The Spell Caster's Trinket Macro

I promised you last week that I'd post my nuke macro and explain it. Then RL happend, and I got busy. But I'm ready to share it now.

All Elemental Shaman have a DPS buff called Elemental Mastery. It's a talent that when used, guarantees your next spell will be a crit. The cooldown on this talent is three mins.

As an Orc Shaman, we also have the Orc Racial Blood Fury, which gives you a temporary boost to your Spell Damage based on your level. At my current level, it adds around 120ish.

Then there are the caster trinkets. These became notorious back before TBC, as mages used them in conjunction with talents to produce insane burst damage, creating the Three Minute Mage. An Elemental Shaman can do the same, and it just so happens that there are TWO caster trinkets that are easily accessible in early TBC questlines. The Ancient Crystal Talisman, which grants 104 spell damage, and the Vengeance of the Illidari which grants 120 spell damage.

Caster trinkets used to be stackable "back in the day", but this simply became way too overpowered. So now when you use a caster trinket, it causes any other trinket to start a small cooldown, keeping you from stacking them.

So lets review what we've got available to us.

Blood Fury 120 Spell Damage 2min cooldown
VotI 120 Spell Damage 2min cooldown
ACT 104 Spell Damage 2min cooldown
EM Guaranteed Crit 3min cooldown

At the time of this post, Thunduh (my main) is at 338+ Spell Damage.

Now that we have the numbers, lets talk about how much win this is. Blizzard will let us make a macro that will cast a different spell each time we hit the button. (using /castsequence) But we only need to do this IF the spell/item causes the global cooldown (GCD) to cycle. Buff trinkets don't. Either does Blood Fury or Elemental Mastery... you following me?

So I made this very simple macro:


/cast Elemental Mastery
/cast Blood Fury
/use Vengeance of the Illidari
/use Ancient Crystal Talisman
/cast Chain Lightning


Now remember, the two trinkets can't be used at the same time, so what this macro does, is trigger off whatever it can, then immediately cast Chain Lightning. All in ONE key press.

KACHOW!

So assuming all cooldowns are up, the math goes like this:



338 Spell damage base

+ 120 from Blood Fury

+ 120 from VotI

+ Guarantee Crit

= 578+ Spell Damage, 2280+ Crit Chain Lightning.

Oh.... TIMES FIVE SHAMAN. ^.^

Joy of joys.

I setup a row of oversized buttons on my screen with all 4 of my damage boosters, so at any time I can see what's available. It couldn't be easier, and it couldnt' be more fun.

So if you're a caster, get those trinkets asap, and get your macro setup. You'll love every moment. Did I mention how cool it looks too when it tries to cram in all the different buff animations from Blood Fury and the trinket? /evilgrin



Boom

The Need to Proceed

Power is a fairly evil thing. No doubt that's a big reason why we multiboxers do what we do. I've been boxing for several months now, and I can't tell you how many times I've launched off 5 simultaneous Chain Lightnings. Yet every dang time I smile.

I did complete my lvl 60 gear, and spent some time in Alterac Valley. It was amazing. After struggling to help push the offensive, I decided to try defense for a round. I'll tell you what... Shamans were meant to stand still, next to their totems, and wait for the next unfortunate soul who dared stumble into range. That's what defense is. At least in AV.

The Horde base in AV is surrounded by an impassable wall. The only opening is between two towers, and about the width of 5 Tauren shoulder to shoulder. That' quite a bottleneck. That's where I made my stand. There's a hill just before the opening, that the Alliance have to climb. It's small, but it keeps the average user from seeing ahead. Perfect.

I fanned out the boys about 20 yards from the bottleneck, dropped my totems, and waited. Everytime a clever mage with giant brass bawls decided it was his turn to rush the base, he found himself promptly plugged directly into the powers of nature. I can only imagine the parts of his body that melted together before his soul gave up and left.

It was pure win. Everywhere.

In our battlegroup (Ruin) AV is dominated by the Alliance right now. They rarely lose. They won the two previous games (by a good margin) before I decided to try Defense. But once I did. We won. We won BIG. For the first time ever, I was being cheered in a BG as a multiboxer. :)

This went on and on. No matter what they did, the Alliance couldn't get past me. They started sending in pets, and I'd kill them before they got to a toon. Mind you, I had a good group of others that were helping me. There's no way 5 Shaman are going to hold back 30+ Alliance. But it was still a sight to see.

I was anxious to save up the Honor I'd need for the two HWL items I wanted. The spellblade and the shield. But I was disappointed at the returns I was getting. I was going to have to sit in AV for a LONG time for that to happen. And Power was calling me....

I couldn't wait any longer. I wanted to see what else I could do. How far I could go. So we ding'd 61, and put PvP on the shelf for a while.

I headed into Outlands to clean up the quests I had skipped in Hellfire, because they didn't give me gear I wanted. It was beautiful. The XP was flowing, my power was growing, and with each quest I'd glance over at Hellfire Citadel wondering if I could go inside.

As it turns out, I could.

At 62, I took 5 Shaman, no dedicated healer and no tank, into Hellfire Ramparts. I was shocked by what I found.

... to be continued.