[Druid] Maul is very, very good (and other quick notes)

Just a quick note: despite what you might have read recently, maul is most certainly not your second-biggest source of threat behind faerie fire. You might be able to make an argument that it's the second biggest source of threat per rage point, but most of the time who cares? On most raiding bears maul is 50-60% of your overall threat for a single-target encounter, and for higher-end bears it is as much as 70%. For multitarget fights it still remains huge due to the glyph of maul, and only is eclipsed by swipe (and only when you have at least 4 mobs and preferably a lot more than that).

Also, swipe is not at all inefficient compared to lacerate on a per-threat point. Unless you have shredding attacks - and what bear build has that? - lacerate costs the exact same amount of rage that swipe does. Swipe on a single target puts more threat on that target than lacerate does; the only time this is not the case is when you have a lacerate-5 stack up, and you should only do that on long fights or when you really want to do max damage. It is otherwise as expensive as lacerate, and definitely on multimob fights is far more efficient.

Yeah, I'll post from time to time when things get really wrong (like they did above) or when it strikes me. But some other quick notes:

• The rage normalization stuff I've talked about elsewhere; maul being removed from on next swing is great. Rage normalization is a bit scary, but mostly because it's going to be a focus on warriors (rightfully so) and not on bears.
• Shockingly the LK weapons are good, in case you were wondering.
• Bears are really awesome on LK too. There's a reason the only guild that's killed LK25 has a bear with a pvp weapon as their main tank, and 3 ferals on the kill.
• You should get stacks of glyph of mangle and carry them around too, and swap them with your glyph of maul when you don't need multitarget stuff.
• No, manglespam doesn't beat shred. Even with 4pT6.
• Ferals aren't going the way of blood DKs, and our mastery will be split between cat and bear the same way our tier gear is.
• Yes, frost resist gear on Sindragosa is good
• Yes, you should get out of improved mangle in cat form and put those points elsewhere.

Any other quick bits of news you'd like my opinion on before I disappear into the ether?

[Druid]A requiem for a glyph

It is with great sadness that I announce the demise of a dear friend of mine, who took me through wonderful times. Since 3.0 was released and our guild worked its way through Sunwell, then later in the quick clears of Naxx, and even as recently as our downing of Sarth3D it was always a wonderful companion.


Goodbye, glyph of maul. You made heroics a breeze, you made trash pulls in raids fun, you made farming and doing old instances into speed runs, and you made tanking two mobs at once effortless. You even gave my raid joy by killing our GM after he was MCed while I was tanking Kel'Thuzad, and then killing that loudmouth DPS warrior who always gives us shit in the same night.

Yet sadly, you cannot be toggled. And because of that, you are being replaced by Growl.

Why?

Because on some things it's actually useful to not tank everything, and on some things it's actually important not to break CC.

The breaking point (hah) was last night doing Thorim's hallway. After trying various things, we decided to try using sheeps to stop the AoE-stunning mobs while we killed the healers (unlike before, where our healers would run up and be killed by the mobs). I'd tank one of the two mobs...and have to do ridiculous gymnastics and aerobatics to try and avoid mauling the sheep's face off while watching for the first boss's Utgarde-Pinnacle like attack, and it was just too annoying. I ended up turning off maul for my attacks, but that's not ideal by any means either.

So today I bid thee goodbye. A moment of silence for this 40% boost to bear DPS on trash.

I'll probably just carry around a stack of glyphs. They're really cheap, and it might be situationally useful to swap them. For now, though, Maul just isn't worth the pain.

Of course, when something takes something away from us, often something is given in return. With that I would like to welcome back an old friend:


Yes, it's wonderful to see you back, CC. We didn't realize how much we missed tanking without you until you were gone.

Yes, I'll have more on the hardmode loot and the PvP gear and where it ranks. In the meantime, why don't you check out Runycat's great list for cat gear?

[General] ToggleOnNextStrike (Maul/HS)

In an earlier post I mentioned that Sarf of Elitist Jerks was working on an addon that can automatically toggle your macros with maul (or heroic strike, or rune strike).

Well, here it is.

It isn't the most user friendly thing in the world, so I'll talk through it a bit.

The trigger is /tons. What you'll want to do is have a macro for each attack you want. Unlike before, you can have your macro be fairly in-depth and big, too - so #showtooltip, modifier tags, whatever all work here.

To add them to be toggled, do /tons addmacro {macroname}, where {macroname} is the name of the macro you'd like to toggle. Do this for each one.

