Grinding Macros
“Dear BRK, grinding is boring and dull and tedious. I like to mix it up by pushing the envelope.
“When the mob is down to about 25% health, I click off the target or unclick the auto-fire, left click another non-aggro mob, send my pet to attack that, switch back to my original target, pew pew pew, and when it dies switch to the new mob which by now has a lovely level of aggro built up against my pet. This way there’s no waiting for pet aggro to build, no down time, and the slight risk that the first target might live just long enough to stop chasing after Wilf and discuss matters with me. That slight risk keeps things interesting.
“First, am I nuts? Should I resign myself to boredom while grinding instead? Second, any suggestions on writing a macro to help doing this? My attempts so far are embarrassing fails, but I really want to do this because there’s an awful lot of clicking involved. Wilf and Garuk”
Nothing wrong with Power Grinding at all; BRK completely endorses it.
As for macro help, though, we can help you some, but not completely. There is no macro command or castsequence series that will auto-select the mob 2nd closest to you or sequence through the mobs in close proximity. At least none of which that we are aware. Aside from that limitation, we can help.
You and your pet are fighting Mob A. If you want to target Mob B, you either have to tab-target or left-click on him. You select Mob B and now you want to send your pet, switch back to Mob A and finish it off.
/stopcasting
/petattack
/targetlasttarget
/cast Auto Shot
This will stop your Auto Shot so you don’t grab aggro from Mob B, send your pet to Mob B while you retarget Mob A, and resume firing at Mob A.
Poof, Mob A goes down. Now you want to engage Mob B. If you had set your pet as your Assist, you could use your Assist Macro to automatically attack your pet’s target. When Mob B gets down to 25%, repeat these steps all over again.
Now for those who choose to grind just one mob at a time, we can simplify this process with the addition of the /targetenemy command to our Pet Attack Macro.
/targetenemy
/petattack
/cast Hunter’s Mark
No more tab-targeting or mouse-click-selecting, this macro will target the nearest enemy mob, send your pet to attack and cast a Hunter’s Mark on the mob. Wait for a Growl to land, then start shooting. Rinse and repeat.
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Nice info.
I am raising up 3 pets at this time. Trying to find my inner hunter–pet connection to determine what my Big Red ____ will be. Plus I worked hard to run into the Blueberry starting area to tame my Ravager and into Red Ridge to tame 1) a goretusk and then later 2) Bellygrub.
Yes, I know I have two DPS pets when you realize I have the white lion from the Barrens. (I always mess his name up so I won’t even try.)
Although, my power grind is usually to drag the mob toward me while the pet finishes off the first mob, I’ll switch targets and hit them with concussive then Serpent Sting and then Arcane shot. If I time it right the pet is on its way back to me so I send it to intercept.
Learning the timing and getting it right is nice when the pet stops the mob in its tracks or hacks on it while I kite it a bit. Or if I need some melee training we drag it into a immolation trap.
You guys like it the “Hard way”!
For grinding, I use a few set of macros: 1) - Target nearest enemy, cast hunter’s mark and set pet on it; 2) assist pet (if no target) and cast serpent sting; 3) same but with arcane (when I simply don’t want to auto-shoot); 4) same but with concussive (for running mobs); 6) and this is the “juicy” one: queue another target for my pet…
You can get away w/ 1), tab or click another mob, 6), tab or click another mob, 6), etc… The nice thing of macro #6 is that, when you queue that mob, you also get your pet’s target as your own, so you can now simply start shooting… It works best with the option to stop attacking on target switching, but I like it that way so I even haven’t bothered to make a on/off macro for that!
Check my blog for the macros, more specifically, this post, which was my first: http://someonewowing.blogspot.com/2007/07/hello-world_18.html
BTW: I skipped #5 as it’s my Heal Pet/Feed Pet macro… Give it a try!
Can someone make me a “/play game” Macro so I don’t have to hit anything but a single button pls?
Kthnxbye.
I like the idea of those targetnearest macros. I’ll have to play around with that. What I do currently, and you might want to mess around with, is a “pet on mouseover” macro.
/petattack [target=mouseover]
(along with whatever other goodies you want in the macro).
This way you can send your pet on the next mob in the grind without interrupting the burn down of the previous one.
Could you use
/targetlasttarget
in a macro to get back to your original target?
Korrun @ Crushridge
Resto Druid aka lesser class
Guy,
Alt F4 works as a shortcut right now.
Huh.. that’s odd.. WoW just crashes every time I do that..
