CHAPTER 2: MACROS

GENERAL MACRO ESSENTIALS

Having good macros is one of the easiest ways to improve in pvp. They make you faster and can help minimize any mistakes.

Well that's only if you're using the right types of macros. If your goal is to master a class and improve in pvp, there is a fine line you need to walk.

There are macros which represent the bare minimum that everyone can benefit from, but on the other side there are some that are completely unnecessary and actually make you worse at pvp.

Today we will be breaking everything down starting with the essentials while including some class specific macros that are designed to make your life better in arena. Everything here will be useful at all ratings whether you are rival or even rank 1.

To get started let's cover some macro essentials that apply to every single class. Throughout this video we will be using this addon called macro toolkit.

This will make it easier to follow along and build macros on your own. With that said almost every macro you make will involve a show tooltip line and command line usually slash cast.

Later on we will be showing you how to build from this to make your gameplay much more fluid. Now while this is a starting place for 90% of the macros you will be using, but you probably already knew this.

What you might not have known is how you can show the tooltip of other spells even if they aren't being cast by the macro. If you've ever watched streams and seen rank 1 players with multiple abilities on their bars this is probably what they are doing.

They will add a show tooltip of a major cooldown into a macro of a spell that doesn't have a CD which is what we are doing here on screen. This allows us to have an additional way to see the cooldown on innervate by attaching it to a spell that doesn't have one, like mark of the wild.

You are not required to do this at all but it can help make it easier to see important visual information and as an added bonus it kinda looks cool if you set things up right.

UNIT FRAME MACROS

Now though, let's cover the most important macro function, which involves using spells on different unit frames. This is by far where you get the most value out of macros, and is the number one way to make your gameplay smoother, especially as a beginner.

As the name suggests, unit frame macros involve using spells on all the different unit frames on your screen without needing to change target. The most important frames include Focus, Arena 1, 2, and 3, Party 1, 2, and Player.

You can cast spells on any of these frames by putting the unit in brackets in between Slash Cast and the spell name. Which will make your gameplay much more fluid since you won't have to constantly change targets.

Focus macros are usually the starting place for getting used to this type of gameplay. By adding an at focus command between Slash Cast and the spell name, the ability will automatically be cast on your focus target, assuming you have one.

You don't need focus macros for all of your spells, but instead anything that is a highly reactive harmful ability such as an interrupt, crowd control, or offensive dispel. You can use these types of abilities on your focus while you use damage or healing spells on your actual target.

You can do the same for Arena 1, 2, 3. Having separate macros for each frame.

Again, this works best for the most highly reactive harmful abilities. We don't recommend using Arena 1, 2, 3 macros for damaging spells since it requires a bunch of keybinds.

Aside from the focus and Arena 1, 2, 3, you will want macros to use specific spells on party members and on yourself. Party 1 will always be the highest player on your party frames, excluding yourself.

Party 1, 2 macros work best with reactive defensive spells like Blessing of Sanctuary or Roar of Sacrifice. As a healer, you could also use Party 1, 2 for dispel.

Or even some other defensive cooldowns. But you could instead simply keybind, target Party 1, 2, and self.

And speaking of self, you can use At Player to automatically cast a spell on yourself no matter who you are targeting. This is especially useful for a spell like Penance since it can also be used on enemy targets, which you wouldn't want to do if your intention was to heal yourself.

You can even use targeted ground spells like Angelic Feather with an At Player to be automatically cast below your character's feet. But as a quick recap, unit frame macros are at the core of gameplay inside PvP.

At the very least, you need to be using focus macros and then branch off into other unit frames once you feel comfortable. This is by far where you will get the most mileage out of any macro, so you absolutely should not skip this step before we cover anything else.

With that said, there is currently a bug affecting all focus in Arena 1, 2, 3 macros. And ironically, it has to do with people playing WoW on controllers of all things.

If you try and use an Arena 1, 2, 3 or focus spell on a target that is out of range, the ability will instead be cast on your target, which is a huge problem. The workaround is to modify a few hidden in-game spells.

You can do this with the macro we have on screen. You will need to press this macro at least one time per character.

Otherwise you can modify these hidden settings with an add-on called Advanced Interface Options and searching soft target to change all of these values to zero.

MISCELLANEOUS TARGETING FUNCTIONS

With the essentials out of the way, let's cover some additional ways to use spells, this time involving your mouse. The first is the mouseover command, which will use a targeted spell on the unit frame your mouse is hovering over without actually needing to click the frame.

This works best with the same spells you could use party 1-2 macros for, like innervate or even thorns for instance. Having these spells on a mouseover macro is faster than clicking individual frames, but slower than using arena 1-2, which makes it ideal for less important abilities if you want to save keybind space.

