A Guide to Mages comment thread

[mjdoom]

Unlike sap, polly goes of in the middle of combat.  Polly picks up adds, polly pulls mobs off the priest, etc.  Sure before the pull there's lots of times to explain who's CC'ing what.  But during combat, that's when these macro's really shine.  When I'm tanking I want to hear that a polly is incoming so I know if I need to run over and taunt the add or not, for example.

[right][snapback]71497[/snapback][/right]

Not sure of the best place to reply on this so this seemed like as good a spot as any:

I am in a similar situation with Shackle. The difference that I find is that I use shackle more often in add situations in certain places. I find that people have a tendency to forget about shackles so I currently have a macro set up mostly to remind people that undead can indeed be dealt with if they add on us. In an ideal world this wouldn't be necessary as people would be properly using /assist and would know that a priest can handle undead as well, if not better than, a mage can handle humanoids. I find that the macro is mostly useful because many priests forget that this trick is in their arsenal and thus many people in pickup groups forget that I can shackle.

I also have times where I despise my own macro when LoS or range issues (or I get silenced :( )come into play. In my opinion there is nothing more annoying than 4 straight "Shackling: Stupid Mob" messages spamming raid chat and I usually apologize to the group when this happens. Maybe if people could just understand that shackle is a better version of polymorph I could do away with the stupid macro.

- mjdoom

p.s. For anyone who is curious, the reason I say that shackle is better than polymorph is that it does not reset the target's hitpoints. This makes it phenomenally useful when soloing undead as I can put a mob into permanent shackle and know that it won't heal when I pop it out. It also means that if a party member breaks the shackle and I reset it the damage that has been done is still there (although this is usually minimal).