Icy Veins Mage Macro - World of Warcraft

With the arrival of patch 2.3.2, mages now have access to a new talent skill called Icy Veins (IV).

It's in the 11-point position in the Frost Tree. Many raiding mages are respeccing from the 'standard' 10/47/3 (+1) to 2/46/11 (+2) specs to gain this new ability.

The ability decreases casting time of all spells by 20% and increases the chance your chilling effects will freeze the target by 10%. It lasts 20 seconds and has a 3 minute cooldown.

Fire mages are interested not because of the freezing effect, obviously, but because of the spell haste, which is regarded as one of the most powerful dps-increasing stats.

Significantly, this spell does NOT trigger the global cooldown (GCD). Neither does Combustion. So, a macro like...

# showtooltip Fireball
/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/use 14
/use 15
/cast Combustion
/cast Icy Veins
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear(); UIErrorsFrame:Show()
/cast Fireball

...will work when you spam it. (One way to do this really well is to bind this macro to your mouse scroll-wheel..when you roll the wheel it's like clicking really really fast). The above macro also triggers any on-use trinkets.

So basically you can activate your trinket, Combustion, and Icy Veins all at the same time, and if you're spamming this macro, whenever the cooldowns are up, you'll automatically pop them again.

A few things to keep in mind:

1. Combustion's cooldown doesn't start until after you use up the crit buff, not when you pop it. So even though both IV and Comb have a 3 min cooldown, they get out of sync right away.

2. The benefit of popping IV with Combustion is limited. Basically you'll just chew through your Combustion a bit faster, thereby triggering the cooldown to start a bit earlier...but not by enough to make it significant.

3. By being 'lazy' and using this macro you run the risk of doing too much damage early on in a fight. If you're raiding, chances are that if you're setting up for a pull you might have all your cooldowns available. If you pop them all together right away, you might push your threat too high. (They buffed mages in 2.3.2, not the tanks' ability to hold aggro.)

4. By being 'lazy' and using this macro you run the risk of popping the trinkets/IV/Comb at a time where you won't fully use them. For example, during fights where you need to stop casting to move (Lurker), or stop casting for aggro reasons (Leo), you don't want to pop them right before you have to stop...otherwise the goodness that is IV will be wasted because you won't be casting.


The solution is to create two different fireball macros. One 'lazy' one above, and another that doesn't pop the IV or Comb (or even trinkets). Just a straight-up Fireball (FB) spam. Use the plain FB spell at the beginning of fights, right before times in the fight when you have to stop, or if you are trying to sync up your cooldowns for a sudden burst of dmg.

Hopefully this combination of an Icy Veins macro and normal spells will help you increase your Mage damage!