Why most macros don't work for BM

I have been testing, just about every macro on this page and I have come to a consensus on why the macros don’t work. Originally I thought it has to do with focus regeneration as our haste and Dire Beast are the only ways we can regenerate focus.

This is now wrong because the talent that effects Wild Call (One with the Pack) doesn’t allow you to run out of focus.

The problem is the spells that Blizzard gave us, and it’s bad because some spells are not on the GCD whereas others are. KC and DB are on the GCD which causes issues of just waiting to shoot something, and BW and other spells are not on the GCD which allows you to spam them with a keyboard.

Marksman doesn’t suffer from this as most of their spells are off the GCD and can be spammed. Because BM is a pet spec, Blizzard expects you to play this class with Auto Shots and keep your focus for Kill Command the most.

So in doing this, I figured putting DB in the Post Macro area on GS-E that way it will go off no matter what even with the talent. Don’t put a ! in front of it as it won’t matter anymore.

Regarding primary rotation, it should be KC CS CS.

The problem with this is how do you put Titan’s Thunder in this as you want that to be affected by DB.

I posted mine here: https://wowlazymacros.com/forums/topic/an-one-button-fit-all/page/2/

What I’m thinking for Titan’s Thunder is this:

Sequences['BradsBMSingle'] = {
author="Katherine@Thorium Brotherhood",
specID=253,
version=12,
source = "Local",
helpTxt = "Talents: 3112113",
icon='INV_MISC_QUESTIONMARK',
lang="enUS",
PreMacro=[[
/cast [nopet,nodead] Call Pet 1; [@pet,dead] Heart of the Phoenix
/petattack [@target,harm]
/petautocastoff [group] Growl
/petautocaston [nogroup] Growl
]],
"/castsequence [nochanneling] Kill Command, Cobra Shot, Cobra Shot",
"/cast [@pet,dead] Revive Pet",
"/cast [target=focus, exists, nodead],[target=pet, exists, nodead] Misdirection",
"/castsequence [combat][nochanneling] reset=1  Bestial Wrath, Aspect of the Wild",
"/cast [nochanneling] A Murder of Crows",
"/castsequence [nochanneling] reset=1 Dire Beast, Titan's Thunder",
PostMacro=[[
/cast [nogroup] Mend Pet
]],
}

Then you’ll only cast Titan’s Thunder while your dire beast is out. Just like it only casts AotW when bestial wrath is on.

Also, when you say BM macros don’t work… in what way? I find mine works pretty well. Currently doing 119k dps at ilvl 800. And I don’t have Titan’s Thunder yet, currently working towards getting it. I do have Master of Beasts.

What I mean by not working is the excess pause even with full focus. The macro doesn’t flow from one spell into another. Usually it’s done like this for example

CS
CS
KC
wait (just sits there no auto-shot)
DB
wait (just sits there no auto-shot)

[quote quote=33950]I posted mine here: https://wowlazymacros.com/forums/topic/an-one-button-fit-all/page/2/
What I’m thinking for Titan’s Thunder is this:

Why are you using “Dire Beast” when you are speced into “Dire Frenzy?” You should change one or the other.

I believe that if a talent replaces a base skill then the talent will still fire off. Meaning that even though he has Dire Beast in there and spec’s into Dire Frenzy, it will still fire off. This helps when you spec to another talent on that same tree, you don’t have to rewrite you macro.

I have a Prot Paladin macro that I have “/cast Hammer of the Righteous” in it. But when I spec into Blessed Hammer, the macro still fires off Blessed Hammers. And when I spec into Holy Shield, then Hammer of the Righteous fires off. I never touch my macro.

I’m not specced into dire frenzy. Dire frenzy is 2/2. I have 2/1, stomp. That is shown accurately in the macro above.

As for the pause… I’m not sure why it matters. Personally if I try to go manual I do less DPS than I do with the above macro. So pause or not, it’s better. I do more damage with the above than any other macro I’ve tested, so it’s better. (At least for me, I have a muscular condition that makes playing fully manual more difficult for me.) What is more important? A continuous stream of casts or DPS? I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a more optimal macro out there, but if there is it won’t be because someone tried to eliminate pauses. That is my take on it anyway, YMMV.

edit: Actually, let me add one more thing. I usually start combat by right-clicking my target. If you want to use that macro to start attacking, the below will work. If it’s specifically auto-shot that isn’t happening for you, that may be why.

Sequences['BradsBMSingle'] = {
author="Katherine@Thorium Brotherhood",
specID=253,
version=29,
source = "Local",
helpTxt = "Talents: 3112113",
icon='INV_MISC_QUESTIONMARK',
lang="enUS",
PreMacro=[[
/cast [nopet,nodead] Call Pet 1; [@pet,dead] Heart of the Phoenix
/cast [@pet,dead] Revive Pet
/petattack [@target,harm]
/petautocastoff [group] Growl
/petautocaston [nogroup] Growl
/startattack [@target]
]],
"/castsequence [nochanneling] Kill Command, Cobra Shot, Cobra Shot",
"/cast [target=focus, exists, nodead],[target=pet, exists, nodead] Misdirection",
"/castsequence [combat][nochanneling] reset=1  Bestial Wrath, Aspect of the Wild",
"/cast [nochanneling] A Murder of Crows",
"/cast [nochanneling] Dire Beast",
PostMacro=[[
/cast [nogroup] Mend Pet
]],
}

Also, I’m up to 130k now with a few more artifact levels.

