I don’t have much experience with macros, but with all the reading I have been doing about bears lately, they have been on my mind… I loved, loved, loved the idea of your FFF macro as I was struggling with how to control pulls with casters spread out… I ran into some frustration though, in that sometimes when I pull an all melee group, I have to focus one of them or use a normal FFF button. It seemed silly to me to have 2 pretty pink buttons, so I wracked my poor untrained mind on how to make the macro do what I want–and here is my (now obvious) simple solution:

#showtooltip Faerie Fire (Feral)
/clearfocus [modifier:alt][target=focus,dead][target=focus,help][target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus, exists, nodead, harm][target=target] Faerie Fire (Feral)

It has the exact functionality of your macro, with the exception that in the absence of a living mob set as my focus, it will cast FFF on my current target. It seems nice both for those all melee pulls when I don’t want to focus a mob, and when a new ranged mob pops into combat and I want to get it under control NAO rather than after I have used a focus macro.

Sorry for the rambling–it’s past bedtime but I realized the fix I was searching for and hope that it might benefit someone else.

Thanks again for straightforward advice on learning to be a good growly bear.

/cast Mangle (Bear)(Rank 5)
/cast Maul(Rank 10)

same with my lacerate

oh ! btw this has to be one of the best bear tank sites around ..has improved my game playby 100%

thnx

I don’t generally use Frenzied Regen by itself since it’s on a 3-minute cooldown, and I haven’t seen a reason to split it out.

Survival Instincts is great and all, but my experience is that if a healer can’t keep your health up, giving them another 25k to burn through isn’t going to help. And then you die when Survival Instincts expires. There are a few cases where the healer can be disabled or go out of range, and then “catch up” if you pop Survival Instincts, but against a harder hitting boss, either you’re getting heals or you’re dead.

But Frenzied Regen combined with Survival Instincts means that the healer has an easier time to heal you back up, and you contribute 25k or so of your own health to the process. And conveniently enough, Survival Instincts is also on a 3 minute cooldown.

So SI/FR works for me as a great once (perhaps twice) per combat panic button.

Since it’s a “panic button”, throwing in the healing potions (and the Endless one is free), Healthstone, and trinkets just makes sense to me. And they get the additive effect of the Glyphed Frenzied Regen. Individually, they aren’t enough to worry about and by the time they were clicked one at a time, I’d either be dead or healed fully, I’d expect. (And the article you link to mentions combining them with SI.)

Putting the Barkskin at the beginning is just gravy. If your healer really is out of range, that might reduce incoming damage enough to get things back to stable. But it isn’t a big deal if Barkskin is on cooldown either before or after the panic button. I just haven’t been in any fights where Barkskin timed with a bosses ability is the primary difference in surviving; so burning it during an emergency doesn’t bother me. That may change as I get further into ICC.

But the biggest role of the panic button macro is for when your healer DC’s (or does something else stupid) in the middle of a 5-man boss, and you need to survive. Then burning all your healing abilities (since no more healing is ever coming in) while you’ve got FR up maximizes those. And I assume that’s all the healing I’m getting. And 10-20 seconds of that is enough to kill most bosses outside of the new Icecrown instances. (We 4-manned the first boss of Halls of Stone the other night with me and 3 pure DPS and the panic button halfway through.)

So the panic button isn’t for “graceful communication with your healer managing the ebb and flow of healing and health during the fight”. It’s for “OMG, I’m about to die because something is WRONG.”

I keep my most-used abilities in numbers 1-6… which I can, for the most part, comfortably reach from the WASD keys. I move with those. I also have a fairly high-buttoned mouse and an addon to bind abilities to each button…. which I mostly only use for healing. For tanking though, I get by with pretty much those 6-ish abilities and clicking when I need the rest.

For healing, I use grid and clique… too hard to do otherwise, IMO.
.-= Kaethir´s last blog ..Life’s Little Joys =-.