You hear about them everywhere “macros this!” and “macros that!”. People talk about their “shot-rotation macros”, and you think “Oh, they must be only for the hard-core raiders or players, I’d never need those!”.

What, you don’t think that? Well, I did, as a young warlock. I knew about writing mIRC scripts and various HTML/PHP coding techniques, so it wasn’t hard for me to understand what the macros did. I just never thought I would need them.

Now, on my action bars, I have a grand total of 7 macros. Yes, thats Zero Seven.

“But Shastarian, what do you use 7 macros for, when you never thought you’d use 1?”

Well, mainly, it saves space on my action bars.

Consider this: Warlocks get (so far) a total of 3 (Zero Three) Ritual spells, these are:

  1. Ritual of Summoning
  2. Ritual of Doom
  3. Ritual of Souls

Normally, these would either sit rotting inside your spellbook, or taking up three slots on an action bar. And, to be frank, you probably aren’t going to be casting these very often, unless you part of a Raid on Crossroads and, being the only warlock there, you are asked to summon everybody …

But they are sort of important enough to have on your bar, if you want to go through a few instances, it’s always nice to hand out ze cookies in exchange for that Mage’s Own Spring Water (What the …? I asked for Dr Pepper!)

To make a new macro, simply type: /macro

In the window that appears, select the <charactername> specific macros tab at the top, then click New. Type a name for this new macro (I chose Rituals) and select the “?” icon (top left corner for me). The macro then gets typed into the big open empty space under the macro slots.

Here is how you can have the three ritual spells on the one action bar:

#showtooltip
/cast [nocombat,modifier:ctrl]Ritual of Summoning;[nocombat,modifier:alt]Ritual of Souls;\ [nocombat,nomodifier]Ritual of Doom

Lets go through it one line at a time.

#showtooltip

If you mouse-over the new icon on your action bar, it will display the tooltip for Ritual of Doom, just as if you had dragged the single spell to the bar. If you hold down Ctrl or Alt, the tooltip will change (as will the icon) to show the current spell (Summoning or Souls). Pretty nifty, hey?

/cast [nocombat,modifier:ctrl]Ritual of Summoning;[nocombat,modifier:alt]Ritual of Souls;\ [nocombat,nomodifier]Ritual of Doom

(Note: in both examples above, this last line should be all written on one line. The macro editor window might take the end of it to another line like Wordpress has done, but this doesn’t mean hit enter. Also, the ‘\’ means (Us Linux nerds will understand this) that whats on the line below it should be taken to be on the same line. If you see a ‘\’ in any of my macro lists (or anyone else’s, for that matter) that’s what it means. Do not type the ‘\’)

This line says to CAST one of three spells: Ritual of Summoning/Souls/Doom. The brackets “[ ]” are “conditional statements” which means “If this stuff here is true, then do what follows”.

[nocombat,modifier:ctrl] Ritual of Summoning;

If you are holding down the Ctrl key, and are out of combat, then clicking on this macro will cast Ritual of Summoning. We can take out the “nocombat” part, but really, are you wanting to summon someone when you’re getting the smack laid down on you?

The rest of it is much the same. Holding down Alt will cast Ritual of Souls and not holding down anything (nomodifier) will cast Ritual of Doom.

Why have I got Doom at the end, since I might accidentally let go of the Ctrl/Alt key when I click it and summon a Doomguard? Well, I happen to think it’s pretty funny when that happens (as long as I have a soulstone), so I put it at the end. Feel free to organise them any way you wish.

Below is my Pet Summoning macro. See if you can follow it, it’s very similar:

#showtooltip
/cast [modifier:ctrl]Summon Succubus;[modifier:shift]Summon Imp;[modifier:alt]Summon \
Voidwalker;Summon Felhunter
/y My pet comes to KILL!!

(OK, so my ACTUAL macro doesn’t have that last line in there. (OK, so it WAS in there until about level 25 or so (that’s Zero Twenty-Five))

Other macro’s to follow as I remember them. What are some of yours?

Edit: Check out Part 2 and Part 3