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How To Properly Configure Your Macros: A Priest POV, Part 2
In Part 1 of this guide I briefly introduced you to the Priest class and their abilities and why the Priest class is one of most complex classes in terms of managing1 ones abilities in an effective manner.
What is it that we want to achieve then?
As you can see in the Priest Abilities Spreadsheet from the previous part, we have a fair amount of different type of abilities. We have abilities that we only use on ourselves, abilities that provide an area of effect (AoE) and ones that are cast on friendly targets and/or on hostile targets. These may either be instant casts, have a cast time or have a channeled cast time. Some have a short cast time, some have longer cast times. The primary difference is: harmful and helpful (a few work both ways, namely Dispel Magic, Mass Dispel, Holy Nova and Penance) and importance/usefulness.
Breaking it down
- We want one set of abilities for when we’re out of form.
- One for when we have a friendly target.
- One for when we have a hostile target.
- One for when we have no target.
- We want one set of abilities for when we’re in form.
- One for when we have a friendly target.
- One for when we have a hostile target.
- One for when we have no target.
Essentially, we want six sets of abilities. Several of these sets of abilities will have certain spells placed in the same space for ease of transition between the six “stances” so we’re able to use the same key binding/macro as association is the key.
Pairing of the abilities
Here comes the tricky part and the most vital one. Pairing things together. Here’s a not too crude summary of how one can pair the Priest’s abilities. This is what I will be using on my Priest, making minor adjustments along the way as I create the actual macros to see what suits best with modifiers (alt, shift and ctrl) added to the mix.
Creating the macros
Before putting my macros into action, I make sure they are correctly written over at Fitzcairn’s Macro Explain-o-matic. It’s quite handy for foolproofing.2 If you would like an explanation of what the following macros actually do, I suggest you head over there.
A thing worth noting is that I use alt for myself, self-healing and self-aid as you will notice.
Mana Management
Discipline/Holy
#showtooltip /cast [nomod,harm]Shadowfiend;Inner Focus /cast [mod:alt]Inner Focus
Shadow
#showtooltip /cast [nomod,harm]Shadowfiend;Dispersion /cast [mod:alt]Dispersion
I’ve found no way to combine these two macros yet to save space. Grr! Any ideas?
Area of Effect
#showtooltip /cast [nomod,harm]Mind Sear;[nomod][mod:alt,target=player]Prayer of Healing /cast [mod:shift]Holy Nova
Flash Heal & Smite
#showtooltip /cast [nomod,harm]Smite;[nomod][mod:alt,target=player]Flash Heal
Greater Heal & Holy Fire
#showtooltip /cast [nomod,harm]Holy Fire;[nomod][mod:alt,target=player]Greater Heal
Renew & Shadow Word: Pain
#showtooltip /cast [nomod,harm]Shadow Word: Pain;[nomod][mod:alt,target=player]Renew
Prayer of Mending & Devouring Plague
#showtooltip /cast [nomod,harm]Devouring Plague;[nomod][mod:alt,target=player]Prayer of Mending
Binding Heal & Mind Blast
#showtooltip /cast [nomod,harm]Mind Blast;[nomod]Binding Heal
These have been paired based on a targets reaction towards you, friendly or hostile. One might want to pair spells differently, for example Mind Blast and Mind Flay as such:
#showtooltip /cast [nomod]Mind Flay;[mod:alt]Mind Blast
… or for Smite and Holy Fire like this:
#showtooltip /cast [nomod]Smite;[mod:alt]Holy Fire
… or for Flash Heal and Greater Heal as this:
#showtooltip /cast [nomod][mod:alt,target=player]Flash Heal;[mod:shift][mod:shift,mod:alt,target=player]Greater Heal
I personally normally only pair harmful abilities this way as I reserve the alt modifier for myself and therefore using this technique messes that up. I could, however, combine Binding Heal with another spell this way as I cannot cast Binding Heal on myself.
Making sense of it all a.k.a. putting the pieces together
Bar behaviour Shadow spec
Shadowform & out of Shadowform – No target:
Shadowform & out of Shadowform – Friendly target and/or modifier alt:
Shadowform & out of Shadowform – Hostile target:
Holding down the modifier alt will cast the equivalent to a friendly target spell on myself, e.g. alt + E = Prayer of Mending on self, alt + 4 = Renew and alt + X = Dispersion.
Bar behaviour Discipline spec
Discipline – No target:
Discipline – Friendly target and/or modifier alt:
Discipline – Hostile target:
Additionally, shift + G will cast Holy Nova regardless of target/no target in all six scenarios above. Also, shift + 3 will cast Shadow Word: Death regardless of spec as long as I have a hostile target.
In conclusion
As with all things (including the Bible) take this with a grain of salt. It’s really not the only way to mush things up when creating macros. It’s really just something I decided to post and share with others as I was creating my Priest’s macros. But, it does give you a pretty good idea how to set up your macros in an effective manner.