As a healer, you can also save time with the target of target command, which as the name suggests, uses an ability on the target of your target. This is mostly helpful as a healer if you want to assist with damage without needing to drop your current target.

The main risk of using a macro like this is that it has the chance at breaking CC, so be sure to pay attention to who your partners are targeting before using this command.

CURSOR MACROS

Some spells don't actually have targets, but instead need to be placed on the ground, which is something we can speed up. This is done with the At Cursor command, which works with any spell that has a ground-targeted AoE effect, like Flare or Ring of Frost.

By putting At Cursor in a macro with these spells, you can bypass the need to click on the ground, and instead automatically use it wherever your cursor is located.

This can take a while to get used to, and requires you to know the range and radius of your AoE abilities, but will make using these spells marginally faster if you really want to min-max.

You can even use this to add a world marker to the ground on your cursor, which is useful for an ability like Earthen Wall Totem, since it can be hard for your team to see. This only works if you are the group leader.

BUFFS AND DEBUFFS

With all of the targeting macros accounted for, let's move onto buffs and debuffs starting with a super vital macro command. No joke, it's an exclamation point, which can be put in front of any spell that creates a buff like stealth, dispersion, or even bear form, preventing their buff from being auto cancelled.

For some reason, buffs like dispersion will be automatically removed if you spam the ability, but if you put an exclamation point before the spell on a macro, the buff will not be automatically cancelled if you quickly press it.

This is extremely useful for rogues, since spamming stealth without this means leaving stealth instantly. On the other hand, there are some buffs you might actually need to remove in order to use other abilities.

You can remove any buff with a slash cancel aura command, followed by the buff name. This is mostly relevant for warriors, who will need to sometimes cancel blade storm in order to use other spells.

In some cases, you can even cancel aura your main defensive cooldown if it prevents you from using other spells like aspect of the turtle.

And if you really want to min max, you can make a unique cancel aura macro for blessing of protection or power infusion to prevent these effects from being spell stolen by enemy mages. This is definitely not required, but is recommended for playing at higher MMR.

/CQS COMMAND

Next up we have a macro command you might not know existed. It's called CQS, so let's break down what this means and how to use it.

CQS stands for Cancel Queued Spell. Spell queuing is how the game engine helps you deal with latency.

We've already made a video explaining how this works and how you can use it to your advantage in PvP. In any case, if you play on higher latency, or with a pretty significant spell queue window, you could run into a problem where your next queued spell will outprioritize the ability you actually want to press.

In order to prevent this from happening, you can put //CQS at the top line of any macro for major abilities, like defensive cooldowns, interrupts, or CCs, to make sure they are always the next queued spell.

Again, this is mostly important if you play with higher latency, since your spell queue window might be over 200ms.

ATTACK COMMANDS

CQS is just one of the many slash commands you can use in macros, so let's cover some of the other relevant ones related to attacking. The first is start attack, which will automatically start your auto attack whenever put into an ability.

Now this technically should happen anyway, but there are some specific situations where your auto attack can be cancelled, and the work around is to attach this command into your main damaging ability.

On the other hand, you can use the stop attack command to cancel your auto attacks, which is mostly useful with any breakable CC spell, like gouge, blind, or sap, when they are being used on the current target.

Casters have a similar function too, with stop casting, which will simply cancel any cast in order to instantly use other abilities. In the past, you needed this for interrupts, but now stop casting is simply built into any kicks.

Its main use now is to combine with major defensive CDs like ice block, aspect of the turtle, or even shadow meld to instantly cancel any cast to use these abilities. As a general quality of life improvement, you can even automatically cast spells in a specific order using the cast sequence command.

Now before you get too excited, we absolutely do not recommend using this to try and do a dps rotation. Instead this works best for simple maintenance buffs like poisons for rogues, and this can even be useful for warriors in order to change stances with a single keybind.

This is also helpful for any class who has a cooldown with multiple charges, like dks. We can add a reset to the cast sequence and set the second spell to null, which will make it impossible to use deaths advanced twice in a one second window.

If you want to be even safer, you can increase the reset time to 5 seconds to make it nearly guaranteed that you wont use the ability back to back when spamming your button.

PET COMMANDS

On the topic of DKs, if you play any class with a pet, you might also consider the following commands. The first is Pet Attack, which you can put into any damaging ability to make sure your pet is always on target.

If you want more control over your pet though, we would recommend keeping Pet Attack as its own unique keybind. For the most precise control over your pet, we would highly recommend using the Pet Move To command, which would get its own unique keybind.

