Hunter Macros & Tips [Redux]

[Limmp]

Hello Fey i was just wondering if you are doing any youtube i have dyslexia (Makes it hard to read) so it would be great if you could make a video about your guide insted of only text <3 (Make it like 5 min videos on hunter macros and next episode pet macro so on and so on)

[Fey]

Hi! I do have a youtube channel, but it's not related to WoW. I don't want to go into too much detail about that, though, because I don't want to go off-topic.

I was actually thinking of starting a few WoW videos though. It'd be fun, for sure!

Hearing it from someone else makes me consider it more, though, since there's demand for it. Thank you for expressing your thoughts.

[Limmp]

Hi! I do have a youtube channel, but it's not related to WoW. I don't want to go into too much detail about that, though, because I don't want to go off-topic.

I was actually thinking of starting a few WoW videos though. It'd be fun, for sure!

Hearing it from someone else makes me consider it more, though, since there's demand for it. Thank you for expressing your thoughts.

Or you could give me a 46 hour coaching about wow pvp your choice

You don't have to make long videos the best would be like 5-10 min videoes about a category (Traps, Pet, Macros)

/Limmp <3

[Fey]

Or you could give me a 46 hour coaching about wow pvp your choice

You don't have to make long videos the best would be like 5-10 min videoes about a category (Traps, Pet, Macros)
/Limmp <3

Oh, if you want specifics, I could give you a few tips. I'll put a blank line between each bullet point to make it easier to read, since I can't go and make a video right now.

ABOUT TRAPS:
- Try not to waste your Feign Death, since you need it to trap or meld in combat. If you're out in the open and under fire, and cover is not far from you, even if it's not LoS cover, just something like a tree that you can shoot through, get there first. If you Shadowmeld right after that, it'll be even easier to set up for a nice trap when they come to facecheck for you like a dummy. Or, if you're overextended in front of your allies in a team fight, walk behind someone and feign. If you were to instead feign and Shadowmeld out in the open, the enemy would see you stealth, and your position would be given away immediately. The point is to prevent your assailant from re-selecting you; you're most effective when you can hit things undisturbed from a distance.

- If running from someone, drop a trap in your path. Either make sure they don't see you do it or perform another action immediately after so the animation finishes, such as jumpshotting. That's when you jump, turn 180 degrees in the air, and fire off a shot and turn back around to keep running. It's even easier if you strafe at the same time; the purpose of the jump is to continue going the way you're headed without having to go a slightly different direction.

- Learn to effectively deal with any class in melee and, perhaps even more importantly, how to disengage from any other class in melee. Melee is often a hunter's weak point, so you'll do yourself a huge favor by learning to use all your close-range skills, such as traps, efficiently and effectively, through much practice. For instance, a mage may blink into close range to frost nova you and DPS from melee, so if you see a mage coming for you, drop a freezing trap. If you're capping a flag in a BG and there's apparently no one around, place a flare somewhere, and have a trap behind you as you cap the flag to trick them. A really funny trick is if you place the flare somewhere the rogue or feral druid won't run into it; they'll think they avoided your detection, only to get frozen in ice and dropped later in your victory drink. Delicious! Really, though, it all comes down to anticipating your enemy's moves so you can stay ahead and more easily outplay them. Watch your tracker at all times and remain in a position to come into fights unexpectedly.

- Your pet can serve as an amazing distraction and setup for a trap, especially as a night elf. If a rogue comes up on a bush which has your pet in it, thinking you're in it and you forgot to dismiss or stealth your pet like a dummy, and walks right into a freezing trap you left in your place, you can come right out from another bush, drop a flare on his head, and aimed shot / concussive shot him before he has any opportunity to react whatsoever. Just make sure you have feign death and your trap off CD in case someone walks in on you, and you need to quickly freeze them after their stun wears off... and make sure you still have a trap down in that other bush. And make sure no one sees you moving between the two! Being observant and aware are perhaps the biggest virtues when it comes to being a master of traps. Oh, and speccing Survival works too, but it's a little tricky to learn.

I think that should be good to start with. If you would like to see my current specialization, which is mainly Survival, this is it:
http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#cZxqohtZcfibohux

I chose my talents with attention to burst damage for hit-and-runs, melee survivability, and CC.