- By this I’m refering to macros, key bindings and action bar behaviour. [ ↩ ]
- Of course, dummy test as well! [ ↩ ]
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How To Properly Configure Your Macros: A Priest POV – Part 1
Macros are something in ‘World of Warcraft‘ I haven’t fully gotten the hang of how they work. I haven’t had the need to — so what would’ve been the point, right? My druid uses stance pagination to decide what abilities are shown and utilized. Now that my priest is coming into an acceptable level1, it’s time to dive into the good stuff.
Ziiva2 is dually specialised in the ‘Discipline’ tree and the ‘Shadow’ tree.
The first tree is focused on improving (and extending) my arsenal of helpful and healing tools and abilities.
The second tree focuses on improving (and extending) my damage dealing arsenal of tools and abilities.
The thing with the Priest class is that when we reach the 6th tier of talents, we are able to learn Shadowform. This Shadowform allows us to paginate our action bar. This means that we may use one set of abilities for when we’re out of this form and another set for when we’re in this form. Why not simply have your healing spells on the out-of-form bar and the damage dealing ones on the in-form bar?
It’s not as simple as that — not when accessibility and effectiveness comes into play.
To further increase the usefulness of this for players who might not be as Priest-savvy as others, Shadow Priests learn a couple of spells which are only usable when in the previously mentioned Shadowform state and vice versa3. This is what makes setting up ones action bars and macros a bit tricky and truthfully a bit of a hassle.
I have for you a fairly extensive spreadsheet covering most Priest abilities and you can find it here here as a nifty PDF document. The listed abilities you’ll find are sorted by “Target Type”, “Cast Speed” and “Spell Type” in that order and hopefully makes sense for others than myself.
We could, and truthfully should, take into consideration what kind of abilities these are, e.g. Dispersion is a mana management tool, same as Inner Focus is. Association and finding similarity (and synergy) is key to perfecting your macros (and key bindings) across multiple classes and specialisations.
Flash Heal is to Flash of Light as Lesser Healing Wave is to Nourish.
Stay tuned for Part 2 (or Part 1.5, if you will) where we’ll tackle the last hurdle in managing your spells and creating those pesky macros we love to hate.
- Level 74 going on 75 — Mind Sear is near! [ ↩ ]
- That would be my priest’s name. [ ↩ ]
- Can’t cast healing spells whilst in Shadowform. [ ↩ ]
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And it’s on
I finally came around to taking this place off of maintenance mode. This is the first piece of proper code I’ve written since two or three years ago. I dare say, it won’t look as proper in IE61 as it does were you to view it in Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
What makes this so neat, you ask? Well, the text shadow of course! There’s something about text shadow I realised whilst playing around with it: It does not look good against (or behind rather) serif fonts of any size.2 It looks plain bad. Due to this I decided to use Impact of all possible things. It’s actually a really decent font to use for headings and menu items etc.3 when you increase its letter spacing. It looks proper yummy with a dash of text shadow added to it as well.
As for this place, I’ve no idea what’s going to happen with it. I was reminded of that “one photo a day for a year” deal in the beginning of February and thought I was too late to then (or let alone now). I might do a similar March through March deal though. I’ve literally no idea.
I would suspect this place will take on a slight slant towards ‘World of Warcraft‘ and all that it might entail.
I see now I must attend to changing the sub/sup font. Looks bad at the moment.
- IE must die! It’s the bane of any website coder. [ ↩ ]
- I did not try it in every size. Let’s be realistic. [ ↩ ]
- For things with a larger size basically. [ ↩ ]
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Avatar
Overview
- Released: 2009
- Running time: 2 hr 42 min (162 minutes)
- Directed by: James Cameron
- Music by: James Horner
- Starring:
- Las Alonzo – Tsu’tey
- Stephen Lang – Colonel Miles Quaritch
- Joel David Moore – Norm Spellman
- Giovanni Ribisi – Parker Selfridge
- Michelle Rodriguez – Trudy Chacon
- CCH Pounder – Mo’at
- Zoe Saldana – Neytiri
- Wes Studi – Eytukan
- Sigourney Weaver – Dr. Grace Augustine
- Sam Worthington – Jake Sully
Synopsis
AVATAR takes us to a spectacular world beyond imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on an epic adventure, ultimately fighting to save the alien world he has learned to call home. [...]
We enter the alien world through the eyes of Jake Sully, a former Marine confined to a wheelchair. But despite his broken body, Jake is still a warrior at heart. He is recruited to travel light years to the human outpost on Pandora, where corporations are mining a rare mineral that is the key to solving Earth’s energy crisis. Because the atmosphere on Pandora is toxic, they have created the Avatar Program, in which human “drivers” have their consciousness linked to an avatar, a remotely-controlled biological body that can survive in the lethal air. These avatars are genetically engineered hybrids of human DNA mixed with DNA from the natives of Pandora… the Na’vi.
Reborn in his Avatar form, Jake can walk again. He is given a mission to infiltrate the Na’vi, who have become a major obstacle to mining the precious ore. But a beautiful Na’vi female, Neytiri, saves Jake’s life, and this changes everything. Jake is taken in by her clan, and learns to become one of them, which involves many tests and adventures. As Jake’s relationship with his reluctant teacher Neytiri deepens, the learns to respect the Na’vi way and finally takes his place among them. Soon he will face the ultimate test as he leads them in an epic battle that will decide nothing less than the fate of an entire world.
