Mana-macros

In light of all the announced coming changes to buffs and debuffs in a raid environment I feel it is a bit unsafe to write more about what to do to keep your mana up when raiding.

Except for one thing - how to save mana by actually using the abilities and trinkets that you have equipped.

My memory is excellent! - only very short! So I rely a lot on macros and addons to help me remember to squeeze those nice on-use abilities out of my gear.

I have the talent Inner Focus from the Discipline tree. This talent gives me a free spell every three minutes.

Now, there are two ways to use this one - either save it for those oh-shit-situations when you need a heal NOW and you have absolutely no mana left, or you use it every time it's up.

I go for the latter alternative, and it helps me stay out of the 5-second rule and thus regenerate more mana, hopefully avoiding those oh-shit situations altogehter.

I have macroed Inner Foocus to my heal spells, like for example Greater Heal.

/cast Inner Focus
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

Every time I click the macro, it tries to cast Inner Focus. If it's available, good, the blue spiral spell effect flashes and I begin to cast a mana-free Greater Heal. If Inner Focus is on cooldown, I get an error message but I cast a Greater Heal anyways, using mana for it.

The first conditionals, [target=mouseover, help], makes me cast the macroed spell on my mouseover target if it's friendly.

The second conditionals, [ ], is for when I don't have a mouse-over target or I do have one but it's hostile, in which case the macro behaves like a plain /cast Greater Heal, casting it on my current target or myself if I have no selected target and auto-self-cast enabled.

For added clarity, I put #showtooltip Greater Heal at the top of the macro. This shows me the usual spell tooltip when I mouseover the icon.

I also use the stopcasting technique for my Greater Heals, so I have put a /stopcasting before the actual /cast Greater Heal. This means that every time I click the macro I restart the cast.

(Why do I do this? you may ask.

I do this because of the 2,5 seconds cast time for Greater Heal. When you are on tank healing duty and don't want to waste mana and drop a full Gheal on an almost topped-off tank, you interrupt the spell and start casting it again right away.

You also don't want to wait around until the tank gets noticeable damage, because if you don't have a Gheal in the pipe already by then, those 2,5 seconds will feel like an eternity and you might end up with a dead tank.

So, start casting Gheal by clicking the Gheal macro. If the cast is almost at the end and the tank is still at almost full heal, click the macro once again to abort the cast and start it again. If the tank is taking damage, finish the cast and heal him up. Rinse and repeat.)

The macro now looks like this:

#showtooltip Greater Heal
/cast Inner Focus
/stopcasting
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

But wait! Being a lazy twit efficient healer I have put even more in my macros XD. You are allowed to use 255 characters in every macro so why not make the most of it?

I have three trinkets that I use when healing: Essence of the Martyr, Vial of the Sunwell and Figurine - Seaspray Albatross. All of them have very nice on-use effects - if you remember to use them.

Same here as for the Inner Focus spell, hold on to the trinkets or use them? It's like a bottle of wine, either you save it for that extra special occasion that might never happen and it may even turn rancid and yukky, or you drink it and turn that mundane tuesday evening into a sweet mellow night.

So I put my trinkets in my macro like this:

#showtooltip Greater Heal
/cast Inner Focus
/stopcasting
/use Vial of the Sunwell
/use Essence of the Martyr
/use Figurine - Seaspray Albatross
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

I get an error message saying Item is not ready yet or You must equip that item to use it, but the spellcast is not hindered.

I have macroed all my heal spells like this now, on the philosophy that it's better with a mellow tuesday afternoon that happens over and over than an extra special saturday night party that might never come ;P

(The /stopcasting is only used in the Gheal macro though, since it's useless in instant spell macros like for Renew, Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing and I don't want to accidentally interrupt any casts of Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing or Binding Heal.)

Edit: *slaps head* Forgot one vital part of this macro! There's really no use in burning all your spell and trinket cooldowns unless you are in combat, so I have added the conditional [combat] before every spell cast or trinket use.

The macro now looks like this:

#showtooltip Greater Heal
/cast [combat] Inner Focus
/stopcasting
/use [combat] Vial of the Sunwell
/use [combat] Essence of the Martyr
/use [combat] Figurine - Seaspray Albatross
/cast [target=mouseover, help] [ ] Greater Heal

This way I won't pop the cd's just by shooting a frisbee to the tank before he engages a mob, when I am still full of mana.