Macro Workbench – Fury Warrior Macros for 4.03a

The Macro Workbench is a column on building and using macros to improve or add utility to your WoW playing experience.

With all the talent changes in the new patch, many of the spell names and functions were changed as well, breaking most of them.  There has never been a better time to revisit your macros after a fresh respec.  Today, we’re going to take a quick look at macos for fury warriors.    While recently nerfed in 4.03a, Victory Rush now restores 20% of your maximum health when used on a mob that yields experience or honor.  This is an essential skill to use whenever possible when leveling in Cataclysm to reduce downtime.

The staple rage dumps Heroic Strike and Cleave are no longer on next swing attacks, but instant attacks that do not trigger the global cooldown.  With these changes I decided that I would make a new macro combining these two abilities as they share the same cooldown.  At the same time its an ability that gets spammed pretty often, so it was a good place to use Victory Rush as well, saving 2 action buttons.  With the macro you don’t have to think about when to use Victory Rush as it will be used whenever you use Heroic Strike.  Here’s the macro I eventually came up with:

#showtooltip

/cast [nomod] Heroic Strike; [mod] Cleave;

/cast Victory Rush

/startattack

Another change is how Battle Shout and Commanding Shout now work like Horm of Winter for Death Knights, generating rather than costing rage.  With that in mind I modified my usual “starting sequence” macro to take this into account.

#showtooltip

/castsequence [nomod,nocombat]reset=15 Battle Shout, Enrage, Intercept

/cast [nomod,combat] Execute; [mod] Intercept

/startattack

I love this macro because it saves a lot of action bar space and gives you plenty of control.  The ideal way to enter battle for fury warriors atm is to use both Battle Shout and Enrage so you have enough rage to hit both Heroic Strike and Rage Blow (with the enrage effect) for strong inital burst damage.  Then while in combat, it functions as Execute and Intercept when shift is held.

Try out the macros and let me know what you think.

Macro Workbench – Bear Tanking Macros

The Macro Workbench is a column on building and using macros to improve or add utility to your WoW playing experience.

I’ve been working on Bear tanking on Gaia lately as I mentioned in this post.  I feel much more comfortable with it and settled on a keybinding and macro layout I can almost as second nature (get it?).  As promised lets take a look at those bindings and macros after the break.

Macro Workbench – More Pew Pew, Less QQ

The Macro Workbench is a column on building and using macros to improve or add utility to your WoW playing experience.

As promised, this time round we’ll take a look at a few macros that will help increase DPS for casters.  One of the fundamentals to good DPS is maximizing up-time.  This basically means like that you spend as much of your time attacking a boss/adds, casting as many spells as possible during the full duration of a fight.  Its nice that you can do 9000 DPS on a boss, but if you are wasting time switching targets when you need to kill an add your dps drops to 0 during that period.  A good macro and knowing how and when to use it will increase your up time and thus your DPS.  Lets look at a few macros after the break.

Macro Workbench – Macroing for better DPS.

The Macro Workbench is a column on building and using macros to improve or add utility to your WoW playing experience.

Welcome to the first Macro Workbench column.  I love using macros in WoW and while I don’t use super complicated ones, I think that macroing spells and abilities can help you to reduce the number of keybindings you need; and when you get used to it, improve the way you play your role.