Blizzard's 5.2 release made World of WarCraft pretty fun and I found that kitties are grrreat!

A good kitty may say his prayers each evening, and still wake up as a bear late at night

In WoW 5.x, at first, I bounced around from class to class, getting a feel for everything and not having an outsized love for anything.

Until I leveled a feral druid. It was okay, as any other class is these days, from level 1 to 30 or so.  But then, I got the ability to pick a second class.  Since Guardian (bear) uses roughly the same gear — identically, in my case, I adopted that as my 2nd specification.

Man, suddenly I was having some real fun!

Tank quits because he gets a drop or his mom calls him to lunch or bring in groceries?

No problem, I've got it, guys.  I switch from kitty to bear and we are good to go less than a minute after giving up on the tank.

Pretty soon, I am queuing as a bear tank instead of kitty DPS guy when I queue for a dungeon I know.

When I reached BC I started queuing as a bear tank pretty often.  WoLK; I leveled through it by bear tanking dungeons, pretty much.  Along the way of doing that, I really got to like the bear tank thing a lot.  I started loving it.

I PvP as what I feel like

My survivability in BGs seems slightly better as a bear than a kitty because either other teams zerg a lot or they just love to come over at pet furry things as a group.

When I battleground (BG) in Feral spec, I mostly tend to stay in kitty form; not religiously, though.  If someone on my team looks like they are close to death and I am in spell range but they will be dead before I can get over there, even in one of my animal forms, I will generally try to heal him with a HoT and perhaps a direct heal casting time spell before I shirt forms and 4-foot it over to the melee.

And if a bunch of guys gang up on me in kitty form, I will generally go bear form no matter what spec I am in because I do not like blood in my fur if it is my blood.

But in my Guardian specification, I am a liberated creature.  I have no bias toward any particular form.    I generally will unhesitatingly switch forms based on what I need to do, and what the other team is doing to me.

I do pay slight attention to what that will do to my current combo points, energy, and rage since I might see fit to use the momentum I have in those departments by lingering a couple seconds more.

Playing the animal crackers macro go-go

Most players in WoW seem to know nothing about WoW macros.  For most of the years I played WoW, that included me too.

However, this definitely changed for me a year or two ago when I finally "got" WoW macros learned.

The two main biases against macros seem to be: (a) no need for them if you "know your class" and, (b) they are "cheating".

On the second point, NO they are definitely NOT cheating.  WoW put Macros in the game for a reason. Macros let you make better use of your "limited" number of keys (well over 100) on your keyboard and action bar button slots [4 dozen built in and if you get ButtonForge or Bartender almost no limits] as well as your finite number of fingers (10, gotcha — check and mate).

What most players call "rotations" because they are cyclical attack strikes or healing/damage spell casts,  macro authors will probably just call sequences, particularly if they are computer programmers and already familiar with this term.

Macros in WoW typically start off with ah line like this:  #showtooltip
The second line will generally look something like this:

/castsequence reset=/combat/target25 Thrash,Swipe,Swipe,Swipe,Rake,Swipe,Rip

And that, just those two lines, would be a complete macro.

Line one is simple.  It is a directive that tells WoW that you have not picked an icon for this macro and so you want the game to display the icon for whatever command will execute the next time the button is pressed.  That is important when you use "/castsequence" because it ends with a list of abilities to use that are separated by commas.

The macro always starts with the first ability, and typically goes to the next one and the next one until it gets to the end of the list.  Then, it does the reasonable thing and "wraps around" to start at the beginning again.  Yes, the list is basically a cycle; goes around in a big circle.

Problem is, a lot of abilities work best shortly after another ability has been used, or actually even require another ability to be used shortly before them. This is particularly true with rogues and us feral kitties; combo points, remember?

Now, I just want to totally demystify that second line.

The "magic word," that is the command in the line is "/castsequence".

The "reset=" chunk there looks intimidating if not downright ugly until it is clearly explained.

The "/combat" part means, "Oh, yeah.  Reset to the start of the list of abilities if I drop out of combat."   This is important because when you get into combat anew you really want or sometimes even need the first ability listed to go first, or at least have some abilities in the list that need some other ability you put in ahead of it to actually happen … ahead of it.

The "/target" part means, "Oh, yeah.  Reset to the start of the list of abilities if I change my Target."  This is handy for most classes and vital for kitties and rogues.  We have a handful of spells that generate "combo points" and a handful of abilities that require one or more "combo points" be on our current target for them to work; "finishing moves" these latter things are called.

Including "/target" makes our macros work really well.  They are smart in just the right way for how our abilities are tricky to 'just work'.  Without this, you would have to tap a different key or click a different button each time you switched targets.

Hey, if I switch targets, I already did some extra work to do that.  I do not want to do extra extra work to make sure something happens, capiche?  WoW's macro designer understands, and that is why he included "/target" in the macro language.  The reasoning and effect are very similar to "/combat".  They are still two different conditions, though.  So be glade he/she did not try to combine them.

The number just rammed on the end of whatever black space trickles out after "reset="seems to me like it should have a delimiter, that is a punctuation mark before it.  However, the macro language designer/architect deemed that was not necessary.  The good thing about this decision is that it saves us an extra character in our macro.

Macros can only be 255 characters long (2^8, minus 1). Saving a character here and there is good.  When I was starting out, I used to put spaces after my commas in /castsequence but I know longer do that. I got tired of going back later and deleting them when I added more and more abilities into my list.

Macros work very well with Ferals and Guardians, as they do with most classes except perhaps Death Knights.  If you play a druid, a rogue, or any cloth-wearing caster character, I think you will find it super rewarding to learn as much about macros as I have taught you above.

By the way, the /castsequence above is not what I normally use.  I have my Thrash, Swipe, Swipe, Swipe thing in one macro and my other attacks in a different macro.

That way, I do not have the former depleting the combo points my latter need at certain points.  You have to be careful about that or you will find that suddenly one of your favorite buttons is not doing anything anymore and you have to hit another one to "re-prime it" so to speak.

Part of the reason I feel extremely confident when I go tanking a dungeon or hopping into a battleground, even on a character not to mention class I have not played in a long time, is that I have these macros set up for my standard attacks.

I read that I may learn what others know

There are some great blog posts — nay,  entire blogs — out there with a wealth of information about this class or spec and that.

One I recently stumbled over is this MOP guide for Feral Druids by The Fluid Druid.  If you play one then you should check it out.

If you have a druid and read this post, I hope it has helped you!