Riposte/SS macro

Here's a recent post I made on the Blizzard Forums in responce to a poster asking for a Riposte/Sinister Strike macro. Another Poster responded that it is no longer possible.

This is because you can no longer have a macro conditionally decide between two spells based on combat status such as "you just parried".

A castrandom macro could be made to randomly select between Riposte and SS, but even after you do parry an attack, the macro would still have a random chance to select SS instead of Riposte, blowing your opportunity to use Riposte. You could weight Riposte as more likely to be selected (i.e. /castrandom Riposte, Riposte, Riposte, Sinister Strike <-- this gives 75% chance to try Riposte, and 25% chance to try Sinister Strike), but what happens here is that when you haven't parried, 3 out of every 4 keypresses will result in "That ability is not ready" type of messages. If you spam the button fast enough, this could be a workable solution, but it would sure make your trigger finger tired fast ;)

These types of /castrandom macros are better suited to an ability that has a cooldown. For example, on my druid, I use "/castrandom Nature's Grasp, Faerie Fire()(Feral), Mangle(Cat), Mangle(Cat)". When I spam this macro, the cooldowns for Nature's Grasp (60 seconds) and FF (6 seconds) are usually down, making Mangle(Cat) the only workable choice. This type of macro works because if a castrandom macro fails due to the spell being in cooldown, it does NOT trigger the global cooldown, so you can spam this kind of macro as fast as you can. The extra Mangle is in there to change the weighting so that Mangle has a 50% chance of being selected and the other two spells each have 25% chance of being selected. This makes sure I will eventually get them off, but priority is on Mangle.

What makes these work differently than the Riposte/SS random is that neither NG or FF have an opening requirement, so when they do come up, they will work - eventually. Since Riposte has an opening requirement, it might not go off. If I remember correctly, these conditional spells have a "window of opportunity" where they are available for a few seconds when the condition happens. If that's the case, then a castrandom with Riposte would work, but don't be angry if you happen to get a streak of bad luck and your castrandom macro decides to SS every time GCD is up instead of using Riposte.

My recommendation: keep your conditionals on their own buttons, or change your macro so that you Riposte when you press a modifier key like alt, ctrl, or shift. Then, use something that will alert you to the opportunity like Scrolling Combat Text (SCT), and just be on your toes ;)