The Warcraft Hunter

In my previous post I showed you how to create a macro that would mark your unfriendly target with a Hunter’s Mark, attempt to use all your special spells and trinkets that were not on a cooldown, and send your pet in for attack.

What was not included in that macro was any shots, and this was deliberate. As I explained, you may not want to shoot right away after marking and sending the pet in. Instead, you might want to wait until your pet generates enough threat that you won’t pull aggro; or you might want to lay down some traps or cast Misdirect, or simply wait to see what happens before deciding what to do.

But at some point you are going to want to start shooting, and it would be nice to have a macro that will do the exact shots you want to in their proper order. This macro will help with that.

For the purposes of demonstration I am going to show a few variations of a Beast Master’s shot rotation macro, partially because it is simpler than the Marksman and Survival rotations, and partially because I am more familiar with Beast Master.

Again, when you create your new macro, give it a name that makes sense to you, and pick the Question Mark button. The first line of code that you want to enter is almost the same as the first line in the previous macro:

#showtooltip Steady Shot

Steady Shot does not become available to you until Level 50, so you might want to choose a different spell to display on the button, but I believe you can still use the button display even if you don’t have the spell. Regardless, you just want to choose a spell here for display purposes for easy recognition.

The next thing you want to do is to start adding lines that will cast the various spells that have cooldowns but are very powerful. Here are some examples:

/cast Kill Command
/cast Kill Shot (no longer works in 3.10)

These and various other spells are ones that only become available to use under special conditions. For instance Kill Shot is only usable on targets that have less than 20% health remaining, and has a cooldown of 15 seconds. Having this in your shot rotation macro means you have a better chance of getting one of these shots off than if you tried to time it manually. These powerful, opportunistic shots and spells should be automated whenever possible.

Some players will also include Bestial Wrath in this macro, but I prefer to keep it in my Attack macro, as I then have the option to invoke it again during a boss fight, or not to if I am dealing with trash mobs in order to save it for the boss.

The next line is one that simply toggles auto shot on:

/!auto shot

This line ensures that you get a shot off right away, because Steady Shot has a cast time, which delays getting damage in. The “!” at the front is there because Auto Shot is actually a toggle, which means that if you were to simply use “/cast Auto Shot”, you might be turning it off instead of on, depending on whether it is off or on when you cast it. The “!” means it will do nothing if it is already on, and turn it on if it is not.

Now we get down to the shot rotation. For Beast Masters, that means Steady Shot for the most part. Here is how that looks:

/cast Steady Shot

That’s simple enough, and for the most part this is what I have. But for demonstration purposes, I will make it a bit more complex. Let’s assume you wanted to alternate between Steady Shot and Arcane Shot. Here is how you want to work it:

/castsequence Steady Shot, Arcane Shot

This line says to cast of of these spells, and each time the macro runs, it will switch back and forth between these two spells. It will not cast both at once, it will decide which one to cast based on what it did last time. The first time you run the macro it will case Steady Shot, the next time Arcane Shot, and then back to Steady Shot.

Since Arcane Shot has a higher Mana cost than Steady Shot, maybe you want to use it less frequently than Steady Shot. You could accomplish this by adding another Steady Shot to the sequence:

/castsequence Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot

The first and second time the macro is run, it will cast Steady Shot, and on the third it will case Arcane. Of course, depending on how often you run the macro you might end up skipping one or both of the Steady Shots as it may be on cooldown. If you want to have a sequence like this, you will have to avoid spamming your macro as you will end up skipping some of your shots and end up relying on Auto Shot for that time.

Let’s say for a moment that you wanted to reverse this and put Arcane Shot at the beginning. This ensures a quick hit with a good chance to crit and no cast time. What happens if you happen to end a fight with Arcane Shot? Your next run of the macro would cast Steady Shot rather than Arcane Shot when you attack your next target. Fortunately there is a way to deal with that:

/castsequence reset=3 Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

Here we guarantee that if you have not run the macro for at least 3 seconds, you will always start with the Arcane Shot, even if it was the one cast on the last run of the macro.

Again, this line will look different for every player based on what they want their shot rotation to be, and what spells they have available to them. One way to establish a good rotation is to practice on Target Dummies that are available in all the major cities. If you use the Recount add on you can get some good detailed info about what shots are working and which are not. There is so much complexity in the game that a minor change can have a major effect on the damage output.

As I have mentioned a few times, many of your spells will not be cast due to cooldowns. The error messages from this can get annoying, so here is line that you can add to help get rid of them:

/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

This invokes the Clear function of your User Interface’s ErrorsFrame object, which is what the game uses to display error messages. Errors can be turned off in your interface, so it is up to you whether you want to include this or not.

So here is my simplified version of the macro in full:

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast Kill Command
/cast Kill Shot (again, not working in 3.10)
/!auto shot
/cast Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Again, you can pick and choose here what is relevant and what is not, but hopefully you have enough understanding of how to create a shot rotation macro that works for you.

**UPDATE**

As of Patch 3.10 Kill Shot will break this macro, as it is now on the Global Cooldown. So far there seems to be no way around it

Erik Basics, Macros, Uncategorized Basics, Hunter, Macros, Warcraft