Note that although most of my spec is Survival, it provides more subtle benefits than MM. MM has obviously powerful benefits, like aimed shot and scatter shot, which you can expect to use often. Don't neglect the passive benefits of Survival, though! You can go toe-to-toe with a warrior for a little while if you swap to Monkey and pop Deterrence. Long enough to get a root and some nice melee burst off, for sure, and a Raptor Strike crit can be startling coming from a hunter. In the OP, I explained that going into melee can be a viable and even very effective strategy if you DoT an enemy up with stings and traps first, then use your agility to survive as you beat them down... or at least root them in place.

ABOUT PETS:
- Like traps, which benefit most from the Survival specialization, you may want to look into a Beast Mastery spec should you find you really enjoy having your kitty or whatever maul someone's face. A Beast Mastery spec can also be tricky to play, since you're heavily reliant on your pet, but you can resurrect it very easily and very quickly, and there are talents you can spec into to improve your pet's survivability.

- I prefer to keep my pet dismissed until I'm scoring a KB, since if I need to stealth, I need to do it quickly, without the five-second cast time of Dismiss Pet. A cat with Prowl would work too, but then again, sometimes you need to move from that place you're in. Learn to play with and without your pet, just in case.

- Intimidation is a great tool for getting pesky rogues or something off of you. Keep your pet a reasonable distance away from you, if you can. Not too close, so they can't be easily CC'd, but not too far, in case you need them. Preferably within range of Mend Pet, so you can dispel negative effects on it as soon as possible!

- If you go deep BM, Bestial Wrath is a great damage CD, and with a really beefed-up pet, using all the pet-only talents you can get, whoever happens to be the target of its fury is going to cry, especially if you're out of reach while it goes and mauls your defenseless target.

- You know what else is fun? Eyes of the Beast. This isn't really a recommendation for improving your gameplay, but you can do some really fun things with Eyes of the Beast. If you have your second action bar to spare, fill it up with macros commanding your pet. You can't use Intimidation or Bestial Wrath while Eyes of the Beast is going, but... you can use pet abilities! And that's fun. At least, I think it is. A cat loaded up with Dash, Prowl, Claw and Bite will give you a miniature rogue to play. Aren't hunters just the coolest? I actually just whipped up a bunch of macros for that. I could link them here, if you'd like, but again, they're pointless.

I don't have time right now to continue writing tips, but as for macros, that's what the OP is about. Hopefully this little bit will get you started on knowing hunters more intimately!

[Bravethestone]

Hard hunter CC is very delicate. Frost trap, scatter shot, wyvern sting, whatever, it's all broken on damage. Our beast fear thankfully isn't necessarily broken on damage, and we have plenty of reasonably potent slows and immobilizing tools in our arsenal. That said, the 'hard CC,' like the stuff that completely stops enemies from doing things, even if it's fragile, isn't really necessary, at least some of the time, but it is useful. If you're having trouble making good use of your hard CC, trying to macro things and clean up your binds so you don't accidentally break it is a good idea, but also try to find alternatives. For instance, a shaman is easy pickings if you don't let them get in Frost Shock range.

Oh, I have extensive PvP experience in vanilla as a hunter considering I hit Field Marshall (no big deal really just a lot of hours playing grinding ranks). Against well geared, skilled opponents...especially when you're under pressure with a few melee classes on your ass. You have to be precise with controls with finely tuned macros...having melee auto attack bound to ranged attacks is a big risk to break CC IMO...one I just don't think is worth the convenience it offers. I guess it would be efficient for PvE mob grinding? For that someone could make a separate PvE action bar with specific macros if they really valued it.

It's a fun challenge to spec Surv/MM and see how many players you can kite/kill at once,...which can be tough when you don't have much space to maneuver and they're blowing cooldowns left and right to get in range...or worse they get the jump on you. Sometimes the proc gods aren't on your side with imp wing clip or that raptor crit you were hoping would finish someone off.


But really all melee can be condensed into on single spammable macro like the one below that I tweaked a little.

/cast Raptor Strike
/cast Mongoose Bite
/cast Counterattack
/run if CheckInteractDistance("target", 3) then CastSpellByName("Wing Clip") else CastSpellByName("Auto Shot") end
/script PetAttack()
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

This works effectively as melee spam when in range, casts wingclip first, then winds up raptor, etc. When not in range it starts your auto which is helpful if you go out of mana and need to start attacking again. And it has pet attack in there if you dont want to bind pet attack to other key ranged shots depending on your personal preferences.


