Extending Vocola (More Commands)

One of the tricks to making the most out of voice dictation (and Vocola in particular, I think) is that you must be willing to continually improve upon the way you do things. The command you wrote three months ago and that has served you well since can likely be improved upon in response to a changing play style. This post explains three techniques I have recently introduced into my gameplay: using dynamically declared variables to heal your off-tank, issuing multiple commands at a time, and dragging and dropping.

Dynamic Variables

I have previously demonstrated how one can pre-define an array of values as an available variable for use in a macro, allowing you to write just one macro to handle all spells of a particular type (targeted, helpful; targeted, harmful; untargeted). This can be expanded further, however, by using the Variable Vocola extension:

This simple extension allows you to remember things between commands during the same session. For example, you could remember the current contents of the clipboard (obtained via Clipboard.Get()) for inserting later via a different command. By session, it is meant that all these variables are forgotten each time you exit Vocola or use the “load extensions” command.
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Raiding with Voice Recognition (Nighthold)

By popular request, I have created and uploaded two YouTube videos from our Normal Nighthold adventures this week: Elisandre and Skorpyron. Because it was important to observe the voice commands I was using, I was unable to exclude our voice chatter. (I believe that to do so, I would have to install a second soundcard, but someone please correct me if I’m wrong.) These are not the only videos that I created, but I have a tendency to die to stupid effects during our Heroic runs, due to the inherent latency of voice recognition. Please comment below with any questions you have.

Thanks for watching!

An Emerald Nightmare

This week marked the official start of our raid group’s ventures into the Emerald Nightmare, an event I’ve been looking forward to with no small amount of trepidation. Would I be competitive with other healers, especially those of my own class? Would I get stuck in a puddle of bad and doom us all? Would I have to use 3 ridiculously overpriced flasks instead of 2?

ursoc

My favorite encounter was Ursoc. He looked amazing, and I found the charge mechanic to be a lot of fun. We did struggle a little bit initially with keeping both tanks up, but then the other Restoration Druid — named Shae(llistrae)! — and I talked and divided them up between us, and things went a lot more smoothly. I also really enjoy the mechanic of 1-required bosses, followed by 4-bosses you can kill in any order, followed by two more bosses that must be killed sequentially, although it did make for a lot of pre-raid research that went unneeded the first night (and that will likely have to be repeated to refresh my memory).

Something I had not anticipated was how difficult the movement would be, particularly on the Dragons of Nightmare encounter. Because I couldn’t risk introducing latency by using voice commands to run/stop — as I generally do when playing in most other areas — I was forced to rely on my foot switches almost exclusively. At least partially due to the fact that my foot switches were positioned too low for my legs to reach them comfortably, by the end of the night, my knees were throbbing. Rather than pushing myself, I gracefully bowed out of our second night of raiding on Monday and am currently investigating other options for controlled movement that do not involve my foot switches.

I did develop a great system for healing using the in-game [raid#] macro parameter that I will explain in greater detail in a future post. I am hopeful that, if I am able to overcome these early issues, I should be fairly mobile while retaining my ability to blanket my friends in Rejuvenation at will.


And, in case you missed it, here are some other posts about first forays into Emerald Nightmare from blogs that I love:

Please feel free to respond in the comments with your own experiences in the Emerald Nightmare so far!