Thoughts
I’ve been excited about this movie for a fair while. The trailer intrigued me from start through finish and has kept my interest and held my hopes up high for when it would finally be released. It does not disappoint. Not one bit. The characters have a very real sense to them, the Na’vi way and race are very intriguing and the CGI and graphics are amazing. A tidbit for you: as Jake and Neytiri walk along a tree branch, in proximity of their feet as they touch the ground — that area becomes illuminated! It’s a subconscious genie putting a spell on you! The world of Pandora as it is viewed and shown is incredible. Again, illumination! And floating big rocks, too!
Aside from the greedy-humans-takes-over-new-world-for-resources deal, which is a bit of a dumbed down and common concept, this movie has a lot to offer, as does its accompanying score (!). To be fair, I didn’t pay that much attention to details, merely enough to give me a great satisfaction as the movie came to its end.
Rating:
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As seen on January 01, 2010
This is what I see as I look out the window of my/our room in the house in San Pedro. It’s quite the sight on the first of January. I’m used to snow and white landscape home in Sweden at this time of the year. Things are different down here at the coast of Spain.
As we were leaving Gibraltar to drive up here for New Year’s last night, we found the car battery had gone flat. Ouch. Seeing as we were in the ICC car park, there was not too difficult to find a friendly soul to aid with jump starting so we could at least get to San Pedro. This proved to me that women and cars really don’t go well together. 1 After about fifteen minutes a woman going out of the car park decided to help us. She parks in the parking lot next to us and gets out of her car.2 (You know what’s coming, don’t you?) She locked herself out of her car.
The spare set of keys got to us about two hours later by the woman’s parents. And then we were off.
But wait, it doesn’t stop there.
As we had gotten past the frontier and out of La Línea, we enter a round-about and TBF makes the rookie mistake of stepping on the brakes. 3 It was raining and the brakes on the car are unreliable on wet surfaces, I’ve been told. Boom. We go into a stall right in the round-about. Fortunately, the car didn’t realise what had just happened and we were able to continue our drive to San Pedro. It was a fairly long evening. We got to the house at about a quarter to midnight with frozen pizzas waiting to be oven-ised. 
All in all, a fairly dreary and cold New Year’s Eve.
- We love stereotypes, don’t we?
[ ↩ ] - For what reason I’ve yet to establish — supposedly she wanted to watch the cables getting connected … ? [ ↩ ]
- I remain bewildered about why he did, to be honest. [ ↩ ]
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New Year: 2010
At the moment I have the official Sherlock Holmes website open in a tab playing its score for me as I write this. We never got to see Avatar last night as the tickets were all sold out. Instead we decided to see Sherlock Holmes.
Guy, TBF’s brother, claims it’ll be a disappointment to see Avatar in a non-3D cinema. What annoys me is that on some degree I agree with him. Hell, it’d be a slight disappointment to not be able to see it in an IMAX theatre (Imagine that! ). But let’s be realistic here, all I need to know is that the trailer alone as seen on my computer screen is enough to excite me over the edge and over again. (See what I did there? 1) Ah, the musical score and the blue people (which reminds me an awful lot of the draenei from World of Warcraft). I can’t wait to see it! 3D or no 3D, I will see it in the cinema!
It’s currently 4 PM here, which for me means the new year will begin in eight hours and I doubt I could be less enthused about it. It’ll mark the beginning of my 21st year as I turn 20 on the eleventh of January. It’s an odd feeling, not really feeling anything. There was nothing especially special about 2009 apart from meeting TBF face to face.
At the moment I miss home, the comfort of my own home with dad and the cats, my things and the apartment. I’m also reminded that I miss my nephew Marius (whose name I shall no longer mock in silence), brothers, sister and mom.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m solving the mystery over at 221 Baker Street.
- Reference to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. [ ↩ ]
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In chilly Gib
So, I’m currently sitting in TBF’s apartment in Gibraltar, which is on the verge of falling to pieces, I’ll have you know. It’s fairly cold here. My guess is somewhere between 15 and 20 degrees Celsius. That’s inside the apartment, by the way, not outside it. Thankfully enough, we have a double duvet which is warm and comfortable which I’m currently sitting on. It’s a bit chilly. This laptop is keeping my legs and hands warm though as I type this.
We’re going to see ‘Avatar‘ at the movies in about an hour and twenty minutes time. Beforehand we might do a couple of bowling rounds as well whilst we wait to get inside. It’s a small cinema with only two screens and two-three showings a day. How Gibraltarians manage, I’ll never know. I need my intense sound effects and big, high quality imagery to truly enjoy a movie, especially a movie such as this one. I’m looking forward to seeing it, a lot. As long as there are no annoying people with plastic bags etc that don’t realise how annoying they are, I shall hopefully enjoy it fully. Wooh!
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Tidbit #14
A non-white Christmas wasn’t so fun after all I’ve found.