From experience, you will lose lots of DPS by macroing your explosive shots… I made the “switch” to manually triggering things, and I’m just fine.

First, let’s talk shot rotations. Gone are the days of the 1:1 and 3:2 macros, gone are the button mashing glory of our past. With survival, it’s less about rotation and more about priority.

What do i mean by that?

Under the OLD way of thinking, you’d have a rotation that you blindly adhered to, and sometimes macro’d together. The cooldowns on the required shots matched up so that they fit perfectly, and as a cookie cutter BM spec, your steady shots were under the GCD. Perfect, yes?

Now, you have multishot, explosive shot, lock and load procs, stings to refresh, a nerfed steady shot, and the cooldowns don’t line up, especially now that haste cap is hard to get. So now we have a priority. Basically, your macro, once a large behemoth, is very small…

/cast Kill Shot
/cast Steady Shot

You can put in there the uierrors lines to avoid error spam if you’d like. Now what does this macro do? It basically casts Kill Shot if it’s up, Steady shot if not.

“But Fitz! How do I put my other shots in there!!!!!!” Fear not, my friends.

You have a shot priority that can be represented by a series of mental questions….

1) Is Explosive shot available? If yes, fire it. If not, continue. This always comes first, as it is a staple of our DPS
2) Is serpent sting up on the target (yours, not your friends…) If it isn’t, sting the bastard! If it’s up, continue.
3) Is multishot available? If yes, fire it. If not, continue.
4) Mash steady shot macro until one of the above needs to happen again.

When you receive a lock and load proc, your priority turns into a semi-rotation again.

Explosive shot ——> multi if available, steady if not ——> expl. shot—–> steady—–> expl. shot

or…

Explosive Shot ——> wait for the GCD + 0.5 seconds ——> Expl. shot ——> Wait GCD + 0.5 secs ——> Expl. shot

Then return to your above priority… Why do we put multishot and steady in between explosive shots? To ensure that the DoT component of explosive shot properly ticks it’s full duration. Otherwise, we “overwrite it” with new DoTs and lose DPS. There is much evidence that simply allowing autoshot to roll while you wait for the explosive shot DoT to end is better DPS, and this is what I do.

So, you can macro explosive shot in with steady if you want, which i do, but it won’t ALWAYS fire the explosive shot right when it’s available, which is a DPS loss… What I do is macro it, but TRY to manually fire it. This way, in the heat of a fight if i forget to manually trigger it, it will go off on it’s own, but a little slower. That macro looks something like this…

/cast Kill Shot
/castrandom Explosive Shot, Steady Shot

When explosiveshot is on cooldown, any mention of explosive shot in that line is ignored. When lock and load procs, I manually click the shots, as I’ve found there are better uses for the keybindings. It’s CRUCIAL to remember here that, in a perfect world, you want to MANUALLY trigger your explosive shots. The ONLY reason i use the above macro is for when I’ve got a bunch going on, have to tranq. shot an ad, Misdirect to the Offtank, then go back to DPSing and i just forget to fire off the explosive shot. This macro helps ensure that when I’m frazzled and distracted I’ll still have a few explosive shots in there. It’s MUCH BETTER if you can remember to fire it off every time it’s up.

So, as you can see… It’s no longer a shot rotation, but a shot priority… it’s a fluid, non-rhythmic thing, nothing at all like the BM spam macro of TBC. Hope this helps

Fitz