The Warcraft Hunter

As soon as you reach level 70, you absolutely need to get the Misdirection spell and make a Misdirection macro. If you don’t, you are wasting a terrific opportunity in both raiding and soloing.

Normally when you are shooting at a mob, you are creating Threat against that mob as well as on any other unfriendly mobs that are nearby in the fight. What Misdirection does is move that threat to someone else in your party of your choosing, which would normally be your tank or your pet. (If you accidentally Misdirect onto your Healer, you won’t get invited back, believe me).

The “natural” way to cast misdirect is to target the party member you want to Misdirect to, cast the Misdirection spell, and then the threat from your next three shots will go to that party member. The trouble with this, and the reason that many otherwise good Hunters don’t use Misdirection, is that it is awkward to use this way. Not only do you have to find and click on your party member of choice, but you then have to find your actual target and get the shots off in a timely manner.

A Misdirection macro takes care of that for you by specifying your target under different circumstances so you won’t have to fumble around looking for the person to Misdirect to. The premise of this macro is that you will have one of two conditions. The first condition is that you are in a party, and one of the party members is a Tank, and that this is the only person on whom you will cast Misdirection. The second condition is that you are soloing and you will want to default your Misdirection to your pet. We will start creating the macro based on the first condition, and then add some options to it.

#showtooltip Misdirection
/cast [target=focus] Misdirection

The first line is our standard button icon selector. The second casts the Misdirection spell on whoever your “focus” is. A focus is a special target that you set up ahead of time. When you are in a party you will normally see the frames showing the other members of your party. You can right-click on one of these and choose the option “focus”. This will create another frame which is basically a copy of the party member frame but without some of the details. You can move this frame to somewhere less intrusive; and if you cannot move it, then right-click and choose the Unlock option and try again.

As long as you have a focus frame, the above macro will cast Misdirection on whoever is in that focus frame, and it could be a party member or your pet. If you have no focus frame then the macro will fail. Bear in mind that you will lose your focus under certain circumstances, such as death and mounting, so you will need to reset your focus. Yes, you could create a macro for that, but right-clicking is not much harder than clicking a macro button, so I don’t bother.

So how do we deal with the situations where you don’t have a focus, and simply want to cast Misdirection on your pet? Do you need a separate macro for that? Absolutely not. First, we are going to add some “conditions” to the second line of the macro:

/cast [target=focus,exists,nodead] Misdirection

By adding “exists” and “nodead” we are saying that we want to cast Misdirection on our current focus, but only if we have a focus, and only if the party member that is in focus is not dead; otherwise don’t attempt to cast it. Now we need to say what we want to happen if one of those things is not true.

/cast [target=focus,exists,nodead] Misdirection; [target=pet] Misdirection

The semicolon (;) acts as a sort of “else” statement. In fact, programmers will recognize this as a sort of “if…else” statement, with the conditions and parameters contained together in the square brackets. With this macro, if you have no focus, or your focus is dead, then you will end up casting Misdirection on your pet. This works well for soloing, because you don’t need to keep resetting your focus. However, there is a little more that we can add to prevent error messages from being displayed by adding conditions to the second part as well.

/cast [target=focus,exists,nodead] Misdirection; [target=pet,exists,nodead] Misdirection

Now the same conditions apply, and if you have no pet out, or your pet is dead, then the Misdirection won’t be cast at all (assuming the first conditions fail as well). So here is the final Misdirection macro:

#showtooltip Misdirection
/cast [target=focus,exists,nodead] Misdirection; [target=pet,exists,nodead] Misdirection

Be ready to use this on demand in raid, and use it to save your skin when soloing; it is the best way to ensure you can use maximum fire power and still not pull aggro onto yourself. Even better, it can help a tank keep enough threat so no one else in the group can pull aggro off them either.

Erik Basics, Macros Basics, Hunter, Macros, Warcraft