Pet macros & commands: Annoying everyone around you with emotes all the time

[TheSpiritFox]

Alright I saw another thread about this and while there are lots of bind places you can look we don't have a thread for it, so I'll start one cause I've been fucking around with this the last week a bunch and I'm going to do the best I can to go over commands and how to use them. 

 

I am not an expert. I played MM a ton on live just as IOs were coming out and haven't played in a decade so I've been refreshing myself and googling to remember how it all works. 

 

GOLDEN RULE! Macros have to be typed into the chat bar, trying to edit a macro after it is created fucks up, the game for whatever reason does not read them right and they often do not work. If you fuck a macro up, start over and retype it in chat. 

Information pulled from...lets see. 
https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Pet_Commands

https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/The_Incomplete_and_Unofficial_Guide_to_/bind

http://guidescroll.com/2011/07/city-of-heroes-mastermind-numeric-keypad-pet-controls/ 

https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/The_Players'_Guide_to_the_Cities/Slash_Commands,_Macros,_Keybindings,_and_Emotes

 

I'm going to assume you know how to make macros so I'm going to give some of the ones I use and the twists to the system I've run into. 

Stances and Orders

 

First the basic functional section for those who need it. We know the stances, aggressive, defensive, passive. The orders are attack, follow, stay, and goto.  

 

Creating a macro to give orders requires that the action happen after the stance. 

 

/macro ATK "petcom_all defensive$$petcom_all goto"

That is my most used macro. So long as you're in supremacy range you can run anywhere in bodyguard mode all the time.  It sends all of your pets to a location and they attempt to stay relatively close to that location, running a short ways to fight but returning if enemies leave a certain range. But if you were to type

/macro "ATK "Petcom_all goto$$petcom_all defensive" it doesn't work. Macros stop at whatever point they hit a power, command, emote, action etc that needs to be executed or is executed in game. You'll get the goto reticule, but your pets won't change stances, the macro is waiting for the goto command to resolve before it does anything else and doesn't get to the defensive stance change. 

The game gives you a few of these macros right off, all follow commands with different stances attached to them. 

 

Now, petcom_all does all your pets, and petcom alone orders one pet if you only have one and fizzles if you have more out. 

/petcom_name lets you order a pet by it's name. I've been told only use the first six letters, more than that and it cannot parse the name. If you rename your pets, this can be really useful. If you have battle drones 1-3 telling it "/petcom_name battle aggressive" is going to confuse the game.  Useful for giving your suicidal arsonist a specific "get the fuck out of melee" command. 

/petcom_pow power_name (command) though can be really useful. Put in the name of the power used and you can select pets by tier, basically. An easy way to create a macro that will move zombies or your bruiser into melee range. 

 

so 

 

/macro BRU "petcom_pow Call_bruiser aggressive$$petcom_pow Call_bruiser goto" would be a macro to make your mini brute specifically move somewhere in aggressive mode

 

I'm maining bots right now, so for them I just move them in a bunch, they're all ranged aoe so they move best in a blob. If you need to move individual minions alot, are playing necro or thugs and want to move specific pets into melee, I highly recommend the numpad pet binds. But if the numpad system is complex you can just fill a bar with macros to click or hotkey. 

 

And it should be noted change the command to /bind and you can bind any legit macro you make to any key you choose. For modular ability and transparency I hotkey my power bars and use hotkeys to hit macros in the right slot. I like that system alot, if you do too be prepared to have 4-6 hotbars around. 

 

New command. /inspexec_pet

Comes in /inspexec_pet_name and /inspexec_pet_target varieties. What do I use this for?

Shamelessly stolen from Reddit
Inspiration combining macros for farming

This was a comment in another post but I figure it may be of interest to a lot of people. Here are the inspiration combination macros I sometimes use for making reds. You can also just disable all non-red drops at the p2w but I think you may see small net gain with the combination macros. Anyway, this works best if you are fire softcapped or you can take the defense ones out of the macro if you use the purples too.

