Lethal Shots

Macros are wonderful things, but I am often surprised at the number of people who don’t use them. Today I am going to go over a few very simple, but useful, macros to get you started.

• First up is a single line macro that is actually the one I use most often. You set the main tank as your focus, and then any time you use this macro it will target the same mob as him, allowing you focus fire:
  • /assist focus
• This is a simple macro to cast Hunter’s Mark and send your pet to attack with one button press:
  • /cast Hunter’s Mark
    /petattack
• This macro provides a one button switch between Aspect of the Dragonhawk and Aspect of the Viper. The last line is there to get rid of any errors that pop up:
  • /cast Aspect of the Dragonhawk
    /cast Aspect of the Viper
    /script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();
• This next one is a little more advanced. This is an all in one Misdirection macro. It will first try to cast MD on your target. If you have no target or an unfriendly target, it will attempt to cast it on your focus. Failing both of those it will cast it on your pet:
  • /cast [help][target=focus,help][target=pet,exists,nodead] Misdirection
• This last one is a Steady Shot macro. What it does is attempt to use your trinkets, cast Kill Command, and then fire Steady Shot. This frees you from having to to manually activate your trinkets and Kill Command, which means less you have to keep track of:
  • #showtooltip Steady Shot
    /use 13
    /use 14
    /cast Kill Command
    /cast Steady Shot
    /script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

Now this is just a small sampling of what you can do with macros, but it is enough to get you started. You can find additional macros on WoW Wiki or by searching google. If you have any questions or need any help, feel free to ask in the comments or email me directly.

With Wrath just a few days away, it is time to finish up your preparations. For the most part, I am ready for Northrend. One thing I have been working on in the last few days is macros. I had some problems with my macros after the patch, but I seem to have them worked out, and I have added a few new ones.

First up is my Steady Shot macro. I still find myself spamming Steady Shot most of the time while manually weaving other shots in as I see fit, so I built a macro to use as my catch all. What this does it try and activate my trinkets, then fire Steady Shot. It also has a small check in there to make sure I have a target. I put that in to keep from auto-targeting mobs. The script at the end clears the error frame of the errors i get when my trinkets are on cooldown.

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/use 13
/use 14
/cast [exists] Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

This is my Misdirection macro. It first attempts to cast on my target. If that fails, it tries to cast on my focus. If that also fails, it will cast on my pet.

#showtooltip Misdirection
/cast [help][target=focus,help]
  [target=pet,exists,nodead] Misdirection

This one is used mainly for trapping mobs. I hit them with Distracting Shot so they will go after me, and I put in the last line to stop my attacking so I don’t break my trap.

#showtooltip Distracting Shot
/cast Distracting Shot
/cleartarget

This macro handles my Aspect switching. With a single button press, it switches between Aspect of the Hawk and Aspect of the Viper. I chose this over a /castsequence macro because I want my first press to always cast Aspect of the Hawk. The last line is there to remove the occasional error message. For any other Aspects, I manually click them.

/cast Aspect of the Hawk
/cast Aspect of the Viper
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

This last one is not really a Hunter macro, but is sure is a lot of fun. I got this from Drotara over a Less QQ, More PewPew. What it does is summon a random Non-Combat Pet every time you press it.

#showtooltip Vampiric Batling
/run local c = GetNumCompanions("CRITTER");
  CallCompanion("CRITTER",random(1,c))

If you have a macro that you like, feel free to leave it in the comments.

I noticed something Wednesday night when I went to Kara. Almost all my macros were borked. Now I don’t use a whole lot of macros. Pre-patch, I used a macro for my shot rotation, Misdirection, and pull with Distracting Shot. Well, with Autoshot unlinked my old shot rotation went out the window and I have gone back to manually weaving shots, but I still needed the others. I also needed a macro to switch between AotH and AotV.

First, my pull shot. My old macro looked something like this:

/cast Distracting Shot
/stopcasting

The idea is I fire Distracting Shot, then stop firing so as not to break my trap. Now don’t ask me why, but this stopped working. Here is what I came up with to keep the same functionality:

/cast Distracting Shot
/cleartarget

My Misdirection macro actually didn’t break. When pressed, it first tries to cast MD on my target. If unable to, it then tries to cast it on my focus. As a last resort it cast MD on my pet. Here is the code:

#showtooltip Misdirection
/cast [help][target=focus,help][target=pet,exists,nodead] Misdirection

With the changes to AotV, I needed an efficient way to switch between it and AotH. What this macro does when pressed is cast AotH, unless it is already active. If so, it cast AotV. Essentially, it switches between the two with just one button press.

/cast Aspect of the Hawk
/cast Aspect of the Viper

If you have any other macros that you find extremely useful, just leave it in the comments.

For the longest time I have resisted using a macro for my shot rotation, instead choosing to manually weave my shots. I always felt that it would kill the fun of being a hunter and turn it into 1-button boredom. But after researching it some, I decided to give it a try. I a 3:2 Steady Shot macro:

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast !Auto Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/cast Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

This is a pretty simple macro that is supposed to scale with weapon speed.On each press, it first attempts to cast Autoshot, but if Autoshot is on cool down, then it attempts to cast Steady Shot. Also on each press, it attempts to cast Kill Command. The last line is used to clear the error frame so that you are not constantly bombarded with error messages.

The beauty of this macro is that my play style has not changed much at all. I used to use a Steady Shot macro that had Kill Command built in, so what i would do is press that button in between my Autoshots, along with weaving other shots in when needed. With this macro, I still do the same thing, I just have to press the button more often.

Overall, I have seen an increase in my DPS at the cost of some mana efficiency, but the tradeoff is worth it.