Stolen from the BETA BOARDS

a GUIDE HOW TOO WORK MACROS

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WOOT! Yeah Baby! Now we're cookin'. These options are so cool!

I've been wanting to post this for a couple of days but haven't had time, getting what's wrong posted unfortunately takes preference over posting Kudos. And you deserve a lot of Kudos for these options!

For those of you who haven't figured it out yet and/or new testers that want to know rather than figuring it out themselves. Also to the Devs in case I missed something that might make it even cooler, here is what I found works, and works quite nicely I might add.

step one, accessing different hot bars: You'll all notice a number to the right of your hot-bar with 2 arrows, you can use those arrows to scroll through your standard multiple hot-bars, or you can hit Shift+Number to change directly to that numbered hot-bar. You can also create new hot-bars on your desktop beyond the standard numbered set the game gives you, rumor has it up to 1000 but lets be realistic, you couldn't play through 1000 hot-bars so lets just leave it at create as many as you want. To get a new Hot-bar you Right Click (Might be Shift+right click, I'm at work so I can't test, I'll edit this later with this specific){checked, it's a right click}, which will bring up a menu and one option is create a new bar. Create as many as you need and can fit, keep in mind you already have like 10 built-ins to scroll through.

Other options: When you do get that sub menu you see other options besides Create new bar, you see assign hot key and target. Assign key is self explanatory, with the new chat system think of all the extra keys you have to assign. The target option is fantastic, you get 3 choices, Target Selected, Target Cursor, Target Self. These can all be set specifically for each slot. Now the best part, you can put the same spell, skill or item (band-aids) in multiple slots. So being a healer, I drop my pile of band-aids in slots 5 & 6, I set 5 to target self and 6 to target cursor. 5 becomes my bandage self macro and 6 gives me a cursor I can target and heal a friend with. Greater heal would work the same way. Target Selected works great once you get used to making sure the correct target is highlighted before you cast, the spell fires off faster since it already knows it destination. Target selected reverts to target cursor if there is no target selected, so if you forget to select your target, or your target dies first, you'll still get a cursor instead.

I can easily see myself having 3 hot-bars on my mages desktop all filled with spells and setting each one to a different row of keys, plus all the built-in bars I can scroll trough for extra (not so Important) spells and stuff. I haven't tried dropping a rune book in a slot yet, (making note to try that tonight), but that might work as well to open your book. It does work with activated skills like taming, stealing, etc.

The only issue I can see with it is potions. Yes someone can load up their bars with potions and just keep a full bar queued up but I think they are going to want a single key for each potion. Unless potions can be made stackable or we can somehow use potions directly from a keg this is going to be complaint from those who use potions a lot. Stackable Potions would be the preferred solution.

Oh yeah, almost forgot, the slots now display the item count if you have something like band-aids in them, another big plus! I am very happy with the new system! other than potions I haven't thought of anything I don't like about it.

And thank you very much for the Shift+Number selection of scrolling through bars, made my day!

*does a happy dance*

Thanks,
GW

An Addition From isol:

Two little things to add to the main text:

1) You have to right click on another hot bar. Took me some clickin' to find out where to right click.

2) Changing the default/standard hotbars is only done with LEFT SHIFT + number. It won't work with RIGHT SHIFT.

Thanks isol

An Addition From Sarphus:

To orient a hotbar vertically instead of horizontally, just resize the bar by click/dragging the corner of the bar and drag a resize box that is longer verticallly than it is horizontally. By resize box, I mean the box that outlines the size you want the bar to be when you click/drag on a hotbar's resize corner.

Thanks Sarphus

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Hot bar ain't a problem, it's when you go into the macroes settings to assign macroes without the hotbar that issues arise... for instance whatever macro you assign overwrites the last hotbar slot and the scroll bars don't work on the macros editor so that once you get to 4 macroes you're stuffes as the new ones disappear off the bottom... not to mention that any macroes you've defined disappear if you switch the client off.

Doing it in the hotbar works fine, but I'm LOOKING for bugs

mmm
Its a big thing on the Beta boards (macros) and they are working on it , alot of folks have reported what you are saying.

Yeah - I reported it once and then saw it was in the "known issues" list - hey ho

Two thumb do you mind if I cross post?

cross post all you like, i know that not all got access to the beta boards sooo since i got it i dont mind sharing whats there and is helpful for people.

*Eyes the fluffyness*