Small insp: /macro red "inspcombine Sturdy Enrage$$inspcombine Insight Enrage$$inspcombine Respite Enrage$$inspcombine Catch_A_Breath Enrage$$inspcombine Break_Free Enrage$$inspcombine Luck Enrage"

Medium insp: /macro Red "Inspcombine Keen_Insight Focused_Rage$$inspcombine Dramatic_Improvement Focused_Rage$$inspcombine Take_A_Breather Focused_Rage$$inspcombine Good_Luck Focused_Rage$$inspcombine Emerge Focused_rage$$inspcombine Rugged Focused_Rage"

Large insp: /macro RED "nspcombine Uncanny_Insight Righteous_Rage$$inspcombine Resurgence Righteous_Rage$$inspcombine Second_Wind Righteous_Rage$$inspcombine Phenomenal_Luck Righteous_Rage$$inspcombine Robust Righteous_Rage"

Delete wakies: /macro del "inspdelete Awaken$$inspdelete Bounce_Back$$inspdelete"

Use reds+: /macro use "nspexec_Name enrage$$Inspexec_name Focused Rage$$Inspexec_Name Righteous rage$$Inspexec_name Tactical$$inspexec_name Keen$$inspexec_name Rage Imbuement$$inspexec_name Precise$$inspexec_name Tactical imbuement"

 

*inspexec is spelled wrong in the use reds macro

If you replace inspexec_name enrage with, say, inspexec_pet_target enrage the result is you can select your damaging pets and press a button to feed them red that you combine from inspirations you have little other use for. It seems the macro will feed your pet one of each level, I haven't tested to figure out how inspirations interact with pets though, anyone who knows that information would be welcome. I know something shows up on the hotbar, I don't see them stack, I'm not sure if I'm wasting inspirations or not basically. 

EMOTES!

 

*First note*

We masterminds love all our fellows and view those who play sets like ninjas and mercs as challenge seekers and do not judge a power hungry AOE farmer or an Inglorious Basterds roleplayer, but if you have a non human skeleton pet the vast majority of petsay emote fun is out of your reach. It's not our fault you wanted to bring your three wolf moon shirt to life, roll a bots mastermind if you want to be a comedian. 

 

So now we get to the next command

/petsay 

 

Petsay selection works the exact same as petcom. So, petsay_all, petsay_name and petsay_pow let you select your chosen manipulation victims. .

*Second Note* 

A comedian understands timing. Petsay comes out essentially as emotes. Visible over the pets, but not in chat unless emote chat is enabled in their window. They're not allowed to speak in local or anything lol. Speech and text emotes come out fast. Commands in macros are executed sequentially as fast as chat can. Put five things for your pets to say in one macro and they will say it all in five bubbles floating simultaneously over their heads. So if you want to create a one act play you're going to need alot of extra hotbars and you're going to need to create alot of macros that you click sequentially like the absolute fucking loser you are typing all of this out to make your pets do ridiculous things in front of people. ❤️

 

If it gets bad enough you'll be creating text files with extra macros so you can delete ones you've been using and copy in ones you haven't used in a while. because there are not unlimited hotbars to stick macros in. No. I haven't done that. Ever. I swear. 

what's a basic crowd pleaser?

/macro ALK "emote alakazamreact$$petsay_all <em alakazamreact>"

 

This will amusingly turn you and all of your pets into random in game objects like trash cans and lamps and tables. 

 

You can see, in that macro I gave myself a command and then the pets a command. Which comes first is absolutely irrelevant, as each has a different target and they're executed a small fraction of a second apart. It is close enough together that if you try to do alakazam on yourself to make your pets turn into furniture, they will be transformed well before your hand wave animation completes. But it works very very well if you want you to talk and your pets to react, or your pets to talk and you to react. Talk pops up instanty and attracts attention usually. Little mastermind sleight of hand, they'll be too busy reading for a second to notice how fast the animation starts. Making the pets talk and do an emote at the same time also works just fine, put the talk first. 

 

And then, petsay_all <em *emote*>

That is the format for making a pet do an action emote. Pets cannot do boom box emotes but they can do every single human skeleton emote from floating books to the emotion emotes to panhandling. 

