A Guide to Mages comment thread

[savaughn]

In any case, polymorph has two distinctive non-visual cues: the arcane casting sound, which only applies to missiles and polymorph, and the "baa" that plays once the spell hits.  Even if you miss both of these cues, worst-case you hit the sheep and pop it.  Then you turn your attention away, and 1.5 seconds later it's a sheep again.  No macro is going to say "I'm polymorphing the add, so don't hit it, and if you do I'll polymorph it again, so go back to what you were doing" and no macro should.  Planning ahead, in my view, obviates any need for an in-battle macro, and if you're not planning ahead, a macro isn't going to help you that much.
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Again, I agree. Rarely do things do anything other than go as planned. If you've agreed that the mage picks up adds, the adds will come in one at a time and will always be humanoid. Similarly, the mage will never have acquired aggro or be in the middle of a long casting spell, and so will always be able to sheep exactly as expected. And even if they did, actually telling your party what the heck your doing should be frowned upon. The best thing to hear in the chat screen is beautiful golden silence. <_<

In the real world, a lot of the time you generall find out that you've just popped the sheep is that somewhere near you there is a puff of smoke and a 'baa' sound. You have no clue if you popped the sheep or someone else did. You're not even entirely sure what mob GOT sheeped. Additionally, in the middle of a fight where two adds join, the mage is going to click on their screen or hit the tab key (which works again! Yea!!!) and the computer will decide which one gets selected. Even if you're trying to get the one on the left, who knows what one you're going to target. Now, you can hang out and retarget a couple times, or you can sheep now.

Things go wrong. Knowing that things have gone wrong and how your party is working to clear this up allows you to recover. When rule #1 kicks in, I want my mage/priest/rogue/warlock to have macros so that we don't have the rogue vanish only to end up with a sapped sheep.

That said, I think having macro/unmacro'ed buttons is definitely a good idea. The LoS observation is a good one. Similarly, bringing 40 people into molten core and having 20 people start chiming off about running out of mana or hps definitely lowers your tolerance for them. But communication is the difference between a successful 5-man group and a dead 5-man group and you can sit down and talk for 20 minutes before an encounter - at some point in time rule #1 is still going to kick in.

<edit: overly snarky comment removed>