Cheapshots: A Better Tricks of the Trade Macro.
Cheapshots is a collection of shorter informal articles for the rogue that needs quick bursts of useful information whilst waiting for their Thistle Tea to brew. Today we learn about some simple improvements we can make to our current Tricks of the Trade macro.
In a previous edition of Cheapshots we defined a focus macro for using our Tricks of the Trade (TotT) ability on a friendly target that we’ve set our focus target upon. This macro works well and does exactly what it says on the tin (to use a somewhat cliched expression) but there are occasions when our focus target is not set to the character that we wish to use TotT on. Today’s improvements to our TotT macro should help to address that problem.
The original TotT focus-macro:
/cast [target=focus,exists] Tricks of the Trade
/ra Broliant cast Tricks of the Trade on %f.
It only takes a few seconds if we’re quick to target another character, set them to be our focus target and then switch back to our previous target but it’s still time we have to stop doing DPS and therefore that’s time we would be glad not to waste.
Our macro can be improved fairly simply to become a little bit smarter about the way it works and that extra “smartness” might just help us to save a few precious seconds of on-target DPS time. Here’s how the improved TotT macro looks:
The new and improved TotT macro:
/cast [help] [target=focus, help] [target=targettarget, help] Tricks of the Trade
As you can see, this is slightly more than a straight-forward focus-macro. Let’s explain what it’s trying to do:
- If your current target is friendly, use TotT on your current target.
- Else, if your focus target is friendly, use TotT on your focus target.
- Else, cast TotT on the target of your current target if friendly.
Note: The last condition here essentially causes TotT to be cast on your tank typically in a group situation or on yourself in solo/rogue-tanking situations – not that you get any benefit when you’re the target sadly.
Hopefully, the end result of this improved TotT macro is the ability to use TotT in more situations without having to spend DPS time setting a suitable target on which to cast TotT.
You’ll also notice we’ve removed the “/ra Broliant cast Tricks…” line from the macro. It’s not really that important to be spamming raid chat with such a notice and we’ve not quite learned the required macro-mojo yet to know how to select the name of the character on which our macro ultimately casts TotT.
We’ll report back again here if we find out how to announce the correct name but for now, perhaps it will suffice simply to have the improved functionality this macro-update provides.
-B-