn't all I'm here for, but I figured if any forum had some good knowledge without all the flame/troll that tends to come with it, it would be this one.

Please don't misunderstand me.. I'm not going to brag and list all of mine or my guilds accomplishments but suffice it to say I've played since beta, know a great deal about tanking, and never rely completely on 1 all-powerful macro when it makes a difference.

 

wiseman

Hmm. Touching on this again the dummy spell is actually an amazing idea. If there was something that blizzard allowed to be placed into a castsequence that always returns "success" has no cast time and doesnt trigger a GCD.. and also has no cooldown, you could use it to regulate anything that has a cooldown.

/castsequence reset=60 Bloodrage, DummySuccessSpell
/castsequence reset=119 Commanding Shout, DummySuccessSpell
/castsequence reset=6 Shield Slam, DummySuccessSpell
/cast Shield Block
/cast Revenge

Essentially what happens is Bloodrage goes off... the dummy spell goes off next and reports to the macro that it succeeded.

Line 1 of the macro is now ignored for 60 seconds.

Commanding shout goes off... dummy spell goes off and reports success again... line 2 is now ignored for just under 2 minutes.

This removes the "randomly-inefficient" part of the original macro I posted.

So whats the miracle spell/command? An interesting search this will be indeed...

 

Edghar

I was under the impression that using a dummy cast in a castsequence would just disable that macro until the reset timer has been reached, meaning that once the macro hits "DummySuccessSpell" the macro will stop and not process anything after that. I would love to be wrong on this, can anyone confirm that this works?

 

wiseman

Only if the DummyCast returns a failure... like I stipulated at first... failure is the easy way out, but the wrong approach.

Look at one of the first macro's I posted:

/castsequence reset=60 Bloodrage, Commanding Shout
/castrandom Shield Slam, Revenge, Sunder Armor
/cast Heroic Strike

This will use bloodrage whenever it's up... reapply commanding shout every minute.. and randomly choose between shield slam, revenge (only if its lit up) and Sunder Armor, then keep Heroic Strike perma toggled.

Once in a while it will choose Sunder over Revenge/Shield Slam and then follow up with the right ability. But even so I hover around 850-900 TPS. 1000+ if I get a crit or 2.

Thats the beauty of this idea... it's possible that if I can prioritize Shield Slam over Sunder, as long as it's of cooldown.. that will up the overall average TPS of the cycle.

 

Xoya

Not quite "disable" -- it will continue to attempt to cast whatever dummy spell you're using if it's not able to actually cast the spell (i.e. it's a "?" spell). If you have a dummy spell return "success", then it would go back to the beginning of the macro and start over. What they really ought to do is just change how castsequence functions. If you could do /castsequence reset=60 SomeSpell, do that once, then just not have it available to cast again for another 60 seconds, that would be ideal. On the other hand, I think they wanted to prevent people from doing that.

 

Lodi

You do realize that the reset=60 does nothing ... unless you don't hit the button for 60 sec.

 

wiseman

If the second spell in the sequence completes successfully that sequence, assuming there were only 2 skills in it, will not be run again until bloodrage comes off cooldown.

So you can essentially create a list of skills with cooldowns and put them in order by priority. Now of course things like rage need to be taken into account, but we're only at the stage of proving a concept possible, not putting it into production

 

wiseman

Assuming this is true, then what is actually happening in the macro I posted is once every 60 seconds Bloodrage completes successfully, so it moves on to Commanding Shout... and then for the next 59 seconds I get a message in my error frame saying Bloodrage is on cooldown.

But the point is moot because the rest of the macro is executing.

 

◊ Praetorian

This thread sucks.