Saturday, February 7, 2009

My Hunter Misdirect Macro

a.k.a. The Misdirect (MD) Macro You Should Already Have.[*]

For raids, you'll generally want to have your /focus set to a tank. This allows you to one-button-press establish a MD to that tank. If you're the only hunter, you get the MT. If you have help, doing the OT is sometimes more work than MD'ng to the MT and sometimes just not necessary. Using a focus as the primary targeting mechanism lets you easily oh-sh17!-MD mobs with much more efficiency. On a boss-fight, it lets you easily stack threat on the tank to give them as much head-room as they may need. If you're using MD and have to then click the tank or even mouse-over their raid icon, then you're spending too much time doing it.

Options:
  • Press/Click: does a MD to your focus target. If you don't have a focus target or your focus target is dead, it gives you a normal MD cast.
  • Click+Shift: does a MD to your pet if its out and alive, regardless of what pet you have out. If you don't have one alive and kicking, it gives you a normal MD cast.
  • Click+Control or Click+ALT: Even if you have a focus, it will allow you to manually control where to apply the MD. This is good if you need to balance out a second tank in a boss threat list.

The Macro:

/cast [nomodifier, target=focus, nodead, exists, help] Misdirection
/cast [modifier:shift, target=pet, nodead, exists] Misdirection
/cast Misdirection


Follow-on questions for the reader:
a) Do you understand threat and have a good threat meter like Omen3?
b) Do you know how to set a /focus and /clearfocus? They're all easy to try and research.
c) Do you think it's crazy to set your focus to your own tank? Clearly there are some good occasions to set your focus to a hostile mob, but those are fairly rare and more suited for PvP.
d) Do you want to announce or emote something? You can, but unfortunately not conditionally. You could add something for your standard tank MDs:

/stopmacro [target=focus, noexists]
/e will be misdirecting %T to %F.

or -- and this one has a bug[**] -- even something like the following for also including the raid icon:

/stopmacro [target=focus, noexists]
/script r=GetRaidTargetIndex("target")SendChatMessage("is misdirecting "..(r and r>0 and ICON_LIST[r].."12|t" or "").."%t to %f", "EMOTE")


[*] - Yes, you can have an addon to accomplish similar stuff. If you are trying to slim down on your addons, this is an easy one to have as a macro instead.

[**] - Bug is left to the reader / macro-hacker to discover.

8 comments:

  1. Hey, thanks for these macros - just got to 80 on my hunter alt, and I'm looking forward to actually playing her somewhat well >.< heh

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  2. What do the " %T to %F " mean? is there a list you can direct us to that gives them meaning? I've seen them before and assume they mean a specific target.. but no one explains them

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  3. Oh, is %T = name of your Target
    and %F = name of you focus ??

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  4. @ Anonymous:
    yep, that's right.

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  5. decent macro, cheers mate.

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  6. Whenever I use non-blizzard unit frames such as ShadowUnitFrames or XPerl, I'm not able to select a focus from the drop down menu by right clicking the portrait, due to the fact that focus isn't on the list. Is there another way to select a focus i'm not aware of and still be able to make use of non-blizzard unit frames?

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  7. BTW, with the new changes to macro syntax, you can do @ instead of "target=" in your macros. My MD macro looks like this: /cast [@focus] Misdirection Nothing else is needed and it's very simple.

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  8. to slecet focus another way just - select a target and type '/focus' and press enter

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