My First Totem Macro

Twenty Totems... think of it... in 5 more levels, I'll be able to live up to the name, and drop 20 of the little buggers at a time. Besides the useful game mechanics involved with that many Totems, just think of how pretty it will be! lol

But how do I manage 20 totems at once? In a word, macros. Well, two words.. macros and Keyclone. As I've stated before, Keyclone is so far, my Boxing Killer App. I bought a copy ($10) for each of my 3 machines. This allows me to use my main keyboard, which broadcasts to Keyclone on my 2 other machines, which then broadcasts them to the two instances of WoW running on each.

So each time I hit a button on my keyboard, I can drop a totem on each toon. But I don't have enough buttons to assign one to each type of Totem, nor would I want to have to hunt through that many buttons knowing I have a set of Totems I use 99% of the time. That's where macros come in.

If you don't know how to use macros at all, spend some time here: WoWWiki Macro Guide

Assuming you do, lets talk about /Castsequence. This script allows us to "queue" up several different spells, and execute them in order, one key press at a time. Here's an example:

/castsequence Tremor Totem, Searing Totem, Mana Spring Totem

When you drag this macro to a button, it will first cast a Tremor Totem with the first button press, then Searing with the next, and finally Mana Spring with the last. Hit it again, and it would start all over in the cycle.

Knowing I can drop one Totem of each element on each toon, I can write a custom macro for each Shaman, and end up dropping a wide variety of Totems with one key. For Fire, I might want all Searing, so I add Searing to every toon's macro. But because some Totems don't stack, I might want a variety. Earth as an example. I currently drop one Stoneskin, one Earthbind, one Tremor and two Stoneclaws (for CC). So each toon's macro will have a different Earth Totem in it, but they all drop together.

The other feature of /Castsequence, is the Reset. You have many options to choose from, when it comes to resetting the sequence. The options are:

• Number of seconds: literally choose a number of seconds after the first keypress before it resets. This works great for spells with specific cooldowns
• Change Target: Reset the sequence each time you change targets
• Combat: Reset the sequence each time you leave combat
• Shift/alt/ctrl: Reset the sequence each time you press the macro button while holding shift, alt or ctrl.

The cool thing is, you can stack these veriables. Here's what I ended up with:

/castsequence Reset=combat Searing Totem, Healing Stream Totem, Tremor Totem, Grounding Totem

Of course, each toon is slightly different. They all drop the same Fire Totem right now, but they drop different Earth Totems. As I gain more spells, I'll have to constantly re-evaluate. I then place the macro on the same action bar (which is tied to a button on my Nostromo) and it becomes my "PvE Totem Button".

When I get ready to enter combat, I simply hit this button 3 times, and all my totems are down. In case I end up hitting it again during combat, the Reset=combat will always reset the button on each toon as soon as I leave combat. It's pretty sweet.

Let me know if you're using any specific macros for multiboxing!

Boom