I’m having trouble finding an answer to this question. When setting your firing speed (ms) for a macro, how do you deal with the WoW world latency?
For example, if someone says they are firing their macro at 100ms, and the latency is 40ms, do you set your AHK, Corsair, Razer software at:
I appreciate any assistance.
Thank you.
World latency has nothing to do with your macros MS.
The lower your MS the more random your macro will behave. Also the lower your MS the more superhuman your actions are. Hardware macros that repeat keys and software like synapse, GHub, autohotkey etc are bannable under the TOS. Running super humanly (under 250 or so) Ms further highlights that you are not a person sitting pushing the key normally and flags your activity for monitoring.
**Reworked How to macro your rotation: using Raidbots to a much easier experience.
**Changed formatting to help break up posts for easier reading.
WoW Theorycrafting 101 #1 - When To Save Cooldowns?
“Should I Save Or Should I Go?” is one of the most commonly asked questions in WoW for any class/spec when it comes to cooldown usage. Okay, maybe not in those exact terms, but how do you actually decide if it is better to save a cooldown to line up with a damage amp, a big pack of mobs, or another cooldown or Trinket?
In this post I will go over some of the principles that guide these decisions, sort of a “mental checklist” that you can use for pretty much any situation in the game, as any class.
Part 1: Saving A CD for a Trinket/Other CD/Etc.
There are a few factors/variables that guide this decision.
The damage increase of whatever we’re thinking saving the cooldown for.
The amount of time we are thinking of delaying, and whether this costs us a cast or not.
Minor concern: The cost of casting the cooldown. This could be Resources, or a GCD.
Once you know, or at least mostly know, these variables, it becomes a pretty simple piece of math.
Let’s say we got:
The question is: Is it worth delaying the 3-minute CD for the 4-minute CD every time to sync them up?
To find this out, we first look at the amount of time that we are delaying. That would be 1 minute, which is 33% of a 3-minute cooldown.
Thus, we are delaying the CD by 33% of its cooldown. Over a long time, this effectively means that we would get 33% fewer casts of this cooldown. To justify this, we would need to be making that cooldown 33% stronger through delaying it. 30% Haste is not going to be a 33% DPS increase in most situations, although this can certainly depend on the class. A good rule of thumb however is that 1% Haste = 1% DPS, since you’re just doing 1% “more” of everything. Certain class mechanics can complicate this simple rule, though, so it’s not a hard and fast one.
Part 2: So What About Saving For AoE?
Most AoE abilities in WoW scale linearly with additional targets. An Explosive Shot on 2 targets does twice the damage of a single-target Explosive Shot, so you can use the same rule as before. The damage increase of delaying for an extra target to be up is 100%, and thus you can delay an ability like Explosive Shot for a long time if it would ensure it does AoE damage.
But there’s more to it than just that. Look at the third variable - the cost of casting a cooldown/ability. Explosive Shot costs 20 Focus and 1 GCD to cast.
If it does double damage on 2 targets, which it does, then it is not just the case that a 2-target Explosive Shot is just as powerful as 2x single-target Explosive Shots… It is BETTER, because when you delay the ability for AoE, you are getting the same damage but for LESS FOCUS and 1 GCD instead of 2!
You can apply this same logic to most mechanics. All you need is the DPS increase of delaying which comes from knowing how much of a DPS increase an effect is, compared to the DPS loss of delaying which comes from losing casts of the spell, which is basically just a matter of dividing the total cooldown of the spell by the amount of time that you are delaying it for. In our case that was 180 (3 minute CD) divided by 60 (1 minute delay) = 3 (so, 100/3 to get your percentage).
A more common example perhaps is whether you should delay Wild Spirits for AoE. From a strictly DPS PoV, based on the above math puzzle, the answer is nearly always yes. It costs a global after all, and its damage scales linearly with additional targets up to its target cap.
However, in a practical Mythic+ scenario, it is not quite this simple. After all, if you delay your Wild Spirits for AoE right now, how can you be sure that doing so is not just costing you the opportunity to cast Wild Spirits on another AoE pack in the future? This uncertainty means that the safe choice is nearly always to cast Wild Spirits almost off CD in Mythic+, unless you know the rhythm and structure of the dungeon well enough to get rid of this uncertainty.
