Shifting Perspectives: Feral druid macros of power

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Welcome to our DPS edition, brought to you by Chase Hasbrouck, aka Alaron of The Fluid Druid blog. This week, we automate (legally!)

So, you might have seen references to macros, macro-ing, or other mac-type things (the non-cheesy variety) in my latest column, and wanted to know just what I'm on about. I've combed through my personal setup, the macro discussion threads over at Fluid Druid, and the excellent tips at Macro WoW to lay down some (automated) beats.

Before we begin, though, a quick introduction/refresher. Macros are an in-game method of grouping up commands or actions so they can be used in a more efficient way. To create a macro, you open the macro UI pane (/macro), type or cut-and-paste the macro text into the field. pick an icon if necessary, and save it. This saves the macro text to an icon that can be dragged to an actionbar, just like one of your regular spells. Macros have two main limitations; they can only be 255 characters or less, and they can only execute one ability on the global cooldown per click. Other than that, go wild! (Just don't miss the litter box.)

Wild Charge

Wild Charge is amazingly cool, but some macro assistance can make it even better. Sadly, even though WC is off the global cooldown, the Blizzard UI currently prevents one-click shiftcharging. For example, you can't macro Wild Charge to Travel Form to get an instant bound forward; you have to wait until the shapeshift cooldown finishes before WC updates to the new ability. Still, we can do a few things to make using it easier.

This macro does three things. If you're in caster form. it will use the caster form of WC to hop to the friendly target that your mouse is currently over, or your current friendly target. If in cat or bear form, it will do the same thing, but for enemy targets. Finally, for Balance, Travel, or Aquatic, it will simply execute the ability. (Feel free to change @target to @focus above if you prefer to use it on a focus target instead.)

DPS Cooldowns

Need something to die? Right now? This macro pops ALL your cooldowns. (Alpha Strike!)

This macro is self-explanatory, though I've added a conditional modifier to the Virmen's Bite use so you don't pop a potion when you're questing; you'll have to alt-click or alt-press to use the DPS potion. Non-trolls can remove the Berserking portion; non-engineers can remove /use 10, which is Synapse Springs; and everyone can remove /use 13 if you don't have a usable trinket in your top trinket slot. Sadly, Incarnation is on the global cooldown so you can't pop it at the same time as Berserk; however, if you wanted to, you could write the Berserk line as /castsequence Incarnation, Berserk and it would work with two presses.

Predatory Swiftness/Nature's Swiftness and Healing Touch

One of the key tools ferals have for off-healing is Predatory Swiftness. When this procs, you have the opportunity to cast a free instant Healing Touch that doesn't shift you out of form. It does use a global cooldown to do so, but feral has lots of time waiting for energy to regen, so there's plenty of opportunities to use it. Now, you could just stick HT on your bar and heal yourself every time it pops, but let's tweak it.

This one gets a little fancy. The first line temporarily disables the autounshift "feature." If you hit HT without having Predatory Swiftness up, it will just fail instead of shifting you out of form and starting the cast. Out of combat, though, it will work as it's supposed to. The third line resets this behavior to normal.

The second line controls who the HT goes to. If you hold shift, it'll heal you. If not, it'll heal your current target, if you're targeting a friendly. If targeting an enemy, you'll heal the enemy's target, which is typically the tank.

Nature's Swiftness is a little different, because it unfortunately suffers from the same problem as Wild Charge. If you macro NS and HT together normally, you run the risk of the Healing Touch starting to cast as a normal cast-time spell before the client realizes that NS is up. The below macro fixes that problem.

The only caveat is you'll have to double-click (or keypress, if you bind it) to get it to fire; it uses the same targeting criteria as the regular HT macro above. It's not optimal, but it's the only way to prevent the behavior I mentioned earlier. (While it's not the end of the world as feral, it's rather troublesome for a bear who tries to heal himself and winds up in caster form instead.)

Powershifting

Now that druids have Disentanglement back, it's time to break out the old powershift macros again!

This one's pretty simple. Hitting it will use one global cooldown to re-shift to your current form, which will break any snare/root effects you have on you. If you hold down Shift, it will unshift you instead, so you can do things like use a flight point.

Hopefully, this will get you started. If this has stoked your interest in macro writing, Wowpedia and Macro WoW both have tutorial sections to get you up to speed. Feel free to share more helpful macros in the comments!

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