Moonkin Battleground Diaries and Macros!

I’m almost positive that I’ve mentioned before my disdain for PVP. Now that doesn’t mean I turn my nose up at people that play PVP. I honestly think it takes a certain mentality to play PVP non stop and I respect the players that can do it day in and day out for hours on end. I inspect a lot of the players that I run with and admire and notice that many of them have gone out and spent time in the battlegrounds because its PVP related gear.

I’ve tried to PVP. Honestly I have. I tried with Luciel, that didn’t go too well. I tried to McGregor but since he’s protection specced it’s not the best way to PVP. I know that there’s certain ways to spec for PVP but am I willing to spend 10, 15 or even 50g to respec every time I want to do something? Um, that would be a no.

So Bosque is close to 60, 56 at the moment and certainly 60 within a matter of days. I decided that I wanted to get him a PVP mount. Why? Well, I have a cat mount and I’d like something different for him to set him apart from the pack, so I want to get him a Ram. It’s 30 battle tokens from each battleground that’s available to me at the moment, with no honor points being spent. Have I mentioned that there’s a nice staff that I want to get him once he hits 70? Not to mention some nice idols that would be perfect for him?

So the last three nights I’ve gone into the battlegrounds. I’ve gone in with some hesitation because honestly, I feel like I suck at PVP. Even dueling friends I get schooled constantly. So going into PVP, you either have it, or you don’t. I love to play PVE because once you memorize the way that the script is written, well then you’ve got it beat. With another player controlling a toon it’s different because you don’t know when they’re going to pop a pot or when they’re going to stun you, backstab, backstab, pounce, evade, pot and then backstab again. There’s no rhyme or reason to his game play that you can see and then not only are you stuck figuring out what your own strategy is going to be but you’re forced to figure his out as well in the short amount of time that you’re going to be confronting that person. (Is it me or am I over thinking this completely?)

With Bosque, I’ve found that I’m a pretty decent at PVP when I’m working with Bosque. The reason being is that I’m a hybrid. While I am specced Balance and I TOTALLY love it, I still have available the other skills of the different trees available to me. I’ve been focusing on two battlefields Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley. Before I had focused on Warsong Glutch but I’ve begun to notice that it’s almost like a solo battleground when you’re doing WSG because everyone is doing, whatever. You have fourteen people on offense and one person on defense, the flag is almost always taken and we, Alliance, have this RETARDED sense of having to turtle when we have the opponent’s flag!

The first Battleground that I did with Bosque, Alterac Valley, we won. I mean we straight just won. Three tokens in my bag right off the bat. I think I ended up in about five battlegrounds for the day and had about 150 kills. Pretty decent for a first day try at least I think.

Yesterday though was the kicker. I work late on Tuesdays, until 8pm and then have to turn around and go back into work at 8am. So my time is short Tuesday evenings. The missus is still recovering from her hospital stay so she was sound asleep. With little time to really do quests, I turned to Battlegrounds again. I ran Alterac Valley three times last night because I want to have the experience of some one on one fighting as well as taking some bases.

I wish I had a screen capture for what I’m about to tell you but you’ll have to take my word for it. We won two I believe, but on the second one, the one that lasted the longest, when the totals came up I placed tenth on damage. Tenth out of thirty. Remember that I’m still a 56 and there were more 59s than anything else on the board and I out damaged twenty of those players.

Can you say shock? Can you say awesome?

With the love of PVP in my heart at the moment, I decided to throw the druids that are Balance and mosey on in here a bone with a quick script.

/castsequence reset=5 Entangling Roots, Moonfire, Wrath

This is a PERFECT battleground macro. It puts the three bread and butter casts that you’re going to use at the touch of one click. At least, if you’re a caster. After this you can just Wrath, Wrath, and Wrath away. It’s the one that uses the least mana and the quickest cast you’re going to find in your repertoire

For Feral, it could go either way.