I'm still tweaking my macros as I level. I decided to make a separate macro that stealths me and my cat and can also be used interchangeably in combat as a hunter's mark. I would like it to be able to mark while shadowmelded but it removes my cats prowl when clicked a second time. And unfortunately there's no way to castsequence that I know about. I found the macro below written for druids, perhaps it can be reworked by someone more knowledgeable with macro writing and variables.

/script if not buffed("Shadowmeld") then CastSpellByName("Shadowmeld") end;
/script local i,x=1,0 while UnitBuff("pet",i) do if string.find(UnitBuff("pet",i),"Prowl") then x=1 end i=i+1 end if x==0 then CastSpellByName("Prowl");end
/cast Hunter's Mark


Another suggestion is to add PetWait() to scatter shot and Freeze Trap macros so that your pet is ready to attack your target after you break CC with a re-opener...Especially with casters so your pet is closer to them and interrupting their casts (fear, heal, sheep) as soon as possible...and also a few more hits that might have killed that rogue that caught up to you because you screwed up kiting with rotations/timing/misclick or something was on cooldown. These shortcomings happen to even the best player so you got to optimize your gameplay strategy as much as possible.

[Fey]

Hello, Bravethestone! Thank you for your contribution to this thread.

Congratulations on Field Marshal! I agree wholeheartedly that hunters are great fun no matter what area of the game you enjoy. If you would prefer an Auto Shot macro that simply does Auto Shot, and doesn't swap to melee, this should cover it for you:

/script if not IsAutoRepeatAction(3) then CastSpellByName("Auto Shot"); end

Remember to replace the 3 there with the number of Auto Shot on your bars. Refer to this image for the correction:

http://i.imgur.com/VGArn.jpg

It's indeed possible to place Wing Clip in a melee macro, but it's extremely mana-inefficient. The way I have it set up is, as you can see by the image of my interface I uploaded:



Auto shot is on 3. My melee attack is on shift + 3, which contains Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, and Counterattack. Ranged CC, my Concussive Shot, is on 4, while Wing Clip and Counterattack once again appear together on shift + 4.

If you would rather be keybind-efficient and mana-efficient, I suggest keeping Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, and Counterattack on one key, while Concussive Shot and Wing Clip are on another, where range to target determines which ability is used. In such a macro, I would also recommend that Counterattack be potentially triggered in melee, along with Wing Clip. With Wing Clip in the melee attack macro, it would be quite inefficient to spam the button, and you won't take advantage of any Mongoose Bite procs that way.

I'm afraid I don't have a solution for your macro issue. I simply put /cast Prowl in my Shadowmeld macro, and I try to only hit it once if possible. If I absolutely must hide, I'll send Glacia off into the distance someplace. I'm not certain that buff detection works at all on pets, so I'm not certain such a macro would be possible to create, but are you aware that Shadowmeld will actually not break if you put Hunter's Mark on a target? It also won't break if you switch tracking, such as enabling humanoid tracking.

It's a very good idea to have a pet wait hotkey, or to have pet wait implemented in those two macros. Good suggestion!

As a side note, I just edited the OP with some more details for new hunters, and why giving a hunter a try is a great idea. Reader, be sure to check it out if you're still on the fence.

[Bravethestone]

If you would rather be keybind-efficient and mana-efficient, I suggest keeping Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, and Counterattack on one key, while Concussive Shot and Wing Clip are on another, where range to target determines which ability is used.

Yea,...my big issue is I'm starting to run out of easy to hit keybinds. On retail vanilla I resorted to clicking some abilities and most consumables, haha. Thats why I just threw wingclip in the melee macro...to clear a keybind.

My macros are geared towards PvP so that is the perspective I approach configuring UI from. I'm always re-evaluating some of my macros, but I don't think the mana inefficiency when spammed will be a huge issue as I wont be meleeing too often or for very long...usually at a point where I'm swarmed by enemy players and likely about to die anyways haha.

One good thing about having wingclip paired with melee spam is that you can do get a wingclip/raptor and possibly mongoose/counter in with one keypress and do run throughs on melee before getting snared/stunned/etc. In my experience it has to do with the global cooldown/windup of raptor after hitting the ability. If they're separate you'd have to coordinate hitting two keys while kiting and the problem is you have to be facing your target to cast them. This will need further testing though for the sake of efficiency.

I made a macro for engineering grenades and put PetFollow in it to counter using PetWait on the Scatter and Freeze Trap macros. I haven't thought of any better pairing for it yet.