Another aspect that I will probably have to make another post about entirely, is the fact that raw overall DPS in Mythic+ is not really all that matters. What you’re actually optimizing for in competitive Mythic+ is time saved.
Keeping it short, imagine if a dungeon was 50% single-target, and 50% 5-target AoE fest in terms of time spent and it takes 10 minutes, and you do 10K DPS overall.
If you improve your DPS by 10% on single-target, you save 30 seconds of time, and you gain 100 DPS.
This is because, assuming for argument’s sake that 5-target AoE is 5x the damage of single-target, your single-target damage actually only contributed 10% of your overall DPS, even though it took up 50% of your time spent. 10% of 10% is 1%, so that’s 100 DPS.
Now, if you improve your DPS by 10% on 5-target AoE, you STILL save just 30 seconds of time, but you gain 500 DPS.
So the time save is the same, but the DPS mostly comes from AoE. Because AoE damage is outright higher, increasing it nets higher Overall DPS numbers, even though the actual time saved is identical, or even lower in some cases.
Thanks for reading! I welcome feedback to these as it is my first stab at writing this. I might do more in the future if people found this useful. I tried to start with a basic, but universal problem. A lot of people honestly overestimate the complexity of WoW Theorycrafting and I want to help make it more accessible and simple to understand. At the end of the day, you can get almost all of it done with basic arithmetic combined with simple understanding of the game’s mechanics.
HEED THE WARNINGS
From Tim on our Discord:
The 100 is actually from Blizzard talking to me about what they were seeing and who their automated systems are banning. If you use AHk, GHub, Synapse etc you risk your account every day. The automated systems are looking at unfair advantage.
If you are using toggles to spam keys they are banning people. In the last month Multiple users were banned for using toggles.
Of the people using hold downs they are evaluating how they are being used but it is situational. The advice from Blizzard has been what a person can reasonably sustain for 3-4 minutes. This is around the 400 mark. In the last month multiple accounts were banned for super human click speeds. (Sub 150ms). These people were banned as they had an unfair advantage over normal players which they used to a competative advantage.
Blizzards crack down on Multiple accounts also affects us as we are using the same tools the multi boxers were to send hardware events to the game. I was warned to warn our community. If this keeps falling on deaf ears it is on the individuals head as “we’ve done this for 10 years” isn’t a defence. They have explicitly said change or we may close your account.
This is just the banning side.
As the developer of GSE, GSE3 is a lot more responsive and while the CVar for spell queue does nothing server side there is a buffer server side and that can be flooded. This severely hinders your macros responsiveness. Slowing down your MS, outbound has two benefits. It doesn’t flood the buffer meaning your [mod]s are more responsive and your macro is more responsive and two it makes your macros execution more predictable and accurate.
If it increases the DPS of the macro what harm is it to slow down the speed?
If there’s no change in the DPS numbers by jumping from 100 to 250 ms what’s it hurting? You’re only making things a bit safer on your own end.
I get it about all the testing on the different speeds but those of us who take macro making seriously to eek out that little bit of damage does suck.
I have one better.
Whoever informed Tim, has no fucking idea what is he/she talking about.
I bet shes/hes not even a tech dev, it really does not make any sense at all from the player perspective.
Impaired people can sustain even those 200ms.
After all these years, and still talking about this nonsense.
PS: and i trully dont believe toggling keys afects it too.
Tim is just going by the information he received and acted accordingly.
Like I said if it helps your overall all DPS then slow it or tune it. If it doesn’t then take that risk.
@TimothyLuke can you give your side opinion about this clearly.
And please, even if a few of us are not patrons, we can swim in the right direction, and push back blizzard.
The more voices we are, the more we can be listened.
PS: got no clue, if blizzard is already watching this forums, if they are… JUST STOP people need this to overcome disabilities for god sake.
GSE has been around a while and very popular so I’m going to assume that they either know of or visit these forums either as a member or a lurker.
Whether they read each and every post is plausible.