/castsequence reset=5 Prowl, Pounce, Shred, Claw, Rake, Claw Rake, Rip

If you don’t have pounce yet you can just omit it and just use shred as a starter. If you don’t want to deal with prowl or being behind someone just use Claw, Rake, Claw, Rake, rip.

For the Bears.

/castsequence reset=5 Charge, Faerie Fire, Maul, Swipe, Demoralizing Roar, Bash, Swipe, Maul

Again, if one of the first two aren’t available to you yet, you can change those out or even add on as you get higher in level, likewise with Cat form. The joy of these kind of macros is that the spells cast are incredibly interchangeable and allow you the flexibility to switch them on the fly. So, say you try this combo but you don’t have Ravage and you want it, simple, if you get dusted, which you will with a battleground, as you’re waiting for the spirit healer to bring you back quickly open your macros window and write it in.

Let me know Druids if these work for you. Like I said, I know basic macros and I know there are other macros to switch forms on the fly but damned if I know what they are.

Think I might have to change my logo to, what do you guys think? I want some responses or emails or something, geez!

For the Dame

The Gamedame stopped by and left a note about macros. She also had a request, here it is. I'm going to add the request to a marco that you can use during a fight.

/castsequence reset=5 Lightning Shield, Frost Shock

So this COULD be a second macro. The first you drop your totems with, this one would get you ready for the fight and also slow the opponent down while you melee or wait for the GCD to do some lightning damage.

Hope this is what you were looking for Dame!

Topping the Charts!

Last night I pugged it with an interesting group. Three of the members were of the same guild a shaman, a rogue and a hunter (Sounds like the intro to a bad joke) and the Shaman let me know not far into the run that the other two with him, well this was there first toon for each. They had never been to ZF, which was what we were doing, and needed to get the experience of playing in it and finishing the quests.

Let me say that I was impressed by the Shaman taking these guys under his wing, I even told him so, to which he replied that they were real life friends and he didn’t have much of a choice. (heh.) Still they managed to do a decent job. We only had one group wipe in the entire time. Bosque and the hunter were left up during the event at the steps, we managed to down both the troll boss and Sergeant Bly by ourselves.

Bosque topped the damage meter.

I have to admit that I’m loving being able to nuke the crap out of everything in sight. It’s much different from having to heal or get up close and tank. Standing back, rooting something and just blasting away at it is more fun that I could have realized. While running around in ZF Bosque went ahead and dinged 47. Outlands are closer than ever on my druid.

I haven’t put together that Marco like I threatened but I think, knowing the spells that I use, that it would look something this:

/castsequence reset=5 Entangling Roots, Insect Swarm, Starfire, Moonfire, Wrath

This would be for a solo situation, by the time you hit up Wrath the mob should be close to being dead and the Damage over Time from the other two spells is still taking effect. I use insect swarm because Farie Fire when I solo because I’m not doing melee damage, remember that a Moonkin is a caster form. Now if you were a Kitty this wouldn’t work at all and you’d want to focus on the cat attacks for your Macro. The same rule applies if you’re a big bear.

Other thing that you should always remember, buy your reagents before you go into an instance. I don’t care WHAT you play; buy your reagents because you never know what you might have to do.

On the Divine Forsaken front things are slow. I know they’re planning a raid for tomorrow, Kara of course, and together with our sister guild we should have enough people to get that accomplished. I’ve been focusing on the Druid and a lot of the players that I run with have just switched to playing alts. I think they have the same mindset; we play for fun, not to break our heads against ten man raids. I’ve already experienced it several times and it’s ‘aight’.

How about you guys? You finding yourself reaching for that Purple Pixel disease or are you satisfied with the accomplishment of having hit 70 and then moving on to a low level character that needs your love?

Also, anyone else have a useful macro they want to send over?

What's in a Macro?

I can not say that I’m a macro king. I can’t even say that I’m really GOOD at macros. I can only say that I know how to make one if I give it enough thought. Now I’ve made probably four successful macros in the past and they’ve been either for my Paladins or my Shamans. I’ve never ventured into the realm of macros for a Druid.