Also a shift key modifier for using Eagle eye and Eyes of the Beast...rarely used but sometimes handy for scouting depending on playstyle in bgs or world PvP. Clears up UI space a bit. Probably not worthy of a keybind but just clicked. This of course can be adapted to use other spells of preference.

/run local x = IsShiftKeyDown(); if x == nil then CastSpellByName("Eagle Eye") else CastSpellByName("Eyes of the Beast"); end;

[Fey]

I tend to keep abilities I won't be using in combat off of keybinds, like Eagle Eye or Eyes of the Beast.

Note that a lot of my ability grouping has patterns to it, like 3 and 4 being ranged while shift + 3 and shift + 4 are melee. That's how I keep organized with my UI and my abilities.

Are you a Survival hunter as well? Have you considered speccing into Savage Strikes? It's great fun in melee.

My fingers are very long, so I can hit keybinds very easily, but I still don't go over 5, which is fairly easily reachable for most people. Here's a list of all my keybinds, in case it's difficult to see in the linked interface image:

1 - Petattack, with dash command attached.
2 - Arcane Shot(Rank 1), for tagging purposes, kiting mobs, getting people off flags, etc.
3 - Auto Shot / Auto Attack
4 - Concussive Shot
5 - Explosive Trap

S5 - Frost Trap
S4 - Counterattack, Wing Clip
S3 - Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, Counterattack
S2 - Serpent Sting
S1 - Viper / Scorpid Sting

Q - Pet General
SQ - Scare Beast / First Aid
E - Scatter Shot
SE - Cheetah / Pack

` - Flare
Z - Mend Pet
SZ - Pet Follow
X - Deterrence
SX - Multi-Shot
Esc - Feign Death (get it?)
F - Immolation Trap
SF - Freezing Trap
R - Distracting Shot
SR - Formerly Growl, now I have Eyes of the Beast there. This macro swaps to my second action bar.
T - Rapid Fire
ST - Disengage

C - Mount
SC - Aimed Shot
SS - Hawk / Monkey
Tab - Hunter's Mark
STab - Shadowmeld

Action Bar 2, button 1 - Petattack, without passive command attached.
Action Bar 2, button 2 - Claw. Turns off Claw autocast.
Action Bar 2, button 3 - Bite. Turns off Bite autocast.
Action Bar 2, button 4 - Dash. Turns off Dash autocast.
Action Bar 2, button 5 - Prowl. Turns off Prowl autocast.
Action Bar 2, buttons S1, S2, S3, S4, and S5 - Disables Eyes of the Beast, and swaps back to primary bar.

I have a few just-for-fun macros and binds, as you can see, or some not very useful ones, which are all subject to change, but the point I was trying to make by listing my keybinds is where they all are. Note that C, F, and T glide upwards in an outward-bound pattern, all in great spots for the left hand to hit and, just as importantly, good spots to pull your hand back from. Or, at least, good spots for me. You've got to do what works for you, but this setup (I mean the binds, not where the abilities are placed) has worked very well for me thus far.

[Sierra]

my addition to this thread:
Pet Attack with mouse-over support

Code: Select all

/run local f=UnitCanAttack p="player" mo="mouseover" t="target" ucat=f(p,t) ucamo=f(p,mo) pa=PetAttack() tu=TargetUnit();
/run if ucat then if ucamo then tu(mo);pa();TargetLastTarget();else pa();end;elseif ucamo then tu(mo);pa();end


The first line sets some variables and shortcut aliases
second one is performing the target/attack logic

it behaves in the following fashion:

if the player has a hostile target and mouseover is a hostile target
=> pet attacks mouseover target , player keeps current target

if the player has a hostile target and mouseover is not a hostile or doesn't exist
=> pet attacks player's target

if the player has no target and mouseover is a hostile target
=> pet attacks mouseover target, player targets mouseover target

Later on, I plan to bundle it with an alt key modifier to stop the pet's attack

No extra addons are necessary for this macro,
Enjoy

[Fey]

Code: Select all

/run local f=UnitCanAttack p="player" mo="mouseover" t="target" ucat=f(p,t) ucamo=f(p,mo) pa=PetAttack() tu=TargetUnit();
/run if ucat then if ucamo then tu(mo);pa();TargetLastTarget();else pa();end;elseif ucamo then tu(mo);pa();end


Wow!! Mouseover macros exist in Vanilla! I unfortunately have no time to test that right now, but thank you so much for this contribution; I know some people who've been looking for such a macro.