In a raid situation if your raid leader sees you pause and just do nothing not even an auto-shot it is going to be called out.

Though I am more casual than I used to be, I like to see a steady stream of casts and flow over big DPS numbers. I can get high DPS numbers with minor tweaks to any macro. Look at some of my old survival macros back when MOP was out (yes they are here) and you will see those had streams than DPS.

One thing though I’m looking into and this is what Blizzard has done the fact that classes are so much easier to play that maybe GS / GS: E are not needed as much anymore, and MTK could regain to working again if Blizzard would allow to safely enable us to use reset=0.1 again and create our priority order in fact.

In previous expansions putting!Auto Shot in the macro solved a lot of issues with the pause, but I don’t think that’s possible anymore to do with GS / GS: E. Adding in an Auto Shot between KC and DB would solve all the issues.

I’ve not had this issue myself, but if a raid leader favored cadence over DPS I wouldn’t want to play with that person.

The reason ! doesn’t work now is a change Blizzard made to the macro engine, it has nothing to do with GS or GSE.

Also, not sure what you mean by adding an auto shot between KC and DB. Auto-shot, as far as know, will continue at the same cadence once it starts no matter what abilities you cast. I’m aware moving can impact it, but if you stand still you can’t really control when auto-shot fires. Am I missing something?

So Auto Shot is based upon a “swing” timer like melee classes. Hunters are known as a “ranged melee class” and not a “magic class” thus they have a swing timer.

The swing timer is based upon the speed of the weapon. Titanstrike, for example, has 3.00 swing timer attached to it. That means if no abilities are being used every 3 seconds it will fire an auto shot.

Here lies the problem, because KC and DB are now on the 1.5 sec GCD (used to be 1.0 sec) it adds +1.5 seconds to the 3.00 seconds of the auto shot to cast. So, in reality, it has a 4.5 second swing time. Now MM’s variant Thas’dorah, Legacy of the Windrunners also has the same swing timer, but because it doesn’t have an auto locking mechanisms for DB or KC holding back everything is moving at a steady pace in any macro unless you are using a focus starving macro (which we all know MM uses no focus)

The reason this is because MM no shot is linked to the GCD, you can spam all the spells you want, but BM is bound to the GCD and to make things even worse our primary focus regen has a cooldown attached to it.

To fix the situation between DB and KC you have to use a spell that is still within that 1.5 GCD that can be linked. AMOC, for example, is not part of the GCD and can be put in between those casts to force an auto-shot to go off.

To finalize, the issue is DB and KC so how do we fix this? Well, one thing I’m looking into is setting the MS or keyboard spam timer to be higher. Right now I have it set to 150 MS (0.150 in Razer Synapse), but it’s still not fixing the issue. I could go higher.

The other thing that might be good to look into is to create a DB / KC macro separately of the main rotation and have the first rotation call that macro. Kind of like a step macro in previous versions of GS.

Because GS uses an LUA script, and not in game file MTK might work better for BM Hunters. It’s worth to look into though that’s for sure.

I wanted to test if this is true so I used a stop-watch and started attacking a dummy.

For 30 seconds I just auto-shot at a dummy and did nothing else. Then I spammed my macro for 30 seconds at the same dummy. Each time I used Recount to count the number of times auto-shot was fired off, so the only thing I did by hand was measure the time.

During that second effort, both KC and DB activated.

In both cases, I fired exactly 12 auto-shots.

If what you are saying is true, the second time I should have done one or two fewer.

But just to be really sure I then repeated the same test but used two minutes this time.

Just auto-shot: 44
Spamming macro: 44

Exactly the same, again.

So as best I can tell, no matter what you cast the cadence of auto-shot remains exactly the same.

On top of that, after researching MM casting order and such, I actually think it is much harder to macro. There are important decisions that you have to make that a macro can’t make. But with BM, it’s not too far off.

I’ll get a video if I can to show you how it’s auto stops. I’m not the only person talking about it though. Here its being mentioned on MMO Champ and other sites too

I could be wrong, but that seems different than what you described.

I could be wrong about this too, but what they are describing happens, it just has no impact on DPS. I’ve noticed that it absolutely does fail to animate auto shot sometimes. But it still casts it.

That’s why I used Recount to count the shots instead of relying on my own eyes. Recount reads the combat logs for it’s data.

Not really if you think about it. The animation stops after KC / DB which also stops in our macros as well.

As I said there is a way to fix this by forcing Auto-Shot to actually go off. I use Skada and TinyDPS as Recount is a memory hog and both Skada and Tiny will show that my auto-shot did not go off and instead “missed”. I haven’t done a raid yet on my Hunter but I will upload a log later on.

The animation doesn’t matter though. I’ve seen it quite a few times. Titanstrike will go to my back, and sometimes I’ll animate a shot with no weapon, sometimes I won’t animate at all, but the shot will still fire. I usually still see the bullet, but even sometimes that doesn’t animate. The shot still happens though, the damage is still dealt.