In arenas, playing with macros may significantly improve your experience at a high rating because they can provide additional opportunities for your team. Performing an action faster than usual is basically the purpose of these and we thought that offering a TBC rogue macros listing wouldn’t be enough.
In this piece, we’ll focus on the macros that can assist a rogue from the perspective of its partner. So if you are playing Discipline Priest, Frost Mage, or Resto Druid, chances are you will find this guide useful as all information found here is applicable beyond rogue combinations.

Party Macros

Party macros are essential for not only support classes such as healers but also for every class that can cast an ability on their allies. 

The syntax of such a macro is the same as the focus macro.

/cast [target=party1] Dispel

For a priest, regardless of spec, there are two spells to use with this macro:

– Power Word: Shield
– Dispel

Those two abilities are likely the most important ones (especially Dispel) when playing with a rogue and priests will use them extremely often. This is the reason why we recommend PvP priests to have them in macros with party1, and even party2.

– For a Druid, Abolish Poison is mandatory but we could also mention Lifebloom.

– For a Mage, Remove Curse could be used as a party1 macro, but not so mandatory on TBC Rogue Mage combination.

– For a Warlock, its pet’s Devour Magic is a mandatory ability to have bound for fast dispels on the rogue in case of controls (eg. Fear, Poly, Nova, and so on)

Arena123 Macros on TBC ?

On The Burning Crusade, the arena123 feature (@arena1 or [target=arena1]) wasn’t originally implemented in the game. The only way to get it would be to use the arena frame addon named Gladdy (private server addon).
For the moment no one can tell if Blizzard will give us arena123 macros nor whether Gladdy will work correctly on Classic TBC. This is why we highly recommend using the Focus macros. Basically, we would recommend having all focus macros converted into arena123 macros as they provide the best reactiveness, especially in the 3v3 bracket.

Focus Macros

Rogue is a class that relies a lot on synergizing its controls with the ones of his partners’. This is one of the reasons why everyone should use /focus macros, at least to keep an eye on enemies’ CC chains (of course you can also do that with a perfectly working version of Gladdy).
Good practice would be to play with each control and interrupt abilities (whatever the class played) bound for target and focus (or for arena123) so there’s no time wasted due to swapping or searching a target.

/cast [target=focus] Shadow word: Death

Here’s a non-exhaustive listing of abilities to get bound as /focus:

– Warlock: Fear, Spell Lock (pet), Death Coil,
– Mage: Polymorph, Counterspell, Frostbolt (rank1),
– Rogue: Blind, Kick, Sap (+shadowstep versions),
– Warrior: Intercept, Pummel,
– Priest: Dispel, Chastise, Shadow word: Death, Mana Burn, Mind Control, Silence
– Druid: Cyclone, Entangling Roots, Faerie Fire, Bash, Feral Charge
– Shaman: Purge, Earth Shock
– Hunter: Scatter Shot, Silencing Shot, Wyvern Sting, Viper Sting
– Paladin: Hammer of Justice, Repentance, Seal of Blood (BE)

Pet Management Macros

This should be of particular interest to not only Warlocks and Mages which both make excellent Rogue partners, but also Hunters and Priests.
A rogue has multiple controls that break on damage: Sap, Blind and Gouge. This means that playing double DPS requires to be rigorous with the CC chains as breaking it accidentally might cost the game.
For this reason, pets (Water Elemental, Demons, Hunters’ pets and Shadowfiend) have to be managed by their owners in order to avoid all these situations that you absolutely don’t need in arenas.

– As a mage

We’d recommend using three macros (alongside all other ones needed by the mage):
One for sheep and sheep focus (that will also help the mage not to break his own CC with his pet)

/petpassive
/cast Polymorph
/petpassive
/cast [target=focus] Polymorph

One for Frostbolt (pet start casting his bolt)

/petattack
/cast Frosbolt (rank 14)

One for Elemental to stop attack / follow. This is useful not only because your partner might decide to Blind after a Kidney Shot trinket and you need to stop your pet auto-attacking, but also because often your water elemental may get kited to China and be out of range for a nova in Africa.

/petfollow

– As a Warlock

The Devour Magic party1 macro is mandatory along with all the pet management ones that make a demon attack, stop moving, or come back to the Warlock.

When playing without voice coms

There are still a lot of players that are playing without voice communication. So the best way to be prepared for such situations would be to insert a few infos written in /p when doing specific things such as controls.
For example:

/cast [target=focus] Blind
/p Blind on %f (focus)

This writes in the chat: “Blind on focus player’s name” (%f is used for focus and %t for target). You could also use simple words like BLINDING.
Then spamming the key would make the text appear 10 times if you press your bind 10 times as well. If you want to disable the spam you must write this script in your macro, instead:

/run if GetTime()>(cd1 or 0)then cd1=GetTime()+5 SendChatMessage(“> “..GetSpellLink(30621)..” Focus (%f) !”,”PARTY”)end

This writes in the chat: “Kidney shot Focus (focus player’s name)”
The number 30621 refers to the spell ID of Kidney Shot. Just change the ID for the one from your spell, and then, the name of the spell will be displayed, and the message won’t be spammed for 5second.
NB: you can find the spell ID on databases such as TBC-Wowhead.