Content
Post details:
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. [ ↩ ]
One thought shared regarding “How To Properly Configure Your Macros: A Priest POV – Part 1”
Trackbacks