We’ve been playing around with a few of the popular shot rotation macros, to see how they perform with our gear. One reason we’re interested in these things is that the Kill Commands are included. While we still feel that a manual shot rotation is more hunterish, it cannot be argued that manually slapping Kill Command is more efficient. It is not; the macro wins that battle hands-down. If you wish to argue that you use a shot rotation macro so that you don’t miss any Kill Commands, we won’t disapprove.

So what are these macros? Well, there are two: the 1:1 Auto/Steady and the 3:2 Auto Steady.

Our 1:1 Auto/Steady Shot Rotation Macro

/castrandom [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command
/castsequence reset=2 Steady Shot, !Auto Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

Don’t freak out, this isn’t rocket science. Let’s look at the steps one at a time.

/castrandom [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command - This macro will make your pet attack will a Kill Command if it is available and your pet is attacking something. However, if your pet is sitting by your side and not attacking when Kill Command activates, it will not cast Kill Command and your pet will not leap into combat. And we use the ‘castrandom’ instead of a plain ‘cast’ so that if the Kill Command will cause an error message, the Kill Command will be ignored.

Isn’t that neat? If you do a macro like,

/castrandom Spell A, Spell B, Spell C

and when you hit the macro, Spell A would cause an error, the castrandom command will eliminate Spell A from its selection process and randomly pick either Spell B or Spell C.

Thus, when we do a

/castrandom Kill Command

and Kill Command would cause an error, it won’t cast it. Very handy. Moving on, let’s break down the next line.

/castsequence - that’s going to make our macro execute commands one at a time, with each keypress

reset=2 - If you don’t press this macro in two seconds, reset it and always cast the first action in the castsequence line the next time the macro is executed.

Steady Shot - The first time you press the macro, cast Steady Shot

!Auto Shot - Oh ho! Auto Shot is a “toggle” spell for hunters. If we just put Auto Shot in the castsequence, it would turn Auto Shot on, then off, then on, then off, and we don’t want that. What the ! does is to tell the macro, ‘do not turn off Auto Shot, only turn it on’.

/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

If any Lua error messages are hocked-up on the screen, dismiss them.

So that’s the macro, and what it does is cast Steady, Auto, Steady, Auto, etc. with Kill Command automatically cast. Now there’s another popular high-DPS macro in vogue right now, that’s the 3:2.

Our 3:2 Auto/Steady Shot Rotation Macro

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

Not much different than the 1:1, is there. What we’ve done is break up the castsequence command into two casts. However, due to the workings of the global cooldown, the shots that will be fired now will look like: Steady, Steady, Auto, Steady, Auto.

The “jerks” out there will tell you that one should select the appropriate macro based upon one’s ranged weapon’s speed. Fast weapons will benefit from the 1:1 macro, slow weapons from the 3:2. Also, they say that the more Haste you pack with your slow weapon, the more effective the 3:2 macro will be.

We’re not going to break all that down, the “jerks” have done quite enough research and reporting in that area.

What we do want to look at is how these macros work with our gear.

The guns we’re going to test are Tuskbreaker and the Barrel-Blade Longrifle. We used the 1:1 and the 3:2 macros with each gun, four sessions each. For each run we made a fresh WoWCombatLog.txt file. After the run we stopped recording, logged completely out of WoW, and used WoWWebStats to extract and analyze the data. After the WWS report was generated, we trashed the old WoWCombatLog.txt file.

We used Aspect of the Hawk, no trinkets, no potions, and our digital Combat Grilling Timer - what we use to ensure our steaks are done perfectly - for perfect one minute testing intervals.

You can see the results of our testing in the spreadsheet above, and you can download it here. The first section of our spreadsheet shows the results in descending-DPS order. A Tuskbreaker 3:2 session is first with 849DPS and a Barrel-Blade Longrifle 1:1 session is last with 670DPS.

The next section of the spreadsheet is the averages of these runs. Our Tuskbreaker 3:2 runs were tops, averaging 817DPS and our Barrel-Bladed Longrifle 1:1 runs were last, averaging 742DPS.

But look at the data again. Those BBL 1:1 runs had the greatest discrepancy between best and worst DPS, from 809 to 670. If you look at the Auto Crit% for those last two BBL 1:1 runs, you’ll see that they’re the two worst of all 16 runs. Crank those Auto Crits up five percent and those two BBL 1:1 runs will easily fall in line with the other two. And if we did that, the BBL 1:1 average would surpass the Tuskbreaker 1:1 average, which due to the slow speed of the TBR, we would expect to see.

Speaking of the TBR, those TBR 1:1 runs are pretty interesting. Even with super-high crit percentages for both Steady and Auto, the TBR never surpassed the BBL 3:2, even at its worst. If nothing else, we’ve proved that using Tuskbreaker with a 1:1 Auto/Steady macro is the worst method of generating MQoSRDPS we tested.

How about the BBL 3:2 sessions? We’ve read that if one uses a 3:2 macro with a fast weapon, the macro behaves like a 1:1 and thus there is no benefit. Well, from our testing, a BBL used with a 3:2 macro may or may not generate a 1:1 Steady/Auto ratio. If one counts our number of Autos and Steadys and looks at the ratios, one sees this:

Of the four BBL 3:2 runs, two times we get a 1:1 ratio and two times we get a 3:2 ration. And a connection between ratio and DPS is not apparent, either. The highest BBL 3:2 DPS is a 3:2, the worst is a 3:2. The middle two BBL 3:2 runs have shots that result in a 1:1 ration. Fascinating!

Tuskbreaker with a 3:2 shot rotation macro produced the single-highest DPS run of all, and the highest average of all the runs. What we didn’t expect was that the BBL 3:2 was the second highest; we thought the BBL 1:1 would do much better. But even with boosting those last two BBL 1:1 runs crit percentages, it wouldn’t pass the BBL 3:2 average.

Haste! They say the 3:2 works wonders with a slower weapon, like Tuskbreaker, and Haste effects. Well we happen to have some haste-gear, our Shoulders of Lightning Reflexes.

But we can’t just slap those on; we have a two-piece Tier 5 gear bonus we must maintain. If we’re going to equip those shoulders over our T5 shoulders, we’ve got to put our T5 gloves back on, which means taking our Gauntlets of Rapidity.

Gloves off, gloves, on, shoulders off, shoulders on, equip Tuskbreaker, run four 3:2 macro sessions, record the data, and that’s the third section of our spreadsheet. That 850DPS run was the first one we did with the Haste gear, and we did backflips. ZOMG IT’S AWESOME! But we continued with the testing, doing three more runs. We averaged those four runs and compared it to the previous runs, which we show in the final section of the spreadsheet. And those other runs brought us back to Earth.

The hasted-TBR 3:2 average did not exceed the unhasted-TBR 3:2 average, and we think we know why: the gear switching was just too detrimental to our stats. The BoJ gloves are plain ol’ better than the T5s, and the Haste shoulders are worse than our T5s. What we gained in Haste we lost in stats. In our case, there just doesn’t seem to be a reason to swap our stuff around to gain a small Haste bonus.

But as we accumulate more Haste gear, we’ll continue to do more Dr. Boom testing to see just what is beneficial and what is not.