At first it seemed like a random isolated incident. Our guild tends to leave the optional bosses of Ignis and Razorscale as pleasant little ‘fillers’, an easy way to round out an evening when there’s just enough time left before raid end for an easy kill. About half-way through the fight, I realised my Tricks of the Trade button was not activating. I tried my keybind, I tried clicking manually on the button. Neither worked – all I got was the “That action is not ready yet” error message. Grrrr.

We regularly run with two rogues in our raids, me and one other, and the two of us trade our tricks once aggro is settled to get a nice mutual damage boost on a 30-second cooldown. Except now I wasn’t able to oblige my rogue buddy. Got to the end of the fight and was about to send a quick whisper to explain and apologise for my ‘apparent slacking’ but received a whisper before I could send mine. “Tricks bugged. ” it said. “Mine too” I replied.

That was the end of that raid and I wouldn’t have thought anything much more about it were it not for the fact that it happened again on our most recent run. Sometime after or during XT it simply stopped working again for both of us and stayed that way until sometime during the pre-Freya trash clearance. I have no idea what’s causing it at the moment but it’s now near the top of my list of things to check up on over the weekend should I get the time.

Not only does it drop our potential DPS on fights where my rogue buddy and I would be trading the buff but it also makes every pull just that little bit more clunky because we can’t help with the aggro-redirection. I’m nowhere near a machine from which I can check the official forums as I type this but I’m hoping it’s got a decently sized collection of duplicated ‘QQ, this is bugged’ posts that will at least show me I’m not suffering this irritation alone.

I’ll update here if we find out what’s causing this issue, but for the moment venting was therapy enough.

-B-

Update: Cause found, solution pending…

It turns out that the cause of this problem with Tricks of the Trade appears to occur in certain instances where the target you expect to apply TotT to is made somehow immune to its effects. A standard example of this is when your target has been placed into the slag-pot on the Ignis fight. If you are not monitoring the status of your target closely and you use TotT on them as they are in the slag pot, they will be immune to its effects and you will be unable to use TotT again until you re-zone or relog.

Dieing/wiping generally clears the problem up but simply reloading the interface (“/console reloadUI”) does not. Logging out of the game then back in also fixes the problem generally.

It’s probably not too much to ask on a fairly static (for melee dps) fight like Ignis to check their target is not “slag-potted” before hitting TotT on them – no doubt simple laziness had been the cause of our past problems in this matter since I know I for one had not been paying such close attention – do forgive me though since it’s normally a warm-up or cool-down fight for us hence ultra-ultimate performance is not generally gut-busted for here.

Blizzard will probably hot-fix this issue away at some point but in the meantime, just pay closer attention to the combat status of your target to avoid such irritations and simply relog (or wipe/die!) if you get unlucky and do catch this nasty bug!

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-