At this point my focus has been Bosque as I’m sure you can tell by the quickness in which he’s gaining levels, he’s currently sitting at 46, cusping 47 tonight most likely.

However I find that there are some macros for both my Paladin and my Shaman that have been useful in the past. The thing with a macro is that it’s very situational specific, at least for totems. If you wanted you could easily run around with six macros on your key functions and STILL find yourself in a situation that isn’t covered by those. I can tell you that there are at least two macros you should consider making when running a Paladin or a Shaman. You should have a macro for grinding; it’s a must, as well as a macro for when you are in a group/instance.

You can name your macros anything you want but I always went with something that was simplistic but reminded me which button to push: Solo or Group. You can pick any icon you want to serve for this macro but I’m going to remind you to use an icon that you won’t find on your spell bar regularly. Nothing worse than confusing buttons because they look the same.

So I’m going to assume that you know how to get to the Marco building section of the game. For a Paladin, grinding is almost like washing a set of clothes; wash, rinse, repeat.

/castsequence reset=5

This is the beginning modifier that you will have in just about all of your macros. Cast Sequence tells the server in which order you want your spells to be done. Reset is just what it says. It’s a reset button. Trick of it is the number after it. Reset=5 signifies that after five seconds of non use it begins the set of spells again. So you kill a mob, take some time to get another one, the button will start the spells from the beginning again the next time you use it.

Remember that a macro is really just a ‘lazy’ button or ‘easy’ button, depending on who you ask. It’s not going to play the game for you; it’s only going to help you from having to search your entire spell bar for the specific spells you know you use regularly.

So here’s a simple Paladin Macro for you to try out.

Macro name: Solo
Macro Instructions: /castsequence reset=5 Seal of the Crusader, Judgment, Seal of Righteousness, Consecration




So what I’ve put together is the bread and butter button of any paladin that’s running around grinding. Seal of the Crusader will come on, judgment will cast it on the mob in question, seal of righteousness will give MORE holy damage and then consecration will make the very ground below you holy. So you’re giving holy damage with your melee strikes and just by standing there and making sure that you’re optimizing that with Crusader as it strengthens the holy damage done. After five seconds of fighting, or after you’ve done the entire spell sequence, the set of spells on this macro will be ready to be used again.

Here’s a thing you have to remember about a macro, you’re still dealing with GCD. I put five seconds in because GCD is generally three seconds long. I made sure to stay within spells that all have the same amount of cool down. After sixty you’re going to get some nice spells and even in the Protection tree there’s the Avenger’s Shield that’s very good, thing is that some of those spells are on longer cool down. Avenger’s Shield is a GREAT way to get mobs but it’s on a thirty second cool down. It wouldn’t make sense to have that be your opening spell on this macro because then you’re telling the macro to open with that spell each time, even though it’s on CD for 30 seconds. So you want to try and keep your spells the same.

For Shamans the use of a macro is important because we are so dependent on Totems. Having a macro for totem drops is almost a must. Anyone who doesn’t have an add-on can attest that totems will take up most of your bar space. With a macro it can take some of those totems out of the equation straight away.

Here’s an example:

/castsequence rest=5 Stoneskin Totem, Mana Totem, Magma Totem

This is one that I used a lot when I was a lowbie. It puts out three of your main stay totems without having to search for them on your cast bar. Some of you may notice the lack of Windfury but honestly, I had it on my weapon all the time. This is a case where I had two macros built. One of them was for soloing and one of them for when I was in a group and Windfury was a request all the time. So that one would look like this:

/castsequence reset=5 Stoneskin Totem, Windfury Totem, Mana Totem

I tried not to use fire totems when I was in group. It brought on too much agro overall and would cause a wipe if not watched carefully. This isn’t an exhaustive resource; it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Still, with these starter pieces in your hands, you should have some idea of what you want to do and how you want to do it. I’ll be playing with a Balance Druid Macro soon and I’ll post it for you guys.