I heard SK's have a spam bar, what is loaded on this bar; I heard 4 life taps and 1 combo defensive disc, I also heard 3 life taps, shield flash, diplomatic papers, and mantle.
When I'm just jamming and not feeling much pressure, this is my basic multibind spam bar: Spear of Bloodwretch Dire Censure Touch of Txiki Touch of Drendar Repudiate Grisly Blade Bite of Chaos (yes, you can use this more "strategically." I can't be bothered) Pet Attack (because otherwise I forget the stupid skelly is there and he watches me, creepily) Darkened Blood Ember Bracer If I'm feeling squishy, I move Spear so it's not first in the lineup. If I'm feeling like tanking everything, I put Insidious Renunciation at the top. Definitely a level 120 with max AA lineup. Need maxed out Hastened Lifetaps to have 0 downtime with just 3 taps.
I have two spam buttons, one for agro and one for taps/everything else. Tap spam button hits dire and then the two most recent touch taps, as well as repudiate, grisly and vboc, and pet attack. Might be missing one thing...the short reuse abilities tied to this are also on their own button Incase I don't also want to tap, it's a ghetto social macro but I hardly ever hit it. Agro hits two terrors and then power. I should prob put spear on there but it conflicts with other small things in my setup so I don't. I can hit spear and power manually easy too. Putting flash or mitigation discs on your spam is pretty silly. Use them when you need them.
I have a similar macro button, and similarly rarely use it. But, it's there for those times where I don't want to/can't use my multibind for whatever reason.
Mine is pretty short, I don’t even load Terrors anymore, i do use parlay sometimes but manually click if it’s loaded. Spear Insid Ecliptic Grisly Repudiate Bite of chaos Pet attack just because I forget.
My hotkey is almost the same, except I use Namdrows instead of Drendar and I don't have any clickies in it because my SK is babby. I will sometimes put a terror in there if I'm having trouble with aggro
Namdrows doesn't heal you fyi. It is just a trashy nuke that procs a good buff on you. Once you have the buff, time to retire the spell for 15m or so
Tiny heal. Heals up its buff amount, 7k or whatever. Cruor's Bite. good spell. way out of flavor for SK, of course. but really good.
I always use Curor's Bite on the group game to give mana if the groupmates... casting it every time that's up means you are giving the more mana that what clarity buff do. Same as bite of Chaos AA, should be multibinded for constant mana to group. I also added Breastplate of wailing hatred on my multibind so my group is constantly atk buffed with theft of agony. I usually don't run with bst buffs which iirc that's what it doesn't stack with.
I keep Cruor's loaded and typically cast it on cooldown, it's just not part of my spam rotation (it casts slower than the other taps, which annoys me ) It's definitely worth casting though, if not for yourself then for your party.
I pull with hates attraction, while the mob is in the air i cast parlay. Now my Necro gf can get silly. She's setting up the Slow. So i want that first parlay to land. thats my pull. First click is a macro,.. Send pet, cast meloncholy, and bond of bynn. Second macro cast, 3 dots. depending on what she's casting due to overiding each others spells.After those clicks i cast both touches, then dire and then fang. But , and this is crucial to our duo strat. When she lands that slow i know the mob is ready for my parlay so im mashing it when i see the slow land, icon on mob will change from parlay to Helix of the undying and it overrides her slow, our SK helix of undying effect is slightly better than Necro slow. ( parlay can get resist checked before helix procs so getting that parley to land first makes me feel better. But i go 2h when mob is slowed ( i am raid geared, but you can def disc while 2h if not , i used to that, just chain tap). TLDR just mash everything that pops, ABB... ALWAYS BE BURNING. (I usually chain tap and hit terror and parley everytime they pop, they can proc small defensives in your song buff window, and gifts of mana procs for the grp. Cruor everytime it pops. I just do it out of habit now when grinding for named mobs. I can use blights horror instead of the mana proc if do this to keep mana up.) Last night doing hunter in deepshade.. pulled mushroom named.. got an add. Sword and board, chain tapping... my health was super spikey mid fight but i was so focused on keeping the add on me and named while my necro gf is going straight burn. It was our last fight before camping. Gate out to pok after and realize our mercs are dead lol. No wonder my HP was spiking lol. But i didnt know, i just assumed he was hitting hard and i had ig skin running LMFAO. pulled a miracle on that one, lol i did actually leech touch.. the ohhh button. I probally missed the add killing the mercs, but chain tapping is how to survive that. What i did for my mash bar was make it bigger, centered it out below target , and put nice icons on them. right side 4 are defensive, everything to left of that is offensive. you dont want to have the move the cursor to much to click. I should set up macros for /disc but im too situational to commit to that. gotta have "ohh " buttons ready to go like, leechtouch and sheild flash. Doing Gumdrop missions made me rethink stuff in that regard to hate and aggro. So.. a second mash bar was created for target hate and AE hate for the adds and split. I had some before this but i made a dedicated hot bar just for hate. and so i dont forget to cast Voice of thule every ten minutes between pulls. Really gotta stretch our your definsive discs to pull this off flawlessy. So you'll be chain tapping. Took a few runs to get it on farm, if you wipe on gumdrop because your the only tank in grp, it will happen on the splits, you gotta AE aggro, have your slower or dps call the adds out so you can time your AE and defensives. so you can be ready to AE or singler target hate to secure aggro and get your /disc ruinning. TLDR.. mash bars are nice for all the AA and /disc, but make one just for hate and aggro. Thats our main role... keep aggro and survive the piles.. your hotbars should reflect that doctrine.
Does anyone know how the focus aa, luminous ice aug, enhanced ruin or slayer bonus all factor into hate for spells? For example if Blood of Tearc does 30,000 a tic without worn focus does that mean its doing 30,000 hate per tic? Or does it only do the base spell description of 10,000 as hate? What about Spear? Again does this do base 25,000 hate per cast or do all the focus aa, etc make it instead do 62,000 hate per cast?
I don't use any spam buttons, I hit every single spell, aa and disc individually, I also don't box so if I did I'm sure that'd be different but I'm max aa's, the best gear without raiding, including augs and I can still take down NoS nameds with just a dps merc, I tried using a spam key before but found it to just be boring so I guess it's how you like to play to determine how you use your arsenal
Similarly, I have an agro-key and a tap+others-key. Agro-key has Hate's Attraction, Terror, and Protest (taunt too-some people debate this). Tap-key has Dire, current Touch, Spear, Ecliptic, Insidious, Bite [order on spell bar], Blade, AA Bite, Thwart, Bracer click. I used to have 2 touches on there, but have gained dps by removing it. The current one has a 3 second recast anyway.
Awesome post overall, but I wanted to comment on this part. Read ~7 months ago that VoT was unneeded on the SK, because it's superceded by something else (can't remember right now what that was), so it's mainly for the SK to cast on someone else who's main tanking. I stopped using it at that time, and never went back to using it again, because my agro numbers seemed just as good without it. Food for thought. Edit: I think it's the worn aggro multiplier on the face item you're wearing. And, LOL, looking at it for my case, it's actually still better (25% vs. 22%) but by a pretty small amount, which is why I didn't notice a difference when I stopped using it I assume the person who posted this several months ago has a raid face item, which is likely better than VoT.
