This is related to making macros where you don’t want to cast the same spell too quickly in succession. My original application for this was the mage Alter Time spell and the macro has received quite a few likes on this forum.
A few weeks ago, Jedith presented a similar macro for Devourer Demon Hunter for the Blur ability. It’s a damage reduction ability that can have two charges, so the idea was to not allow the second application to go to waste, if the player was panic-spamming the Blur keybind, for example.
The idea is to use a /castsequence where the first spell is the spell you want to guard and then you have a second action or spell that doesn’t go forward. Jedith used the chest slot for that (number 5), so the macro would get stuck there. For the sequence to not get stuck forever, it also needs a reset timer, which will then allow the Blur spell to be cast again.
The way the reset used to work (at least as far as I can tell - can’t check this anymore) is that it would start counting from the first cast in the sequence. The way it seems to work today is that it resets on each activation, so they macro will only reset if you do not try to use it for X number of seconds.
I made an additional hack/tweak to the macro that I felt was kind of clever. Instead of using an ability that can not be cast, so the sequence gets stuck, you can use a spell that doesn’t have a cooldown and is not on the GCD. Effectively each activation will advance the sequence one step and it will eventually reset back to the first one, if you keep hitting the button enough times. This is often good enough to prevent double or triple hits from wasting charges. Here’s that version:
#showtooltip Blur
/castsequence reset=1 Blur, Cyrce's Circlet, Cyrce's Circlet, Cyrce's Circlet
# Remove the purely cosmetic buff right away:
/cancelaura Cyrce's Circlet
I had the reset timer originally at one seconds, but given the change to how the reset works, this actually feels quite long now, so I dropped it down to one second.
I can only speculate on the reason why this might have been changed, but it’s possible that some players were using the sequence reset trick to bind a key that maintains some kind of aura or debuff. The new implementation prevents that kind of use.
I might of course be just imagining this, but someone on Youtube did comment that the “macro no longer works”. It does work, but if the reset time is long and the player keeps hitting the keybind, then it doesn’t work. So, I genuinely think this was changed recently.
Here’s the Alter Time macro I use. It allows double-tapping out of combat to get a quick Blink cooldown reset, but forces a 0.5 second timeout between activations in combat. The “null” in the macro is simply an invalid spell that the sequence will get stuck on.
#showtooltip Alter Time
/cast [nocombat]Alter Time
/castsequence [combat]reset=0.5 Alter Time, null