Bears and cats living together

So, I no longer have seperate feral specs for bear and cat. In the end, I decided having my resto secondary spec back for more pugging options was more important than the little bump in dps my cat form gets from having its own spec - especially given that even in my assorted low-end gear I was doubling the dps of the average regular mode pugger.

The bright side of this is that I can now perform three roles in the game with one toon - tanking, dps, and healing all with two specs and three sets of gear and some keybind tricks.

The keybind tricks are the cool thing, though.

One of the hardest parts of trying to regularly do both bear tanking and kitty dps on a single spec is finding places to put all of those buttons where they will be useful.

Generally, I like to have everything I normally do in the game jammed up on the left side of the keyboard, usually buttons 1-5, q, w, e, r, a, s, and d are my go-to keys, with less-used things scattered further afield. Either bear or cat can fit their most-used binds into this happy little group (playing a druid is starting to make my huntering feel like playing Chopin - I actually use 30+ binds on a semi-regular basis), but they can't both fit in there.

But they can.

The set of binds for the 1-5 keys is easy, changing forms automagically flips those, but I still need six or seven more buttons with two purposes in order to achieve full utility.

Enter macros.

Macros are a funny things. Theoretically they could be used to control or even automate almost any aspect of the UI, however, Blizzard has actively nullified much of the scripting engine's capabilities in an effort to resrain the extent to which people control or automate almost any aspect of the UI. To that extent, it always surprises me when I discover that something can still be done which allows for a degree of logical evaluation, as most of this was removed ages ago. Still, they did have the decency to leave stance conditionals in the active toolkit, and for that, my druid is very happy indeed.

A conditional is a modifier which allows you to state criteria under which a line of macro code will activate, or not activate, based on the outcome of a simple boolean check (i.e. true/false evaluation). In this case, we are looking at the stance conditional. A statement with this conditional looks like this:

/cast [stance:1] growl

This macro will cast growl if the toon is in stance index 1, which happens to be the bear form stance. The statment within the square brackets is the conditional modifier and depending on the outcome, it will or will not cast the spell that follows it.

So, with this macro, your druid will cast growl in bear form, but if you are in any other form, it will do nothing.

Doing nothing is useful. When your UI does nothing you don't get errors, you don't halt macros with additional statements, and you get to brag about being a coder. I pretty much got my day job knowing little more than that back in the heady days of the dot-com bubble, but that's a long story.

That one line of code alone is neat, but it doesn't really do anything for our bear/cat split personality. However, consider this macro:

/cast [stance:1] growl
/cast [stance:3] savage roar

Here we see how you get a set of useful dual-purpose buttons. By combining a bear-only spell on conditional with a cat-only spell on conditional, you can use one static keybind to cast either spell, and only cast the one which is appropriate to your current form. A half dozen or so macros like this will fill out the remainder of those vital keybinds off the first action bar and allow for a stance-based bar change in effect without the overhead and fiddling of an addon. very cool.

But the coolest part of this effort for me was the discovery of how intelligent the macro engine actually is with regards to stance conditionals. I had expected that despite having two effects tied to the buttons, I would only have either bear or cat spell icon images to work with, and would have to adjust to kitty spells under new art, but remarkably, this is not the case.

When creating macros, if you select the very first icon in the option stack, a red question mark icon, it engages in an intelligent tooltip swapping scheme. I already knew that this feature would flip the icon to display the next spell in a castsequence stack, so you knew what was coming in the chain, but what I didn't realize was that the behavior also extended to stances - it will display the tooltip of the first castable spell in the macro, which means that if you are in cat form and the first cast statement is a bear spell, it will check the next one and set the art accordingly - so, when you change forms, all of those macros we just made update their tooltips right away. You don't even have to learn to kittydps with new icons.

Macros are cool.