…In which Namthe admits defeat

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve documented before my utter hatred of macros, especially castsequence macros. While I have a couple of timesaving ones bound, for the most part I try to stay away from anything that restricts my choices.

However, recent WWS parses have shown me a problem. My uptime on Demoralizing Shout is utterly abysmal. And on top of that, I’m refreshing Thunder Clap about twice as often as I need to. I know why this is, too – Thunder Clap is bound to the 2 key, Demo Shout to shift-2. At some point along the way I’ve lost the muscle memory needed to hit shift when I want to apply demoralizing shout.

There are two approaches to this problem, and I’m taking both of them. The first is to force myself to hit shift when I mean to use Demo Shout. The other, and it pains me to say it, is a macro:

#showtooltip

/castsequence reset=30 Thunder Clap, Demoralizing Shout

This takes the place of my old Thunder Clap key (and Ctrl-2 is bound to just Thunder Clap, if I need it).

An interesting feature of castsequence macros is that if a spell in the list is cast outside the macro, it still moves on to the next action. So if I hit the right button for Demo Shout, the next action taken will be Thunder Clap. If I hit “2″ instead as my muscle memory tries to make me, Thunder clap will still be available the next time I press the key.

So, it’s a crutch, but while I’m training myself to do things the right way again, it’s a useful one. And it’s a useful compromise between helping the raid not wipe and improving my own game back to a point where I’m satisfied with my performance again. Last night’s raid showed an immense improvement. I can only hope to keep it up once I remove the temptation of button mashing again.