This mod creates macros for your character's CC abilities that you might want to "chain-cast" in order to keep a particular target CCed.
CCFocus README
The Short Version:
CCFocus creates macros for your character's CC abilities that you might want to "chain-cast" in order to keep a particular target CCed.
The macros it creates will:
On an unmodified click: If you don't already have a focus, or your focus is dead, it sets your focus to your current target. It then casts a CC on your focus.
On a control-click: It will unset your focus.
On an alt-click: It will set your focus to your current target, whether you have a focus or not. If you're in combat, it will then cast the CC. If you're out of combat, it won't.
If you don't like those keys, you can use either "/ccf options" (to change them through a dialog) or "/ccf set" and "/ccf clear" followed by a keyname (alt, ctrl, or shift) to change them directly.
The CC abilities it creates macros for, by class, are:
Druid: Hibernate Mage: Polymorph, Polymorph: Pig, Polymorph: Turtle Priest: Shackle Undead Rogue: Blind Warlock: Fear, Banish, Seduce/Spell Lock (pet-dependent macro)
These macros are placed in the character-specific macros. They can be accessed by using /macro to bring up the macro interface, selecting the tab for character-specific macros, and dragging them from there to an action bar.
Other Addons to use with CCFocus:
CCBreakWarner will watch a CCed focus and alert you with a nicely visible message and a sound when/if the CC breaks. Great for when your CC breaks early! It supports all the CC types that CCFocus does, plus some more.
FocusFrame will give you a unit frame for your focus, so you can see its status visually. If you want to re-CC things before CC breaks, it's great to have, since you can see the timer on the CC ticking away on it. It's also good if you're putting DoTs on your CCed target, so you can see how far down its health has gone.
Both can be found in the usual places (Curse, WoWUI, etc.)
The Long Version:
CCFocus is designed to automatically create "focus macros" for a number of crowd control (CC) abilities. So what's a focus macro?
Well, often one wants to keep a particular enemy CCed while dealing with other enemies. This is done by "chaining" CCs -- casting one, then immediately re-casting each time the previous one breaks (or before it breaks, if you're really on the ball).
If you want to do something else while that enemy is CCed, however, you have to stop targeting it -- and that means that when you need to re-CC it, you have to re-target it (losing your current target), do the CC, then re-target your other target. This can be a problem, especially with CC abilities such as Polymorph or Fear that make the CCed target move around.
The WoW game has something to help with this -- a "focus" target. You can set your target as your "focus" with the command "/focus", and the game will then remember that target. Then, you can cast spells on your focus with "/cast [target=focus] Spell". Now, this isn't too fast to type out, but you can make macros to do it, put them on keys, and have it at your fingertips. It's nice to have one key do it all, so a typical starting macro for this sort of thing might look like:
/focus [target=focus,noexists] /cast [target=focus] Polymorph
The first line sets your focus to your current target if you don't already have a focus. (If you do have a focus already, it does nothing.) The second line casts Polymorph on your focus. So, the first time you hit it, it would make your current target be your focus and sheep that target. You could then change targets, and when you hit it again, it would re-sheep your original sheep target, without losing your current target. Pretty nice, huh?
Once you start using a macro like that, you start thinking of other things you'd like it to do, though. For example, it's nice to be able to set your focus easily without casting the spell yet, so that when you're setting up to deal with a group, you can set your focus, set your target, cast your CC, then immediately hit an attack spell on the target without having to try to change targets. It's also nice to have a way to unset your focus. With all that added, you get a nice, complicated macro like:
1. showtooltip
/focus [modifier:alt] /clearfocus [modifier:ctrl]; [target=focus,dead] /stopmacro [modifier:ctrl]; [nocombat,modifier:alt] /focus [target=focus,noexists] /cast [target=focus] Polymorph
This is, in fact, just the kind of macro that CCFocus uses, so here's a breakdown of what it does:
Just pressing the macro without holding ctrl or alt will:
- Set your focus to your current target, *if* your current focus is dead or doesn't exist.
- Cast Polymorph on your focus.
If you hold down alt, it will:
- Set your focus to your current target without casting, if you're not in combat, whether you have a focus already or not.
- Set your focus to your current target and cast, if you're in combat, whether you have a focus or not.
If you hold down control, it will:
- Clear your current focus.
It also shows the tooltip for Polymorph if you hover over it.
That's a lot for one button to do, and can be quite nice -- the problem that comes in is that, since a WoW macro can't decide what spell to cast based on your class, if you like to play multiple classes with CC abilities, you have to write the same macro several times over... once for each CC ability you want to use it with. Also, if you want to share those macros between characters, then they take up valuable space in your global macro list -- there's only 18 slots there, and to do one for each of the CC types that CCFocus supports would take up half of those!
So that's what CCFocus takes care of -- if writes the macros for you, so you don't have to do all that typing, and does it for each character, in their individual macro space, so you can use the global space for your own macros.
Version History:
0.1 - First test version
0.2 - Added slash commands, wrote Readme
0.3 - Added saving of settings
0.4 - Added options dialog box and associated slash command
0.5 - Got options dialog box to actually work (grumble, grumble)
0.51 - Updated Readme to be in DOS/Windows text format - Removed Mac-autogenerated files from zip - Corrected reference to "CCBreakWatch" to "CCBreakWarner"
Credits:
CCFocus was thought up and written by Travis S. Casey (efindel@gmail.com)