To add maul or remove maul from those, simply do /tons toggle.

Now, here's the cool thing about this - it works for all the tanking classes. It works for DKs and druids and warriors, and will add the appropriate ability depending on the class you are.

It's fairly new, and I'm sure isn't quite tweaked out - but it does a lot of nice things that I like. Check it out if you're tired of spamming your maul button. One thing I'll try and add is the ability to customize what is toggled so that instead of adding/removing maul, it adds a [modifier:shift] maul or [nomodifier] maul depending, so you can use it in a pinch.

[General]Toggling Maul part 2 - making a better toggle

Some really nice discussion about the maul macro talked about yesterday. Instead of answering in that post some of the questions that came up, I figured it'd be easier to talk more about it in another post.

First off, you can remove the "if not InCombatLockdown() then...end" part of the macro. That gets you a ton of extra characters, which allows you to do something like this instead:

/run local i=GetMacroIndexByName ("Ma") local mt=GetMacroBody(i) local a=strlen(mt) local v="/cast Mangle" if a < 15 then mt=v.."\n/cast [nomodifier]!Maul" else mt=v end local n,t,_,l=GetMacroInfo(i) EditMacro(i,n,t,mt,l,1)

This will change the mangle to do a mangle in one case, or do a mangle/maul in the other case as long as you don't hold down a modifier key (alt, shift, ctrl). Which might be nice for finer grained control.

Next, thanks to reader Pockie I figured out how to make this a one-button toggle. Though it's a bit involved. Here are the steps (and this should answer your question, secretagentcat)

First, make three macros for your basic attacks: Mangle (Ma), Lacerate (La) and swipe (Sw).
Next, make modifier toggle macros for those three attacks like the ones above. Put them on a bar that is hidden normally.
Next, use another macro to determine what the name of that button is in the WoW UI world. The macro for this is:

/run local f = GetMouseFocus(); if f then DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage(f:GetName()) end

Bind this to a button with a keypress for now.
Then, hover over one of the three toggle macros and use the macro above. You should see something like "BTBar4Button28" in your chat window. Do that for all three toggle macros.
Finally, write a macro called 'toggle' that looks like this:

/click BTBar4Button28
/click BTBar4Button29
/click BTBar4Button30

Where the BTBar4Button28-30 are the text strings that appeared in your chat window. And bind that to a key. Now you can hide the bar with the three separate toggles and toggle everything with one key while having only 4 visible buttons. Of course, this doesn't work all that well if you have a shortage of bars or don't have hideable bars.

An alternative (as Pockie suggests) is to do something like this:

An alternative would be to have your 3 ability macros have a line "/click MaulButton" instead of "/cast !Maul". MaulButton will be a macro that simply consists of "/cast !Maul", and it's hidden somewhere on your bars. You then have a toggle macro on your main bars that will modify the MaulButton macro to "//cast !Maul". The end result is that you only use up 2 buttons (1 visible 1 hidden).

I like that idea too, though it's not for me personally; I like being able to do it for each type of attack potentially. The big advantage of this is that it allows for a lot of text in that /cast !maul macro, at least in theory. You could easily toggle between it doing /cast [modifier:shift] !maul and /cast [nomodifier] !maul, which might be nice.

If this is daunting to you, don't worry about it too much. There should be an addon soon that fixes this a bit and allows for a lot more complex and maintainable using of this type of feature, and it'll come out soon. At least hopefully.

Nav does what a lot of people out there - he has a castsequence macro and spams it and his maul button. Astrylian (of Rawr fame) had a one-button tanking macro that was good for 95% of all encounters. It was basically mangle, lacerate, swipe with the ability to override in certain circumstances (like on berserk) and did auto-mauling except on overrides. I tried that for a while, but it felt really uncontrolled and awkward. But it was at least one button. I would strongly recommend macroing maul into the basic attacks if you can, though; the difference between spamming one and two buttons is night and day, especially when doing things like moving while doing so.

Felkan asked about the ! in front of maul. I think that they've actually turned off the ability to 'toggle' maul, but it was put in there as a precaution. I've honestly not tested it much to see whether or not the toggle works. My experience is that it doesn't matter, but only actual testing would know for certain. I do know that pressing maul multiple times will turn off the highlighting on the button - but that doesn't seem to affect the actual next cast of maul.