 

https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Emotes

 

There you go. Emote away. 

So how do you get them to speak? Here's one of my sets for amusement. 

 

/Macro wht "team WHAT DO WE WANT?$$petsay_all <em protest>"

/macro dmg "petsay_all MORE DAMAGE!$$emote drat"
/macro tnk "petsay_all BETTER TANKS!$$emote frustrated"
/macro sup "petsay_all COMPETENT SUPPORT!$$emote grief"

 

I whip it out after every team wipe. If you give the pets a continuous animation they will keep doing it while you make them say things, until you give them a different command. You can see how you'd manipulate timing here. You can leave some pets in one emote, change others to something else, and soon you're doing hamlet under atlas. 

Protector bots are loveable assholes and will stop emoting to bubble everyone and you just have to accept it. 

 

When it comes to syntax, just no spaces around the $$ that divides commands. You can put punctuation into any command that's supposed to show visible text, like exclamation points, the game doesn't care so long as it's not a dollar sign $ it'll just put it up in a text bubble. 

 

OH! Emotes specifically are the things that break in macros I've found. Like petsay emotes. It doesn't parse it right idk why. You have to get any macro with a petsay <em     > command right on the first try. Every one I've edited it starts saying "<em whatever>" in a chat bubble over their heads. 

Last note. If you want to not be obnoxious as hell you can use Emote instead of like local to make yourself talk. It'll appear in a thought bubble over your head instead of a chat bubble, no helping that, but it also won't spam anyone anywhere and you can use your macros with impunity. Formatting them for /local and being wise works, and /team obviously for only harassing the people who choose to spend time with you. 

Last last note I think, I've tried using petsay with variables like $target and they literally just say $target. You can use the variables all you want, I don't think you can make the pets like say your targets name unfortunately. Missed opportunities. 

 

Edited September 22, 2019 by TheSpiritFox

[TheSpiritFox]

Bumping for visibility

[Scientist]

 

Something you didn't mention is the ability to load new keybinds on the fly to rotate through different chunks of text to make a dialogue from only repeated presses of a particular key.  Like this, where you press shift + o to start it off, where there is a 1 in the first pets name and a 2 in the second pets name (like the default for bots); 

 

petorate1.txt
shift+o "petsay_name 1 Say has it occurred to you that our master treats us as expendable?$$petsay_name 1 <em lecture>$$bind_load_file c:\keybinds\petsays\petorate2.txt"

petorate2.txt
shift+o "petsay_name 2 Nonsense, he treats us just as well as his teammates!$$petsay_name 2 <em research>$$bind_load_file c:\keybinds\petsays\petorate3.txt"

petorate3.txt
shift+o "petsay_name 1 Ummm OK, I feel much better now. . .$$petsay_name 1 <em fancybow>$$bind_load_file c:\keybinds\petsays\petorate1.txt"

 

You can make as long a dialogue as you want and only occupy one key on your keyboard to rotate through it, by making additional petorate keybind files, each one you trigger loads the next line in the dialogue.  There may be a slight lag if your hard drive is slow to load the keybind files, but that is fine when you aren't in combat, like waiting for that teammate to train up.  

 

I think I had another dialogue I wrote for my Bots MM where they were conspiring to revolt against me, until they saw me watching them. . .  What I pity I mainly use my MM these days for soloing, the best IMHO for that since they can solo ANYTHING, and pets will defend you from those stupid ambushes that sometimes happen while you are trying to read NPC dialogue.  

