Mouseovers and Helping

Sorry for the late post – the AP Latin IV exam was a butt-kicking thing to take X_x

To those who usually only read my blog via their RSS Feed – I apologize for the black font in the black tables (I can’t change it due to a glitch) so you’ll have to either highlight the tables to see the text. Or…ya know…actually come to the blog to see it in full color. Sorry again, peeps!

Anyways, I have recovered and have the last little things for a macro post. Mouseovers and the [help] condition. Here’s an example of one that I use frequently in raids.

#showtooltip /cast [target=mouseover, help] [] Abolish Poison

Spider quarter in Naxx is the bane of my existence. It has curses and megatons of poisons. To cut down on the time that I waste selecting targets, removing the poisons, then reselecting my healing target, I use a mouseover macro like this one. You’re looking at it and seeing 3 new things. I can explain!

If there’s a non-hostile target under the cursor, cast Abolish Poison on it.
If there’s no target under the cursor, cast Abolish Poison following normal targeting rules.

Mouseover

What this does is look at where my mouse cursor is on the screen, figure out if it’s on top of a target (be it in the main area of the screen like a physical body or over a unit frame), and cast a spell on that target without having to select it. As a healer, I absolutely adore this function since I can heal almost entirely by looking at my raid frames instead of party portraits (yay tiny uniform rectangles!). I can also be doing two things at once in a way – watch and roll HoTs on my target while removing poisons from the raid. Obviously I can’t do that at the same time because of the GCD, but mentally it’s easier to manage.

The presence or lack of a mouseover target doesn’t affect your current target or focus.

Help and Harm

This condition adds the “non-hostile” bit to the target. This can be an NPC, player, or pet – anything that you can literally help with a spell. If I was mousing over the boss or a mob, it would evaluate to false and the macro would go to the next set of conditions.

If you were doing this with a damaging spell and wanted a mouseover for casting it, you’d use [harm] (as opposed to [nohelp] which isn’t a valid condition) since you want the macro to see if you can attack your mouseover target. Because…you know, you want to harm your target.

Default Targeting Brackets []

Oh god she’s using SYMBOLS AGAIN! FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES!!!

…take a deep breath. This can be explained in a picture.When looking for a target in this macro, the first thing it looks for is the mouseover and whether or not it’s a hostile target. That’s covered in the first condition.

The second condition of empty brackets lets the macro search for other targets without having to specify conditions. First, it looks for a normal target and tries to cast Abolish Poison on that if you have one.

If you don’t have a normal target, it looks at your self-casting (either if you’re pushing your ALT key which is the default self-cast button, or you have Auto Self-Casting enabled in the Interface menu). If you have self-casting enabled somehow, it’ll cast Abolish Poison on you.

Mouseover –> normal –> self. It’s simple, and all of that is stated in the simple empty brackets. Those are the “normal” targeting rules for a macro. I personally always have Auto Self-Cast enabled for quickie recovery, but that’s just me. My other rendition of this is with Remove Curse.

Modifier Keys

Reader Stefan sent in this one with Innervate, which is pretty clever and introduces the modifier condition. This one only works if you do NOT have Auto Self-Cast enabled.

#showtooltip /cast [modifier:alt, target=player][help] Innervate

If Alt is pressed, cast Innervate on self.
If Alt isn’t pressed and the target is non-hostile, cast Innervate on it.

There are 3 modifier keys that you can use in a macro. This next one has all three.

#showtooltip /cast [modifier:alt] Innervate; [mod:ctrl] Thorns; [mod:shift] Moonfire /cast [mod:ctrl, alt] Wrath; [mod:ctrl, shift] Starfire

You can truncate the word “modifier” to “mod” if you want to save space. Alt, Ctrl, and Shift are all valid modifiers. You can combine them too, as shown above. Just make sure not to put a macro with a modifier condition in it on an actionbar that changes based on what you’re holding down. You can only do this with a mod like Macaroon…but I have to admit, I put a Ctrl macro on the bar that only shows up when I press Alt and it took me a bit to figure out why it wasn’t working. The macro was all “Hey, she’s pressing alt and ctrl! Let’s cast nothing!”

I have my moments :D

Quickie Recap

• The mouseover condition can tell if you have a target under your cursor.
• Help and Harm can determine the target’s status towards you.
• The default “normal” targeting sequence is Mouseover –> Normal –> Self, depending on the status of your self-casting option and if you’re using a mouseover condition at the same time.
• Modifier keys can save space and allow for more spells in one macro. You can combine modifier keys as well.

I think I’m gonna cap it there in terms of macro posts. Big thanks to those who sent in macros and helped me out with some of the mechanics! And to those guildies that I continually killed for the purpose of testing a resurrection macro ;D