Casting a spell auto selects a target - How to prevent that?

[Lima-aggra-português]

The problem - casting a spell auto selects targets

When I have no target and press a spell the game automatically targets the nearest enemy and casts the spell at it, in in range.

Why is this problematic? Imagine the following scenario:

Hunter attacks me with some attack and his pet starts hitting me too. I chase down the hunter and press Mutilate, and again Mutilate. My combo points are full, I want to stun him.

At this very moment, the Hunter decides to Feign Death. I press Kidney Shot right after that and my Kidney Shot hits the pet instead. Oh no!

You blind the Hunter healer, a Priest, and you try to Mutilate the Hunter. Hunter uses Feign Death. Priest is the closest enemy and you Mutilate him breaking the Blind. What a sad day!

So how does one prevent that from happening? A target macro can help:

#showtooltip Kidney Shot
/cast [@target] Kidney Shot

If I press this macro, it won’t automatically select a target for me if I don’t have one. It will only cast it if I have a target. Great!

Problem fixed right? Wrong.

If you only use target macros you will find yourself hitting the Hunter with all of your spells correctly but you won’t do any autoattacks! At least one non-macroed spell needs to be cast.

What I tried so far and didn’t work

1. Tried having all of my rotation on target macros. It won’t autoattack unless I right click the target or press a regular spell button. Also tried adding /startattack to the bottom of target macros. It would simply do the default behavior which is to auto select a target and start autoattacking, it would only cast the spell if you press it again.

2. No luck tweaking the values of some CVars such:

• TargetAutoEnemy (default 1) - Auto-Target from your single target helpful spells
• TargetAutoFriend (default 1) - Auto-Target from your single target helpful spells
• SpellTargeting (default 0) - No description [No permission to change this CVar]
• SoftTargetInteract (default 1) - No description
• SoftTargetEnemy (default 1) - Sets when enemy soft targeting should be enabled

3. Research. Found this reddit post “Auto target closest enemy when using spell/ranged attacks” from 5 years ago that hints at the fact that the current behavior wasn’t a thing in the past. If this was implemented say 5 years ago surely there’s a CVar for it? Or unfortunately it’s the new standard and there’s no variable that controls it at all?

TLDR

How do I make spells not target enemies automatically - while still starting autoattack if I do have a target and press an attack spell.

Took 3 screenshots [imgur/a/bdVNVP7] that demonstrate the issue:

• First screenshot is me facing an enemy without target.
• Second screenshot is me pressing Mutilate (F1) without target - regular spell/no macro. It targets it and attacks it with the spell.
• Third screenshot is me pressing Envenom (F3) without target - with target macro. It won’t target the enemy and won’t do anything. If I had combo points it would say ‘You have no target’.