Macro tip #9: Stances

This is from the Instance 138, at time index 1:31:33.

This segment was prompted by an email to the show from Shooter, a hunter who wanted to know how to fit all of their aspects and abilities onto their action bar. Of course, many of the previous tips have focused on doing just that, so it may pay off just to review some of the topics covered so far.

However, the problem hunters face is that aspects aren’t stances. Stances are a feature of several classes; they represent different “modes” for the character class. The obvious examples are Fury, Battle and Protection Stances for Warriors, but Stealth also counts as a stance, as do the different Druid forms and Death Knight presences. Apparently, Shadowform for priests, Ghostwolf for a Shaman and Demon Form for warlocks also count as stances. When certain characters swap to a stance, their action bar changes: this means that they can manage the abilities that show up in each stance quite easily, giving lots of room to fit stuff in.

As an added bonus macros can also detect stances and manage abilities accordingly. This may be useful for macros you place on other bars on your screen (e.g. side action bars rather than the default one), or for characters with stances that don’t swap your action bar.

Putting the following text into a macro will allow you to set up conditionals in this way:

/cast [stance:number] ability

…where ‘number’ should be replaced by the number that stands for your stance (see http://www.wowwiki.com/Stance for an overview) and ‘ability’ is the name of the ability you want to use. So a rogue might have:

/use [stance:0] frostweave bandage
/cast [stance:1] Sap

This would allow them to bandage if unstealthed, but would swap to sap if they went into stealth. You can also use ‘nostance’ to detect if you are not in a particular stance. For example, for a warrior:

/cast [nostance:2] Defensive Stance
/cast [stance:2] Spell Reflection

This will cast Spell Reflection if in Defensive Stance. If the warrior is not in the right stance to cast this, however, the first button press will swap them to that and the second will activate it.

Since many stances give you a fresh action bar, it can be simpler just to have a button that will let you swap quickly between these. For example:

/cast [nomodifier] Blood Presence
/cast [modifier:alt] Frost Presence
/cast [modifier:shift] Unholy Presence

If you wanted to be particularly clever, you could even build in variations so that the macro never showed the stance you’re currently in – but the easiest way to do this would be with combined conditionals, which haven’t been covered here yet.