Shot rotation lunchables

Ah shot rotation, you've heard of it, you know what it is, at least in theory, but unless your 62 or higher you can't really do it, sure you can weave shots in to your auto-shots, but all your specials have a cooldown time, or take time to deal damage so there's no point casting them endlessly (actually serpent sting rank 1 is quite good to spam to gain ranged weapon skill, but normally there's no point reapplying stings every chance you have). You can think of Shot rotation as a sandwich if you like, Auto-shot is the bread, one on each side of whatever your doing. Steady shot is the filling, be it chicken, ham, cucumber, whatever you like really. Your other specials are those little additions, perhaps a slice of tomato or a little bit of jam, they aren't needed, but they make things that much nicer.

Now shot rotation can be done manually, just hit steadyshot as soon as your autoshot fires, make sure you don't hit it before or you will stop your auto shot from firing for 2 seconds (1.5 cast on steady shot, 0.5 cast on autoshot), and repeat, auto-steady-auto-steady is the very basic sandwich shot rotation to start with, its also known as a 1:1 rotation and is commonly used by BM hunters. Perhaps you feel you want something more that just a ham sandwich? maybe you want some slices of tomato? Well that's simple, so long as you have a slow weapon, as soon as steady shot stops you hit tomato shot arcane shot, there you go 2 ingredients between the 2 slices of bread, twice the shots in the same time.

Ah but there is a problem with this, there's a global cooldown after the arcane shot which means you can't cast another spell for 1.5 seconds, which means your next steady shot will be late which means you can't have another tomato in your next sandwich, but there's no cooldown after steady shot so you can on the one after. This rotation is known as the !:1.5 rotation, its commonly used by marksman and survivalist hunters who have slower attacks peed and need to make up for it with extra shots, the disadvantage is mana efficiency, using extra shots uses extra mana and you can soon run out if your not careful! Of course there's one ingredient that you can easily change, using rank 1 cheese multi-shot cost considerably less than a full rank but still does noticeable damage (rank 1 does your normal auto-shot damage to up to 3 targets), So if your concerned about your mana level you can always start using a weaker cheese in your sandwiches!

Now lets move on to macroing a shot rotation, for this you need to use a cast sequence macro, to keep the pointless analogy; you need to use a sandwich maker, which will automatically choose what to put between both slices of bread so long as you keep pressing the button. A cast sequence macro will go through a list of spells until it reaches the end whereupon it will start again from the beginning, you can add a reset clause to it to make it go to the beginning after so many seconds of the button not being pressed. Here's a basic 1:1 rotation in a cast sequence macro:

/cast sequence Steady shot, !Auto shot

The advantage to using this rather than just pressing the button mindlessly is it will never clip, the macro will not let you fire a second steady shot before your autoshot, after all you don't make a sandwich with 2 slices of ham and one slice of bread! This means all you have to do is hammer on this button and your steady shots will fly, and if you have a fast weapon and never need to use any other specials this is fine, however if you want to use some specials you will have to put them in manually, well that's awkward, what if you get the timing wrong? Lets look at an example of a 1:1.5 rotation:

/cast sequence Steady shot, arcane shot, !auto shot, steady shot, !auto shot, steady shot, multi-shot(rank 1), !auto shot, steady shot, !auto shot

This might look a little confusing, how it works is the first steady shot has an arcane shot with it before the auto shot, but because of the global cooldown after that arcane shot there's no time to put a special after the next steady shot so your rotation works like follows: Ham and tomato followed by ham followed by ham and cheese followed by ham and then it restarts so your next would be a ham and tomato. For those who aren't following the sandwiches the rotation would be: steady-arcane then steady, then steady-multi then steady.

The important thing to remember is everyone is different, they require different sandwiches! some people might only need plain ham, some might not like cheese because it can break crowd control so they might replace it with cucumber which helps the tank. (cucumber would be scorpid sting in this case) and anyone below level 62 can't even eat ham (I confess the sandwiches thing isn't working out, I'm just hungry) and it all depends on how fast your sandwich maker(in this case your ranged weapon) can work. Before I finish this is the reset added to the previous macro, so if your idle for 4 or more seconds (eg. using revive pet, or having to avoid a bosses attack) the macro will restart so it starts with ham and tomato Steady-arcane again

/cast sequence reset=4 Steady shot, arcane shot, !auto shot, steady shot, !auto shot, steady shot, multi-shot(rank 1), !auto shot, steady shot, !auto shot

Oh and if your wondering why all the auto shots have exclamation points before them, this is because the spell auto shot (and auto attack for that matter) is a toggle, use it once its on, use it twice its off, without the exclamation points the macro would cause you to switch your auto shot on and off between each shot, giving you a sandwich with only one piece of bread, which is completely useless. The exclamation mark tells the game to cast the spell, but never to turn it off, giving you enough bread to make as many sandwiches as you have bullets loaves!