=P
It’s playing your game in minimized mode. Rly.
dudes … nothing beats the ravager with gore … set ur swstats or dmgmeters to have a page that separates the hunters and pets only and u will see for urself … pretty embarrassing for dps warriors when my ravager out dps’s them …. we r on Lady Vashj and i lead the meters through phase one easy …. when the mob i’m grinding gets to 50%, i just set him to get the next one, hot on him and viper … non stop grinding
btw …alt F4 ….rofl … i love it
Secndworst
Hunter Class Leader
Stormreavers, Shadow Moon US
We were having a guild meeting a few weeks ago and were taking some screenshots for the website …
someone said over Vent you could use ALT+F4 for a hi-res screenshot and we had about 6-8 people suddenly sign off. Much hilarity!
For grinding, get yourself a unit-frames addon (perl, pitbull, ag unit frames, etc) which will show you your pet’s target. This way you target the 2nd mob, send in pet, finish off the first, and you have a handy little pet target bar to click on. Don’t know how I lived without this.
I’m sorry, but i need to point out a couple of things in your post, anon.
The first is that you don’t really need to abbreviate all instances of “you” to “u”. “Yourself”, “you”, “your”, and “are”, by the way, are all perfectly acceptable.
The second is that there is punctuation available other than the ellipsis. You can use commas, periods, and even question marks. Putting these together in the right way can lead to sentences, which will serve you well in organizing your thoughts in a form other than stream-of-consciousness so we can understand what you’re trying to say.
Let me see what i can do with it.
Dudes, nothing beats the ravager with gore. Set your swstats or damagemeters to have a page that displays only your hunter’s and your pet’s damages and you will see for yourself. It’s pretty embarassing for dps warriors when my ravager out-DPS’s them. We are on Lady Vashj, and i lead the meters through phase one easily. When the mob i’m grinding gets to 50%, i just set my pet to get the next one, cast Pet Mend, and hit the enemy with Viper Sting. It’s non-stop grinding.
Finally, not ALL forms of killing things should be called grinding. That term specifically refers to doing a repetitive task to level your character or skills or otherwise to obtain something incrementally. Killing adds in a boss fight isn’t really what we’d call grinding.
The reason i’m pointing these out is that i don’t want you to degrade the reputation of hunters further by sounding like that. Your performance sounds impressive enough, but i really wouldn’t ever want to have to talk to you. I’d keep my hunter unguilded before having him under a class leader who … now, i’m trying to be nice here, so i’ll just leave it at that. This post isn’t designed to attack you so much as it is to discourage you from sounding like a huntard.
Mr. Anonymous, BRK respectfully requests you register and maybe even give us an armory profile address.
Join the fun!
/hijack
Okay guys, my guild has gotten to where we can one-shot Curator now and we are now looking to move beyond him. We have only gotten as far as clearing the Library, but didn’t have the time to move further. We are now looking into where we need to go next and thought that if I hijacked a BRK blog comment thread that I would get some good (and humorous) responses from some of the best commenters in the WoW community. Of course this opinion is based on the general population and maturity of the WoW forums, but I still think that you guys could provide me with a reasonable response rather than ramblings about my guild sucking and me being a n00b for not knowing where to head next.
So, onto the bottom line…
I have heard that Chess is the next thing to head for until we gear up for Shade. I need to know:
1) Is this a correct assumption?
2) How long is the trash clear to the Chess event and how long does it typically take?
3) What kind of gear check are we looking at for Shade?
Thanks for listening guys and I expect a variety of responses, some of which to include a shot from BRK for me replacing my Hunter with a S Priest.
Cheers all,
- Misfit
delete my reply will ya!!!
*shakes fist @ BRK*
*embarassed*
Wrong blog post
/hides
Misfit,
Aran is not a gear check cept that you need +8k health on each player.
+hit helps your people do some, but as long as you have 8k or more health you can expect to be able to do this fight as long as know what you are doing.
Misfit,
You’re a noob and your guild stinks.
Just doing my part
I suspect others will need to address this as I realized about 4 months ago I was 7th hunter in my guild and they were still recruiting hunters and I left the server and moved horde side.
/petattack [target=mouseover]
Actually, we didn’t have much trouble with Shade when we did him the other night. We’d had a few cracks at him before, but it was my first time in there. First shot, I was a noob and moved during Flame Wreath (I got confused with Arcane Blast). Booooooooom! Le wipe. Second time, though, it was pure beauty. It’s basically a matter of knowing the rhythm of the fight and being attentive to Aran’s castbar, at least from my perspective up close and personal. I dunno how it looked for the casters in the group, since I was a bit occupied with my Pummel (I know the Locks were tangled up with the Elementals at one point, that’s all I saw), but my bit was easy, anyway. =)
After downing Curator I highly recommend heading straight for the chess event - after you clear the library (well the path to the ramp anyway) there are, I think, around 5 rooms of trash to clear (it doesn’t take a huge amount of time) before the chess event and once you’ve done that you can head straight back for Aran or Illhoof.