Indeed ! i dont understand them sometimes …Put urself in players spot for once and see if such actions make us happy or not , I support banning bots / hackers etc etc 100% but me and a lot of ppl here are neither of those so please see and understand the difference ! SEE AND HEAR US BLIZZARD ! WE enjoying the game Dont ruin it for us . thank you
Really great post and thank you. I love GSE and this only helps to make me a better creator. There are quite a few things like which MS is best that have been hard to understand. The info on SIMs is so important too.
Hey mate few confusions for me ,
1- the part " the 100 is actually from blizzard " means they said 100ms is ok ?
2- using GSE 3 has advantage over old Gse cuz it doesnt trinket blizzard in a bad way anymore ? so if i can fix my GSE working with versin 3 will be all okay ? sorry im a little confused :S bad enlighs myself
Anything less now on GSE 3 will flood the input queue.
GSE 3 and all previous versions are 100% safe to use only if it’s used correctly.
So much speculation and complete lack of understanding.
If you use Autohotkey, Razer Synapse, Logitech GHub with WoW you are risking your account and can be banned. This isn’t new and isn’t news. Input Broadcasting Software + GSE Bots, Botting and the thin grey line.
100ms is a myth - any value has risk and you can be banned for any value. Using AHK to click a button for you according to WoW’ TOS is classed as cheating. Now before you go but what about this legislation etc by agreeing to play the game you as a player agree to abide with this rule.
As I have been quoted People are constantly being banned for using AHK. This again IS NOT NEWS!!! The “but we have always done this” people read this: STOP BEING AN IGNORANT DUMB ASS AND LISTEN: If you continue to do this you are playing Russian roulette. You may not get banned but don’t cry if you do.
What can be done to minimise the risk - there are some things that can be done.
Blizzard are concerned with unfair advantage. If you spam your macro you can click at speeds that are unable to be sustained by the average person. Slow down your MS - as a rule of thumb I wouldn’t go UNDER 250ms. That is the absolute bottom ceiling. This is still 4 clicks a second. “Oh but my macro runs crap at that speed”. Let me fix that for you - “Your macro is crap!” Fix it. You are trying to stuff way harder than you need and it’s costing you DPS but I will cover that later. If you are running at 100ms (or a complete tool running in the 10’s and 20’s) you are waving a big flag at Blizzard saying “Please ban me I am an idiot who doesn’t care that I am exploiting the game.”. I have been talking about running at higher speeds > 250ms long before work even started on GSE3. Again this isn’t new!
Blizzards rules are in place because they want you the player making decisions not a mod or a macro. A bit can be written in AHK that watches pixels and performs very detailed actions. This means that if you are using AHK - let the buyer beware - you can be banned outright because you are using software that is botting software. Again this isn’t news - see links above.
control when your macro runs. In the last week a couple of special dumb asses got banned because they walked out into Maldraxxus, toggled their macro on, and walked off made coffee and came back 3 hours later. Or they toggled their macro on and went back to Oribos and left it running. Again don’t be an ignorant dumbass. Using a hold down approach is not perfect but it is safer than a toggle. “Why can’t GSE tell me that my macro is toggled on?” How can GSE tell what you have setup in a third party tool outside the game? GSE has no third party components. It solely is in game.
you cannot get banned for Using GSE. It is totally contained within what Blizzard exposes for mods to use. It cannot break the rules. If it does try it cannot operate and you have to do a /reload. Using third party apps OUTSIDE the game (ahk, GHub,etc) are what can get you banned. If Blizzard doesn’t like how GSE works within those rules they will change the API and stop mods, not just GSE, from accessing the parts of the API that GSE uses. This is important.
Now having said all that these are things that are different that need to be taken into account:
Changing CVar x - CVars are client variables. Changing a CVar has NO EFFECT on how the server side of the game operates. WoW is not a twitch based game. It is designed that there is a 1.3 second gap between actions to account for people’s reaction times and lag. What that means is there is a fair amount of tolerance and you don’t need your macro clicking 13 times or more within that window. (100ms in a 1.3 second window is 13 clicks - that’s 12 skipped actions in your macro between one line and the next).
Now server side when you send a command to WoW it is buffered into a queue and this is collected periodically. This is why changing that CVar has no effect. You change what you send the server but you are not changing how fast the server processes the information you send. If you send a bunch of actions a bunch will be ignored. This means that your [mod] commands will be sluggish and laggy and slow to respond.