Saroosh asked about extra macro slots in 3.1. And sadly the answer is no - you have only the normal set of macros. Ugh. Again, an addon would help this tremendously.

SecretAgentCat also asked about if you could modify a macro so that it would target different things at various parts of the fight and allow you to spam it. And the answer is no - at least not like this does. You can't modify the text of a macro during combat. Additionally, you can't do a castsequence either for targets; only actual casts works for this. Still, you probably can get away with doing something like this for your specific needs:

/tar Shad
/tar Vesp
/cast Growl
/cast Faerie Fire (feral)
/tar Shad
/tar Teneb

If Tenebron and Shadron are up, it will first target Shad, then fail to target Vesperon (since he's not around), then growl, faerie fire, target Shadron again, then target Tenebron, ending up on Tenebron. If Shadron and Vesperon are up, it'll target Shadron, then target Vesperon, growl and faerie fire Vesperon, target Shadron again and then fail to target Tenebron (since he's not around), ending up on Shadron. I think that's what you want it to do. Alternately, you can do tricky things with setting your focus and then reseting it, but I don't think it's really necessary for something specific like this.

[General]Toggling Maul/HS

One of the bigger headaches I've had is having to queue up maul while doing attacks. Maul is a huge part of the bear threat component - over 60% - so it's required when doing most tanking duties assuming you have enough rage. But it's not really useful to just press it separately from the other attacks. Most of the time I maul/swipe, maul/lacerate, and maul/mangle.

Except, of course, when I don't. When I absolutely need to not do this for whatever reason, such as me not wanting to do a lot of threat. In that case, most of the time I don't want to use maul at all, or I'll want to use it selectively.

I could add the following to make sure that I cast maul whenever I cast an attack:

/cast !maul

The exclamation is there to make sure you don't toggle it off if it's already on, so you can spam it. But then, I don't get the choice of doing maul or not. It'll always maul.

Okay, I can add modifiers:

/cast [modifier:shift] !maul

or

/cast [nomodifier] !maul

But then I have to hold down a shift key while spamming the button anyway, which still involves two buttons. Bleh. Or hold down a button when I don't want to use it. Again, bleh.

What I'd like is to turn maul off for a duration of a fight, if I want. So that for some fight I could just maul to my heart's content, but for another I could choose to do it if I wanted. The problem here is that there's no capslock type of system. I can't just press a button and have it 'held' without programmable keyboards. What to do?

Well, if you're sarf from EJ, you hack the bastard instead and you write a macro that rewrites another macro. Which is a brilliant idea. I had to modify his initial crack at it and mine's not nearly as elegant, but it does work.

/run if not InCombatLockdown() then local i=GetMacroIndexByName ("Ma") local mt=GetMacroBody(i) local a=strlen(mt) local v="/cast Mangle" if a < 15 then mt=v.."\n/cast !Maul" else mt=v end local n,t,_,l=GetMacroInfo(i) EditMacro(i,n,t,mt,l,1) end

With the other macro called 'Ma' being this:

/cast mangle

What this does is the following:

• checks to see whether you're in combat. (you can't modify macros in combat).
• Gets the macro that's called 'Ma'. This looks for a macro called Ma and grabs info about it. It's important that you have this macro already.
• gets the length of that macro
• if the length is smaller than the extended version, make the macro's text be:
  /cast Mangle
  /cast !Maul
• Otherwise, make it be:
  /cast Mangle
  
• Then edit the macro 'Ma' to say whatever you said above.

That means that if you press this macro, it'll change your 'Ma' macro to either be with or without maul. And it'll stay that way for as long as you don't change it back.

Then, I had three sets of macros (Ma, La and Sw) and set up an associated modifier macro to change them for mangle, lacerate and swipe. So I can toggle all three of these abilities as I need to. Just change the parts above in bold from Ma and Mangle to La and Lacerate or Sw and Swipe. It's a total of 6 macros, which is not great. But it does work for exactly what I want it.

In practice I don't find myself toggling them all that much. For more threat-sensitive fights, I'll likely take lacerate off the automaul but not swipe and mangle. If it's imperative that I don't maul at all or I only maul when it's safe because of CC, I can take them all off and do it manually as before.

Sarf has said that if there's interest, he'd clean it up and make an addon that could toggle these things more easily and get around the 255 character limit, which would be ideal. But even so, this removes about half of the keystrokes I use normally, and makes me a happy druid. I don't know whether this will work precisely as well for warriors given that their swing speed is close to their GCD speed, but it might help some.