A Guide to Mages comment thread

[Skandranon]

This information is OFTEN quite helpful.  In fact, IMHO, ALL crowd control abilities should be macro'ed.  If you're going to fear something, let me know what.  I can't see what you're doing behind me and I'm probably not going to look to notice.  If we pick up an add, there are 5 people who could move to intercept that add.  If a mage is going to polly it - I want to hear that over the chat channel.  There are often enough differences that with pulls of 3 or less I can figure out which of the targets the mage is going to polly.  And if I can't the worst case scenario is that I can't figure it out and un-sheep the polly - which would have happened if it WASN'T called out.
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This should be worked out ahead of time: whether the mage will pick up adds or not. Once that's determined, stick to it and don't execute a macro to pollute party chat in the meantime. As a tank, and I've played a paladin to 52 so I do know what I'm talking about, I found polymorph macros exceedingly worthless.

If you can figure out which target the mage is going after, then why do you need notification in chat? And if you can't, how is the notification going to help you?

Even allowing for the odd situation where it does help, the overwhelming majority of them are going to be superfluous. Much like the even more annoying Flash Heal macro, this one induces people to tune out party chat and pay less attention to the chat window scrolling, which means that they're more likely to ignore key warnings like "inc patrol" and so on. You can't ignore the negative aspects of these macros. Even skilled and attentive players will pay less attention to chat if warnings are going off every fight, and the chances of someone misreading an important alert as just another polymorph notification are much less if the only things chat contains during battle are important.

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.