Hunters can burn through their mana pretty damned fast–especially when they pop their long cooldowns. To help deal with this, Blizz has given us a new and improved Aspect of the Viper in 3.0 so we can regain mana quickly (but at the cost of some DPS). Managing mana and properly timing a cycle in Viper are covered elsewhere by people smarter than me, but I do have a few ways to make the actual transitions between aspects less error prone.
The Sequence
Let’s begin with a simple castsequence macro. This is likely the first one we all wrote when we found out we’d be frequently switching aspects. (Substitute Aspect of the Hawk if you’re not high enough for Dragonhawk.)
#showtooltip
/castsequence Aspect of the Dragonhawk, Aspect of the Viper
At first glance, it seems like the perfect approach. Click once and you’re DPSing in Dragonhawk. Click again and you’re gaining mana in Viper. What could be simpler? The problem I encountered (the one that made me find another approach) is that castsequences reset any time there’s a loading screen. This doesn’t affect us in most cases, especially since we use “reset=3/combat” type things to reset our sequences anyway. But, for long duration affects like aspects, the silent reset can lead to trouble.
Picture this: You’re on your way to a the raid, and you encounter some nasties. You pop into Dragonhawk, pew pew ensues, and zone into the raid. You check your aspect, and it’s Dragonhawk, but what you didn’t notice was the that the castsequence reset. On the first boss, you notice your mana getting low. Boss is at 60%, so a simple mana potion’s not gonna cut. You hit your cast sequence macro and continue pew pew-ing and wait for your mana to go up.
Except, it doesn’t. What happened? You just cast the first spell in your sequence, which toggled your current aspect–it’s now gone! No Viper, and no Dragonhawk! How annoying.
You can “prime” your sequence by mashing the macro a few times at the start of the raid, if you remember. You can also change the sequence to:
/castsequence !Aspect of the Dragonhawk, !Aspect of the Viper
The little exclamation marks (“!”) before the aspect names force the spell to be cast instead of just toggling, so it won’t be silently canceled. Depending on your play style, this approach may be what you need.
The Switcher
Another approach is a macro like this:
#showtooltip
/cast Aspect of the Dragonhawk
/cast Aspect of the Viper
Two casts in a row? How will Viper ever be reached?
This macro takes advantage of the fact that changing aspects doesn’t trigger the global cooldown (but it does trigger an aspect change cooldown of one second). When you use the macro, if you don’t have Aspect of the Dragonhawk active, it is cast. It doesn’t matter which aspect you were in, or even if you had one at all. The macro icon also changes to the “active aspect” icon:
You use the macro again, and what happens? The first line toggles Aspect of the Dragonhawk to off. This is a freebie, and doesn’t trigger any cooldowns. Next, it casts Aspect of the Viper. Press it again, and back to Dragonhawk. Since it’s based on your current aspect, it’s not prone to the errors of a cast sequence resetting. That isn’t to say it has no errors…
Pressing it quickly twice in a row (within that one second aspect change cooldown) may turn off your Dragonhawk aspect–or whichever aspect you have listed first. This is because, unlike the sequence, the macro has no protection from multiple quick hits. Again, depending on your play style, this may be a good approach.
The Conditional Aspect
I’ve mentioned before how I don’t like to think about my macros when I’m playing–especially in combat. I want them to “just work”. For a long time I used the above “switcher” macro for managing my aspects, and things were fine for when I raided.
Lately, though, I’ve been doing a lot more deep-BM pet tanking in my free time–soloing Old World raids, and the like. (Dual-spec makes this easy!) To help a bit with the threat issues, I’ve switched to using Aspect of the Beast. It’s a bit of drop in DPS, but changes the ratio so that pets do more damage/threat compared to the hunter. Since the action bars change with spec, I could create a second macro that replaces Aspect of the Dragonhawk with Aspect of the Beast. This eats up a precious macro slot, which I’d like to avoid. There’s a new condition to use with dual-specs that will let you chose your aspect correctly all in one macro. (My soloing BM-spec is second, in this case.)
#showtooltip
/cast [spec:1] Aspect of the Dragonhawk
/cast [spec:2] Aspect of the Beast
/cast Aspect of the Viper
Or, you can use the following if you prefer the sequence form:
#showtooltip
/castsequence [spec:1] Aspect of the Dragonhawk, Aspect of the Viper
/castsequence [spec:2] Aspect of the Beast, Aspect of the Viper
Neat, neh?
There’s lots of opportunities for personalization with these macros. For example, I add a line to make sure Trueshot Aura is up. Looks like this:
/cast [spec:1] !Trueshot Aura
My first spec is (currently) Marksman for raiding, and I… well, let’s just say we have multiple MM hunters and it’s hard to tell if mine is toggled on.
