So! There are a few handy macros that will make life as a holy paladin a little easier. Here are a few of my favourites:
Heal-through Flash of Light Combo
#showtooltip Flash of Light
/stopcasting
/use Lower City Prayerbook
/use Pendant of the Violet Eye
/cast [button:2,target=player] Flash of Light; [target=target,help] Flash of Light; [target=targettarget,help] Flash of Light; [target=none] Flash of Light
Heal-through Holy Light Combo
#showtooltip Holy Light
/stopcasting
/cast Divine Illumination
/cast [button:2,target=player] Holy Light; [target=target,help] Holy Light; [target=targettarget,help] Holy Light; [target=none] Holy Light
Edit: Please see the comments for some revised syntax tips since patch 2.3. The above will still work, but the revised syntax is cleaner.
These two macros work in much the same way.
- The “#showtooltip” line means that when you mouse over it you see the tooltip for the max rank of the named spell, not just an unhelpful tooltip with the macro’s name.
- /stopcasting is no longer strictly necessary now that “client spell cast requests are now sent to the server even if your player is already casting another spell”, but it helps with timing anyway
- The /use and /cast effects trigger my clicky trinkets (for Flash of Light) or use my mana-saver spell (for Holy Light) if their cooldowns are up. If they’re on cooldown, this will actually cause an error message saying the spell/item is not ready; if you prefer not to see that, you can insert “/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()” (without the “s) after these lines
- The final line is the meat and drink of the macro. It resolves like thus: if I rightclick the macro, I heal myself. Otherwise: if my target is friendly, it heals them. If my target is hostile and has a friendly target, it heals that friendly. If my target is hostile and its target is also hostile, the spell won’t fire at all. If I have no-one targeted, it will trigger the spell and give me the glowy-outline-hand selection cursor.
The really important line of these macros is the part where it heals my hostile target’s target if friendly. This is what’s commonly known as a “heal-through” macro; it’s great for tank healing on a boss who requires multiple tanks – like Gruul or Void Reaver (or, say, BWL’s Broodlord Lashlayer, back in the old days). You just target the boss, and heal away; the spell will land on whoever was the mob’s current target at the time you started casting the heal. (That’s something that can catch you out, so be careful of it, if the mob changes targets a lot.)
Personally, I think that every single healer should have a heal-through macro for this kind of situation.
Note that you can apply this kind of principle to any spellcasting macro. I’ve got similar ones for Blessing of Protection and Lay on Hands.
Rez Macro
#showtooltip Redemption
/cast Redemption
/stopmacro [nohelp,nodead]
/say Resurrecting %t.
This one’s helpful because it means other rezzers don’t waste time rezzing your target instead of moving on to the next deadie. Breaking it down: the /stopmacro line means that it doesn’t announce itself if your target is hostile or dead. The %t is a placeholder that is replaced by the name of your target. And of course you can edit the /say text to say whatever you like – mine says “Upsadaisy, %t!”
Mouseover/Castthrough Cleanse
/stopcasting
/cast [button:2,target=player] Cleanse; [target=mouseover,help] Cleanse; [target=target,help] Cleanse; [target=targettarget,help] Cleanse; [target=none] Cleanse
I bet you can guess what this one does already. The trick with this one is that its first check is to see if I have my mouse over a friendly target (either their actual body in front of me, or their unitframe in my raid or party display), and if so it cleanses them (or tries to). Very handy for raids with mass decursing, or PvP situations; lets you cleanse without having to change targets.
Those are some of my favorite healadin-specific macros. You can find some useful tanking and DPS macros at the WoWwiki page for pally macros – and don’t forget to mine macros designed for other classes for good ideas about what can do with your own! If you’ve got any good healadin macros, please let me know in the comments – I’m always keen to see more.
Good Macros.
Some syntax commentary: In 2.3 Blizzard changed macro syntax slightly so you don’t need to keep typing the spell name. You can string together multiple conditions like:
/cast [button:2,target=player][target=target,help][target=targettarget,help] [target=none] Flash of Light
It does the same thing as your macro, but saves a little room.
Also, you can go:
/use 13
/use 14
instead of naming the trinkets directly. Makes it slightly easier when dealing with multiple trinkets.
Also, I personally bind Divine Favor to Holy Light as well as Divine Illumination. Seems to work pretty well.
Thanks for the syntax tips! I knew there were some improvements I could make, but I didn’t realise they’d cleaned it up like that.
Re the /use 13 kind of syntax, I prefer not to do that, because sometimes I’m wearing a gear set that has trinkets I *don’t* want to try and blow with the first Flash of Light (like, say, a Talasite Owl) – but it’s certainly possible if one doesn’t swap gear much :)
And re the Divine Favor thing – that’s a really good idea :) I don’t think I need to do it, as I use DF all the time anyway and I’d prefer to have it available to use when I need it, but I can definitely see the merit in your method.
I tweaked my macros last night as well. Currently I have this:
#showtooltip Flash of Light
/use 13
/use 14
/cast [target=mouseover] Flash of Light
/equip Blessed Book of Nagrand
and:
#showtooltip Holy Light
/use 13
/use 14
/cast Divine Illumination
/cast [target=mouseover] Holy Light
/equip Libram of Mending
This will trigger my trinkets whenever they’re not in cooldown and will equip the proper libram that will best benefit -this- heal.
I also tweaked my macros for Exorcism, Holy Wrath and Consecrate to best use the proper librams for those spells.
Ooh, what a good idea :)
I haven’t done that, because I’m usually a MT healer so I run with Libram of Souls Redeemed (for the bonus to Blessing of Light) rather than the Blessed Book or Libram of Mending – but I do have a macro that will flip me to the Libram of Mending on leftclick (and back to Souls Redeemed on rightclick) for the occasional mp5 top-up. Come 2.4 I probably won’t need that, with the buff to Libram of Souls Redeemed (making the buff 30 seconds instead of 10, which is all but permanent), but it’s worth thinking about.
Just a query though Nibuca – with the Exorcism and Consecrate macros, given that the spells in question are instant, do the Librams properly take effect even though they’re equipped after the spellcast is triggered? I mean, does the game assume the spell and item swap are simultaneous, and give you the benefit of the newly-equipped Libram?
On Exorcism and Holy Wrath I put the equip before the cast and it works.
{from memory}
/equip Libram of Wracking
/cast Exorcism
I guess since Holy Wrath has a cast time that you could equip that libram after the cast starts.
I only use a heal through macro if the boss is using random target attacks, Aran/Solarian … if he swaps between tanks then I just follow the tank manually.
In a fight like VR I will often focus the tank most likely to die as I have macros for healing the focus target that uses trinkets/buff spells.
However I dont have a heap of macros, and have seen many that I could add to my rotation, think I will spend the next day or so updating my macros and pushing my toons limits.
@K – I do much the same thing; I usually target the tanks myself, but sometimes it’s handy to just follow the boss’s target. I use that on Al’ar, too, since I’m not usually the one assigned to topping-up the previous tank before moving on.
If you come across any handy macros, let me know!
As for focus targets – I love Trinity bar mod for just that reason; it lets you set the target of a bar, so I can have a bar that’s set to cast on the focus, and then I just put focus-specific spells on there. That way I don’t have to have macros for them all :)