My guild downed Aran and Illhoof for the first time last weekend and I’m sure you can image the glee over teamspeak
Guy and others already nailed it with their comments re Aran. A healthstone (if available) and pot consumption after the pyroblast are the only things I would add.
Good luck!
I’d say — and mind you, i haven’t timed this — that heading to and completing the chess event (assuming only one attempt) probably eats about 30 minutes.
I see you mentioned anonymity. It’s not so much that i don’t want to take the time to input a name (as you don’t even have to register to do that) as it is that the old image board philosophy has grown on me: that post content can stand and be judged on its own merit, without names and the luggage they bring, unless the thread of conversation is difficult to keep track of without them. For the sake of this post, i’ll try it for now.
Ah, yes, you like those armory profiles. -Mine- is here, but you probably want my hunter, which is here (pet: ravager).
I despaired about playing my hunter recently after realizing that, since my druid can be a tank or dps for the same raid, it’s unlikely i’d ever take my hunter into a raid. I may get back to playing him some time, but for now i’m bringing up a little priestling. I suppose i have to get over that little hangup eventually, because i know i’m probably not going to take the priest in much either if i think that way. My druid has decent healing gear (picked up when nobody else wanted it) and at any time is only a respec away from being a tree.
@Misfit
The trash between Curator and the chess event is stupidly long.
I would say that the time estimates given here are very generous - Call it 45 minutes to an hour to complete the chess event.
But they’re absolutely right, if you can make it to Aran, you should make sure you ALWAYS do the chess event. The event itself isn’t very long, has ZERO negatives (no death, no damage, no stress…if you fail the event, you just do it again, no big deal) and it’s FREE LOOT.
Aran takes a few times to get him down - the health stone/pot advice was excellent.
For Aran, the other thing I’d add is that the elemental adds need to be burned down, they do waaaay too much damage to just ignore them and stay on Aran. Since they spawn at opposite ends of the room, we usually blow fears and banish one of them as quickly as we can, so we can kill them.
They go down quickly, but they stand back and eat the raid if you ignore them.
$.02
~Ego
If you don’t have a warlock, Aran becomes 50% harder than if you did have one. Having four elementals pounding you instead of only two, in addition to Aran himself, is a lot more challenging.
We’ve tried attacking the elementals and we’ve tried just absorbing their damage. Attacking them always sounded like a better idea, but somehow we never killed them before they despawned on our successful attempts, probably a combination of me always dying, as the “stray elemental tank”, and the fact that several people have to stay on Aran to keep interrupting him. I still don’t know how we keep beating him, but as of yet it never happens unless we have a warlock.
lol …another english lesson in a mmo …*sigh …so what ur sayin is anyone that dosn’t sound like u is a huntard …. nice, i can see with ur intolerance why ur unguilded.
dude …i own 3 businesses, i hire people to do what u just did …lol
the world is larger than ur textbook … and second of all, diversity is what makes the world go round, would be a boring colorless world if everybody was an english major or if everybody was like me … lol … take pride in ur uniqueness but revel in mine also.
btw, that RL lesson was free, next one costs u ….. lol …ahhhh, i crack me up.
as BRK stated, plz post anything so we can look at ur armory …
ALT F4 for clearer screenshots …. rofl … thats awesome …
Secndworst
Hunter Class Leader
Stormreavers, Shadow Moon US
What i’m saying is that you look like an uneducated sod, your posts are much less pleasant to read than others’, and your message is poorly transmitted to people who like to read things that make sense. I have given you advice; you may choose to ignore it at your peril.
It’s easy enough to say you own three businesses (though what relevancy that has to this discussion i cannot imagine) but much more difficult to provide evidence. I could claim to have five, myself, but as it isn’t true, all i can do is make the claim.
The armory has nothing to do with communication skills.
Hey, thx for looking out for me ….
*knowing smile …..
quote: “(though what relevancy that has to this discussion i cannot imagine)”
the point u missed is, if i need a plumber i hire one, if i need a spellchecker i’ll hire u … i don’t care …. it’s irrelevant to the big picture, don’t get hung up on the little details, u may care and that’s fine, but since u figured out that i could care less, then that should be fine also …. i love the randomness of BRK’s posts and threads, it’s partly why i come here … i love the diversity of thought here …if i want conformity then i’ll go … gezzz, i can’t think of anywhere ….. but ur house ….. lol
thx again for ur reply … and post ur armory ….just curious ….*wink
Secndworst
Hunter Class Leader
Stormreavers, Shadow Moon US