/castrandom what's up?

#0 - Aug. 14, 2009, 2:39 p.m.

I want to start off with quote from a blue post that really makes no sense.

Q u o t e:
Players using this system had an unfair advantage against players that weren’t.

/castrandom - [Definition]: Working smarter, not harder.

The simple fact of the matter is that this was a system that was in the game, that required no additional addons or external peripherals. The problem with what Blizzard has done is now players who choose to use certain action bar mods, or fancy keyboards can achieve the same thing as a /castrandom macro. Players who don't, cannot, which is truly an unfair advantage.

I feel that comparing /castrandom to decursive is unfair, a better comparison would be a student who studies for a test vs. one who doesn't.

The underlying issue here is that more and more classes are being designed with less of a "rotation" and more of a "priority" system that consist of keeping all of you buttons on CD in no specific order. Just give me a reason to use one ability befor another, rather than break my macro.

Ghostcrawler

#41 - Aug. 14, 2009, 11:58 p.m.

One clarification:

The way we changed ("broke") castrandom was that if it fails, it continues to try and cast the same spell again. This means it will still work as you intend for randomly casting mounts or using different versions of Polymorph since those won't generally fail. We have no objection to using castrandom in that fashion, which was honestly more of the original intent for the macro.

Where we don't like castrandom is when players wanted to use the macro instead of having to pay attention to procs and cooldowns. That's just not the way we really want players playing WoW. There are some great games were part of the challenge is trying to automate your character as much as possible to respond to whatever happens. We just don't want WoW to be one of them.

In those situations where you feel utterly dependent on a macro because our default UI isn't cutting it, please help us to identify them (though don't feel obligated to turn the rest of this thread into that discussion). We'd rather make the class or UI work better rather than balance around the assumption that everyone castrandom macros the ability.

The legendary DK one-button macro is an interesting beast. It tended to work because it defaulted to Icy Touch a lot since most other abilities require melee. At the time, Icy Touch hit really, really hard.