I was about make a post mentioning GCDs, but thought that it’s worth making a short post first about what Global Cooldowns are and how you can work around them (just in case anyone is not 100% familiar with the concept).
GCDs – What Are They?
Simply speaking, Global Cooldowns are the pauses between your special attacks that stop you from emptying your energy bar in less than a second. Without them, WoW would become a game where the winner would be the person who could press their buttons the fastest (think of a Mage machine-gunning Ice Lances at you). However, not all of your abilities trigger this GCD so it’s possible to chain together any of these in one macro. You can also include one attack/ability that does have a GCD in the same macro without any issues.
Abilities that don’t trigger the GCD
Rogue Specific
Cold Blood
Evasion
Preparation
Sprint
Vanish
Racials/Equipment (not a complete list)
Battlemaster Trinkets
Every Man for Himself
Hand Mounted Pyro Rockets
PVP Trinkets
Will of the Forsaken
GCDs in Macros
The least situational example of what you can do involves Preparation. This is an old favorite of many a rogue as it stops you wasting unused cooldowns when you’re forced to use Preparation early.
#showtooltip preparation
/cast [nostealth] evasion
/cast sprint
/cast preparation
Another macro that might be of use is this anti-BladeStorm one;
#showtooltip evasion
/cast evasion
/cast feint
You’re best off experimenting with other combos and finding out what is useful and what isn’t. Your only real limitation is the number of free spaces on your toolbars!
One thing that might be helpful would be to add [nostealth] to the prep macro; wouldn’t want to get unstealthed
Good idea, have edited the macro to stop evasion from breaking stealth
I’ve seen this classic macro previously, but I removed Cold Blood from it. Reason being that when you activate CB, you gain the buff, but the CD doesn’t start as long as you don’t CONSUME the buff with an attack. That means that with that macro you just activate CB, but do not regain the CD through preparation. At least to my experience.
I also have another similar macro without vanish in it for BGs: sometimes I need to prep for regaining Sprint, but I do not want to vanish and drop a carried flag in the process.
Now that BS can be disarmed, do that instead of faint and you won’t waste evasion nor extra energy on faint