This is a more technical form of pet micromanagement, but can be useful for changing the position of your pet to prevent it from taking damage. Finally, we have Slash Dismount, which is useful for some abilities, since you cannot control your pet while mounted.

This just guarantees that you will dismount in order to start using your pet's spells.

TRINKETS AND INVENTORY SLOTS

To wrap up the most useful slash commands, let's quickly cover one involving trinkets. Every inventory slot is numbered, with trinkets being numbers 13 and 14.

You can make a macro with slash use 13 or slash use 14 to automatically use whatever trinket is occupying that slot. This is useful if you swap between badge and emblem since it means you won't have to swap them out on your arm.

You can even put this command in any bursting macro to make sure you always line up your trinket with your main offensive cooldown. If your cooldown does damage, it is best to put your trinket as the first line so the ability itself gets the damage modifier.

If you do this, be sure to show the tooltip of your main damage spell.

CONDITIONALS: KEY MODIFIERS

Now that we've covered some of the unique commands you can do with macros, it's time to get nerdy with some conditionals, starting with key modifiers. You already know what these are, shift, control, and alt, and just like before, these go in between the slash cast and the spell name.

Let's pretend you're a warrior, and have mortal strike bound to 1 and battle shout on shift 1.

You could have these on two totally different places on your action bar, which is completely fine, but if you wanted to save some space, you could instead make a macro that uses mortal strike when no modifier is pressed, and battle shout when shift is pressed.

In order to make this work, you always need to have a no mod first if you have a key bind modifier in the macro. Here for instance, this macro will not work, until we add no mod for slash cast flash heal.

This way the macro knows what to do when no modifier is pressed. You can do this with any modifier, even having all three in the same macro, but we would only recommend doing this with spells that do not have a cooldown unless you have another way of tracking it.

You can even combine this with the target. You can use the targeting commands we covered earlier, so that you can have a single key capable of using the same ability on different targets, depending on which modifier is being pressed.

THE QUALITY OF LIFE CONDITIONAL

There is one conditional unique to dragonflight that prevents a lot of headaches. It is the known condition, which will change whatever spell is used depending on whether its actually in your spellbook.

This is helpful on any of the split talents on your talent tree, like the decision between ursul's vortex and mass entanglement. If you swap between these abilities, that usually means you have to manually drag the new ability on your bar, assuming you are using the same keybind for both.

Instead you can add both spells in a macro with the known conditional, which can be followed by the spell name or even the spell ID. Every time you swap between split talents, the macro will automatically update to the correct spell.

EVEN MORE CONDITIONALS

The following conditionals are all a matter of personal preference. They are technically all useful but not required for your gameplay.

First up, we have the exists conditional, which you can attach to the targeting functions we covered earlier and will attempt to use a spell on a target only if it exists. This starts by putting a comma and then exists in the same bracket of the target.

If we are targeting a friendly player, this macro will first try and cast this spell on their target if they have one. Otherwise, if we are targeting an enemy, it will just cast star surge on them instead.

This can be used with the help or harm conditionals, which allows you to use one ability on a friendly target and a different ability on an enemy target all with the same button. This is useful for saving keybind space as a healer and works best with spammable rotational abilities.

The only downside to this is that you will need to target yourself to use a helpful ability if you are currently targeting an enemy.

You can even make similar macros that change what spell is used depending on whether the target is dead or alive, which is only useful for saving keybind space for using resurrection effects.

Druids, rogues, and even hunters have a similar binary condition with stealth and no stealth, which changes what ability is used depending on whether you are in stealth, prowl, or camouflage. While this might seem important, there are very few use cases for this.

Druids can do something similar with stance macros, which is a throwback to the original design of warriors. Each one of your forms corresponds with a stance, and you can use the stance conditional.

There are a few other conditionals, but most of these are quite useless in PvP, like this one, which can change effects based on whether or not you are targeting a enemy. Your character is swimming.

CLEANING UP AND COMBINING CONDITIONALS

Hopefully by now you're getting a hang of how all the different macro options interact, but now it's time to clean some stuff up. If you want to, you can even use a semicolon to clean up these macros a bit.

The semicolon checks to see if the first part of the macro is possible, and if it's not, it continues to try everything else downstream. Here is a help harm macro from before.

Notice how the macro is split into three lines, but instead of adding a new line, we can add a semicolon in between our two spells and their conditionals, which does the exact same thing, but with slightly less clutter. As we briefly mentioned, multiple conditionals can be used in the same macro.

Here we have a macro that not only combines multiple things we've learned, but also combines conditionals. This macro, for instance, will first attempt to cast master's call on our mouse over if they exist and if they are friendly.

Otherwise, it will use master's call on ourselves.