Death Knight Macros
 

I know people have posted certain helpful macros in other threads, i.e. tanking threads, dps threads etc... So I wanted to start a thread for all those macros or other macros you have found that you think are useful in one spot.

Macros I've found useful for me:
1) I hooked horn of winter with my trinket, you however have to make sure that horn is not on global CD when you use this, I did this so that horn of winter would be up consitantly. 2-3min buff with a 2min cd trinket equals horn of winter always up.
/use (name of trinket)
/cast horn of winter
or if you don't want to worry about it being on GCD
/cast horn of winter
/use (name of trinket) I'm not sure which will work better.
2) A speed potion with AOTD makes it so your AOTD is cast much faster.
/use speed potion
/cast army of the dead
3) I have the hyper speed engineering enchant on my gloves so I hooked it with unholy presence.
/cast unholy presence
/stop casting
/use (name of gloves)
4) I hooked gargoyle with blood presence
/cast summon gargoyle
/stopcasting
/cast blood presence

Summary
The 1st macro for me is just because I forget to use horn sometimes, the other three are for speed on my Army of the dead, I would cast the 3rd one then use the 2nd one so that I have 15% cast speed increase and 340+500 haste this makes it about 30-40% faster I don't know the exact math. Finally I would summon gargoyle with the blood presence so that I can go back to my normal cycle and not have to worry about switching back to blood.

Here's an evacuate ghoul macro, that I used mainly before the NoTD buff.

Its very basic, just targets a healer, and leaps at them, and stay in place.

A simple one I like to use to reduce the number of things I have keybound is putting death coil and rune strike into the same button. If I'm in melee range and rune strike procs, it uses that, otherwise it uses DC.

Just:

/cast Rune Strike
/cast Death Coil

I'm sure you could make it more fancy with #showtooltip or something, but it works well enough for me.

Actually, that macro should use both DC and queue up a Rune Strike on your next attack. Most common "rune strike" macro-ing you will see may likely be in the form up

#showtooltip
/cast someAbility
/cast !Rune Strike

The "!" prevents Rune Strike from being toggled off in case you were to hit the button twice by accident before your next auto attack landed.

A guildy asked a question if "stance" macros worked with DK presences yet, to which I didn't have an answer nor have I experimented with yet. One could use something like "/use [stance:2] !Rune Strike" if they only wanted Rune Strike triggering while in Frost Presence (presuming 2 would be frost presence, but I do not know for sure).

Yeah I could macro it in to other abilities, but I prefer to have a bit more control on my rune strikes, so I don't macro them that way, say for making sure I can use AMS or IBF.

I'm not sure about the queuing thing. Rune strike isn't on the GCD, but I don't remember it casting both spells if only hit once if I'm at 60 rp or over.

HoW triggers a GCD while most trinkets don't. Your first macro is appropriate for a player who forgets to use his trinkets, not one who forgets to HoW.

AoTD should be used when you can't DPS normally. Examples are before thaddius spawns, before pulling bosses without adds like patchwerk, sitting in a bubble in malygos, maybe behind the iceblock in sapphiron, etc. So I question the usefulness of this macro, particularly because we can only use one pot per fight now. Also it's "potion of speed", FYI.

I don't see the unholy presence/glove macro as particularly useful. You want to use that enchant as soon as it's up, so you should macro it to something you cast more often, like scourge strike. These macros represent a great deal of optimization for small buffs to gargoyle and AoTD. Gargoyle just isn't that great since 3.0.8, and AoTD shouldn't be used to improve DPS in situations where the 6s cast time is an issue.

As for my contribution, this macro will:

- death pact if you have a pet up
- raise ally with the alt key
- summon a ghoul if you don't have a pet

3 buttons in one.

I also use a great deal of simple "/cast [modifier:alt] ability; otherability" macros to save bar space. For example,

I also use "/petautocastoff Leap" with death grip.

Be careful with adding "/cast !Rune Strike" to everything. If you don't run with blessing of sanctuary, you can easily run out of runic power that way. I used to do it myself, but have changed to cast rune strike manually.

For those of you who don't use the HoW glyph (I don't), you may find it useful to macro

/cancelaura Horn of Winter
/cast Horn of Winter

in place of your normal HoW button. I will typically pop HoW if it's off cooldown and I have a spare gcd in my rotation (and as 17/0/54 I frequently do). Without the macro, if a glyphed HoW is already up, you'll get a "more powerful spell is active" error and miss out on the free rp.

/cast [modifier:alt] Unholy Command; [modifier:ctrl] Death Grip; [target=mouseover] Death Coil; Death Coil
I bind that to a key (Q for me) that will do the 3 things I use quite often.

Replaced that with Frost Strike macro when I spec to frost tank.

It will cast both if you have 60+ RP. My Frost Strike Macro is simply:
#showtooltip Frost Strike
/cast !Rune Strike
/cast Frost Strike

This means if I have 40 RP, the button lights up (because the icon is for Frost Strike), however if I could cast Rune Strike and I have less than 60 RP, then only Rune Strike is cast. If I have 60+ RP, Frost Strike is cast and Rune Strike is queued for the next attack swing. Remember, Rune Strike works just like Heroic Strike, it applies on next auto-attack but you queue it up just before.

Allowing Gnaw to be a toggled pet ability makes life much easier for PvPing with good pet control, and in the odd chance you need a stun in PvE.

A macro to replace the vanilla pet attack button:
/petautocaston Claw
/petautocaston Leap
/petautocastoff Gnaw
/petattack

I consider that to be the normal state for the pet. Another macro puts him in stun-as-soon-as-you-can state, and wont spend energy on claw:
/petautocastoff Claw
/petautocaston Leap
/petautocaston Gnaw
/petattack

Just have to be sure to set him back to normal if you want him to put out any kind of DPS. I've got my pet bar arranged in such a way so that the highlights on claw and gnaw are clearly visible as pet state indicator, and it works out pretty well.



On a side note, didn't realize Leap worked on friendly targets, I figured it had to be cast on an enemy. Thanks, Winco.

/cast blood tap
/cast unbreakable armor

I bind that to a convenient button (tilde) and remember to mash it now and again during bossfights, as long as I'm in the right phase of my cycle - all my runes cooling down. Unbreakable armor is a not-inconsiderable DPS buff (10% strength) while it's up, even if the bladed armor "ping" is poorly timed for you. The side effect is that if you do it really right and hit the macro while one of your blood runes is already a death rune, you'll bug that rune into staying a death rune for the duration of the blood tap buff. That's yet another little boost to your DPS as it allows you to avoid blood striking for a cycle or two.

Is there a way to have Raise Ally go through the members of your party (regardless of their name) and have it try to cast on each one if they're dead? I'm thinking for an arena like situation.

This should work:
/cast [target=party1,exists,dead] Raise Ally; [target=party2,exists,dead] Raise Ally; [target=party3,exists,dead] Raise Ally; [target=party4,exists,dead] Raise Ally

If you wish to have it use a particular order, replace partyX with the names of your arena team mates.

bind it to a key(or mouse wheel), put your mouse over a target and use the bind...BAM there silenced and you never even have to switch targets.

/cast [target=mouseover,exists,harm,nodead] Strangulate

/cast [target=party1,exists,dead][target=party2,exists,dead][target=party3,exists,dead] Raise Ally

Should be equivalent to the above and use fewer characters. I haven't personally tested it though.