Macro-first WoW

Coding for fun / as part of a game, is a great way of learning (aspects of) programming.

I've been playing World of Warcraft off and on now for ... 12 years.


Recently, I've dug deeper into the macro system and the underlying scripting support, using the LUA programming language.

The best game, is the game you don't have to play ;) 

Playing with Macros

In World of Warcraft, you receive Quests from NPCs. These can be anything from "pick me up that apple over there, just out of my reach" to "kill 10 smelly goblins!". For the latter type of quests, targeting the right kind of monster can take more than 1 second (I was going to write 'tricky', but that's not quite it ... 😉), which may be annoying, if you're just playing on the side, while writing a blog post 😇, reading an article or kind-of talking to your significant other.

To make this easier, I created a macro this morning to target the type of monster indicated by my quest and mark that monster with an icon, so that I could easily pick it out amongst the rest of the wildlife.


Once a monster has been successfully found and marked up, I just hack and slash or sling fireballs at it, depending on my class.

The macro? It looks like this:

/target kobold laborer
/script SetRaidTarget("target", 8)



Two simple statements - one to target the thing you're looking for and one to set an icon. This macro is dragged into my action bar, next to my spells 'n stuff, for quick access (and then edited by hand for each quest that I pick up:


Speaking of macros, I also have a macro to open the macro editor (a little meta, I know), 'cause I'm lazy:




By the way, coding for fun / as part of a game, is a great way of learning (aspects of) programming. For example, I happen to be quite adept in regular expressions, simply because I've also played text based adventure games for ... longer than 12 years and regex really helps me automate things there (e.g. via the Mudlet client).

In the background ...

While playing WoW - particularly in the early mornings (my cat wakes me up early ...) - I tend to listen to an Audio Book - most recently Jordan Peterson's amazing 12 Rules for Life or stuff on YouTube premium.

Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life


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