Following the recent release of patch 3.2, many rogues have been playing with various forms of weapon-swapping macros in order to attempt to gain a small boost to their DPS. The premise is that whatever spec you are raiding with, and currently this should really be a standard Assassination-Mutilate build or a standard Combat build, you’ll typically be running with Deadly Poison (DP) on your off-hand weapon.

Now, DP has an uptime of 12 seconds and can stack up to five times on a single target. The idea therefore is to begin a fight with an off-hand weapon coated with DP, wait until DP has stacked five times and has a full 12 seconds or so of uptime remaining and then to switch your off-hand weapon to a good alternative/equivalent that has been coated with Instant Poison (IP). You then continue as normal until your DP stack has about 5 seconds of uptime remaining at which point you perform another weapon-swap to reequip the DP coated weapon so that you can refresh the stack before it drops.

If all goes well, you’ll have gained some additional DPS due to the extra DPS that IP can provide on top of the DPS that DP is already providing as it continues to tick. This whole concept relies very much on you being able to stand relatively still and maintain DPS on a single target only – it does not work on mobile fights or on fights where you are required to switch targets regularly.

Depending upon your spec (Assassination or Combat) and what gear you have will determine how easy it will be for you to perform the weapon-swapping due to the 1 second enforced cooldown (CD) that occurs after each weapon-swap. Additionally, you ideally should have a second off-hand weapon comparable in terms of DPS and speed to the normal weapon you use in your off-hand so that when you switch you don’t lose a significant amount of DPS through raw weapon-stat reductions.

We’ve included a trio of simple macros below and to use them, simply replace the “Dagger of BLAH Poison” with the name of the weapons you are off-handing in each case. And no, they don’t have to be daggers! Once you have some macros, we’ll assume you can cover the basics of keybinding them and of using a simple addon like class-timer to track the points when your DP stack is full and refreshed and when it’s getting close to expiry such that you need to swap back. If you pop on over to Elitist Jerks (EJ) then you’ll find some people there are creating automated weapon-swap macros that run in addons like Outfitter.

The Deadly Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Deadly Poison

The Instant Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Instant Poison

The Wound Poison Weapon-Swap Macro:
/equipslot 17 Dagger of Wound Poison

However, we’d suggest that if you can’t at the very least track your DP stack yourself and manually select when to switch weapons using macros like these, then you’re essentially letting the addons make your decisions for you and frankly you then neither deserve nor should you be swapping weapons. Do it manually by yourself or leave well alone. Blizzard already made their position clear on who should be thinking on behalf of your character when they locked addons down previously, meaning decursive users had to learn to do more than simply stab a single bright red button labelled “Decurse the cursed person please!”

In ideal circumstances where you are able to fit the weapon-swapping into your rotation, have an identical OH weapon to switch to and are on the ball with the changes so that you don’t let the DP stack expire, you can expect to see anywhere up to a 500 DPS increase from doing this. It’s likely going to be a smaller proportion of this figure for the “average you or me” once all non-ideal parameters are factored in but from our early experiments, it’s certainly worth doing on those “stand still and fight me” encounters.

-B-

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-

Following our recent article on raiding as an assassination-mutilate specced rogue, we realised that we’d mentioned the use of several macros which we didn’t take the time to explain in the body of the text. Therefore we’re picking up that loose thread here today to explain how we do some of these things we spoke about.

The “Auto Pick-Pocketing” Macro:

First up, an olden but golden macro that is not really a “raiding” related macro but is perhaps one you can setup once and then use for the next two years without thinking about it. Yep, it’s the magical “pick-pocketing” macro and for it to work, you must first go into your Interface Options/Controls panel in-game and ensure that the “Auto Loot” option is ticked.

With this done, simply create a macro that you will use to replace the ability you plan to use from stealth at the start of the fight, be it Ambush, Cheapshot, Garotte or otherwise. Then either drop the macro onto your button bar and/or keybind it according to your preferences.

PP-Garrote:
#showtooltip Garrote
/cast Pick Pocket
/stopcasting
/cast Garrote

Although this macro won’t work on bosses, it won’t break anything or prevent your main action (garrote here) from being cast and when you do happen upon a mob with pockets, you’ll get some free loot and coin for your trouble. What’s not to like?!

The “Focus-On-My-Tank” Macro:

I have several copies of this macro for ease and convenience. All it allows me to do is to set my focus target to one of my raid’s tanks. This is typically a pre-emptive move on my part indicating that I plan to use Tricks of the Trade (TotT) on them.

Focus-{tank-name}:
/target {tank-name}
/focus
/targetlasttarget

* Replace {tank-name} with the name of the tank (or other player) that you want to set as your focus target. Also, don’t include the “{}” brackets.

In raids, this macro helps me apply TotT to one of my tanks but you could also set-up a macro like this if you wanted to trade TotT with a fellow rogue in your raid, hoping that he or she will return the favour, so that you both gain a periodical 15% damage buff.

The “Cast Ability on my Focus Target” Macro:

In this case, the example below shows the macro I use to cast Tricks of the Trade onto my focus target, if it exists. It’s handy to be able to do this because by using a focus target, I only lose time to the energy used to cast TotT and not for targetting my tank and then retargetting the next mob in the kill-order.

Focus-TotT:
/cast [target=focus,exists] Tricks of the Trade
/ra Broliant cast Tricks of the Trade on %f.

TotT is the ability I most commonly use this macro for but I also have additional copies for other abilities such as Blind which can me handy when fighting bosses that mind control players and turn them against your team-mates.

Summary:

These three macros are the bread and butter of what I’m currently using. The point of any macro is to speed up and simplify common and/or complex actions and I’d encourage everyone to make liberal use of macros to streamline their play. It can make a real difference to the overall efficiency of your game and that’s a very good thing indeed.

-B-