Macro to cast your Best Available Skill

[illusionistpm]

Running out of buttons for all your skills? Tired of wiping a raid because you tried to cast a heal on cooldown? I've built an AutoHotkey macro to control an entire hotbar with a single button!

For example, I might set up one bar with all of my single-target heals, starting with Heal and working down to Cure Moderate. When I trigger the macro, it will cast Heal if it's off cooldown; if not, it works its way down the bar, checking Cure Critical, then Cure Serious, and so on. This lets me get an emergency heal off as quickly as possible.

I've also found it to be helpful for RSI-type symptoms since you aren't awkwardly spamming your hand all over the keyboard... as much.

When you press the hot key, the script is smart enough to scan through each skill on a particular hot bar and hit the first one that is ready for use. This lets you easily prioritize skills, while giving much more consistent results than simpler macros that simply spam all the hotkeys for a bar. This consistency comes at the cost of a bit more setup time, but anyone can do it with a few minutes in an image editor and text editor.

You can read the full setup instructions and download the script at https://github.com/illusionistpm/ddo-autohotkey. Hope you find it as useful as I do!

 

[Synalon]

This sounds helpful! I probably do lower dps than I could due to spamming spells in a suboptimal order. The only question is how to fit an extra hotbar, as I have most of mine used. I presume it's useful for dps spell rotation?

A related question...is the best dps just to cycle through the highest damaging spells as soon as they come off cooldown, or is it more complicated than that?

 

[illusionistpm]

Yes, it's good for any sort of skill rotation: I initially designed it for an Alchemist life where I had a fairly large selection of AOE DPS spells and wanted to use the SLAs when they were available but still wanted to cast something if I hit the button and they weren't available.

For highest DPS - in the simplest case, yes, casting your highest damage spells as much as possible is the way to go, but it can be more complicated. For example, you might have debuffs to interweave or need to refresh CC to keep the Helpless damage boost.