GSE2 had a ton of internal lag. When you pressed a button in GSE2 it would spend 130-300ms figuring out what command was next and then sent that. If you clicked again in that window it would just skip and ignore what you pressed. At 100ms every 2-3 clicks were just being dropped client side and not even sent to WoW servers. Icons would cycle and it “looked” like you were doing something but it actually wasn’t. GSE3 had exposed this as it doesn’t have this lag. If you are running at 50MS GSE keeps up but it costs you FPS and as you are flooding input queues WoW will cut your connection as a defence as it thinks you are running a Denial of Service attack. The follow on from this is the faster you run your macro (ie the lower the MS) the more random the next line becomes. This is based on simple maths. 100ms in a 1.3 second window = 13 actions. 50ms in a 1.3 second window is 26 actions. If you macro is 10 actions long it will run through multiple times before the next action. - USE YOUR BRAIN it’s not rocket science.
putting a random value in AHK so it appears like you are not using AHK is a sign that you are trying to exploit. They already know you are using AHK/GHub etc via Warden. This is a flag that you are trying to exploit and a dumb ass.
macros are like cars - smooth is fast. You also have more control the slower your ms and can write better macros making it a lot easier to interject with things like [mod] and manual actions.
the sweet spot MS wise will be different depending on each macro, your gear, your class and your connection. Just because the author runs at 250ms doesn’t mean this is the best number for you. You need to do some testing and investigation. 90% of people won’t do this and get crap results and then blame the author. This is the behaviour of an ignorant dumbass! Don’t be a dumbass. “But I can’t write macros” guess what no one could. We learn by doing not by whinging.
Now despite me saying the bulk of this for 4 to 5 years guys like ScarryLarry has gone “the sky is falling” and attempted to induce a panic. I have repeatedly informed SLG that what he is saying and trying to do needs to change. It has been “when agSE3 comes out I’ll change.” Then it was “I just want to get my macros working then I’ll change”’. And now it’s “Why didn’t you tell me to change earlier now I have to spend all this time reworking things as I’ve done it wrong? Why don’t you ban people for doing the wrong things. Why doesn’t GSE block things from happening?” In answer to all those things, I have repeatedly and GSE can’t control what you do OUTSIDE the game. It also can’t control how often you click your macro as it simply doesn’t know and can’t tell. If it could know this - it would t be able to run your macro.
In the last two days unfortunately SLG still hasn’t gotten it and completely misinterpreted what had been said to him. He has now thrown the baby out with the bath water. The rules around GSE haven’t changed with GSE3. The rules are exactly the same as in GSE2. It is however exposing the ignorant who have no clue and want to remain in their ignorance.
As for other things in this thread - Yes Blizzard reached out to me, or someone claiming to be from
Blizzard, prior to when the IBS stuff started. GSE has 8.5 million downloads and yes they care about people with disabilities. Their stance is that no number is acceptable as the practice of using a third party tool to press buttons for you is not acceptable. AGAIN this hasn’t changed. Are they religiously enforcing this - no. They are evaluating on a situational bases on what is the player doing. Translation if you act like a dumbass you may be banned.
Do they read this forum? I don’t even read this forum. I poke my head in once or twice a week and even then I don’t read 95% of the stuff written here as honestly so much of what I read is so completely wrong full of subjective and “I think x so therefore it must be”. This is a community that uses GSE but it is neither the sole community or even the largest. One of the questions I get asked by other people in other communities is “Why are the WLM macros so bad?” The answer I have to give is people here don’t want to know the truth and how to be better they just want to stay in their bubble and pretend they are the only ones in it.
None of this is written to offend however If anything in this offends you I would perhaps go back and look at why does this offend you.
You know it’s gonna be a good day when @TimothyLuke responds in your own thread.
To all those that read his post: take a shot everytime he mentions the word "“dumbass”. lol
I wish I could like his post 100 times more.
Thank you Tim!!!
I have to say, I’m very curious about what these other communities are. I love this addon, I love learning new things about macros, but I hate a lot of the negativity and nonsense around here 
so 100 MS is safe according to blizzard ? thats all i wana be sure about dear 