[TheSpiritFox]

1 hour ago, Scientist said:

 

Something you didn't mention is the ability to load new keybinds on the fly to rotate through different chunks of text to make a dialogue from only repeated presses of a particular key.  Like this, where you press shift + o to start it off, where there is a 1 in the first pets name and a 2 in the second pets name (like the default for bots); 

 

petorate1.txt
shift+o "petsay_name 1 Say has it occurred to you that our master treats us as expendable?$$petsay_name 1 <em lecture>$$bind_load_file c:\keybinds\petsays\petorate2.txt"

petorate2.txt
shift+o "petsay_name 2 Nonsense, he treats us just as well as his teammates!$$petsay_name 2 <em research>$$bind_load_file c:\keybinds\petsays\petorate3.txt"

petorate3.txt
shift+o "petsay_name 1 Ummm OK, I feel much better now. . .$$petsay_name 1 <em fancybow>$$bind_load_file c:\keybinds\petsays\petorate1.txt"

 

You can make as long a dialogue as you want and only occupy one key on your keyboard to rotate through it, by making additional petorate keybind files, each one you trigger loads the next line in the dialogue.  There may be a slight lag if your hard drive is slow to load the keybind files, but that is fine when you aren't in combat, like waiting for that teammate to train up.  

 

I think I had another dialogue I wrote for my Bots MM where they were conspiring to revolt against me, until they saw me watching them. . .  What I pity I mainly use my MM these days for soloing, the best IMHO for that since they can solo ANYTHING, and pets will defend you from those stupid ambushes that sometimes happen while you are trying to read NPC dialogue.  

Good information, I've never used keybind files like that before. 

[srmalloy]

Back on live, I had a stack of emote bind files for my Bots/Dark MM, whose background was being a 'failed' Soviet experiment to create a robotic director of combat robots. What the bind files did was let me make a sequence of pet 'statements' in Russian like this:

 

<em taunt> Твоя мать носит обувь солдата!	Your mother wears the footgear of a soldier!
Что?	What?
Это должно быть оскорблением?	That's supposed to be an insult?
Так написано в словаре.	That's what the phrasebook says.
Я никогда не пойму органику.	I'll never understand organics.

 

I need to recreate the bind set; maybe with a popmenu, so it doesn't take up much keyboard space.

Edited November 6, 2020 by srmalloy

[torquenator]

Is there a way for keybinds to run macros?  does anyone know how to do this beyond placing the macro in a specific tray?

 

I have found emotes like dance and laptop do not work on keybinds but do on macros.

[Psychic Fury]

Hello there! I love your  post TheSpiritFox and am looking forward to playing around with your software.

I am doing something that is giving me fits. I create a custom file per toon - a few emotes and the NUMPAD being added to my "Master".

I'm working on an MM and have the following issue:

• This line in the bind file will not execute the emote -> CTRL+F "petsay_all <em Flip>"
• When I copy this line and paste it into the chat bar4, all is well with the world. The Ninjas flip around like they're on crack.

Do you have any pesrls of wisdom to provide?

 

Thanks,

Frustrated Geek

[TheSpiritFox]

Bumping for visibility

 

[UltraAlt]

1 hour ago, TheSpiritFox said:

Bumping for visibility

 

 

[Crysis]

Speaking of Pets and Macros.....

 

Is there a way to summon a psuedopet and rename it at the same time?  For example, you can rename Barrier Reef but it reverts to plain old "Barrier Reef" each time you resummon it.  Would be nice to resummon it and rename it all at the same time.

[TheSpiritFox]

1 hour ago, Crysis said:

Speaking of Pets and Macros.....

 

Is there a way to summon a psuedopet and rename it at the same time?  For example, you can rename Barrier Reef but it reverts to plain old "Barrier Reef" each time you resummon it.  Would be nice to resummon it and rename it all at the same time.

/macro REF "powexec_location me barrier reef$$petrename_name "barrier reef" "Harrier Beef" 

That macro is I'm pretty sure correct from a syntax perspective, however it might run into an issue where pets when summoned cannot be selected or affected immediately, it might need to be pressed a second time to rename once the pet is fully summoned. I'm about to fire up the game and test it myself, I've never used rename commands through the chat bar before. 

::Edit:: Tested it and at the very least the rename scrip works as pictured, as to renaming it on summon with one press not sure I haven't made a marine. Is it a stationary pseudopet? A follow dumbpet like singularity or  the rain power from storm blast? 

Edited September 3 by TheSpiritFox

[Crysis]

5 hours ago, TheSpiritFox said:

/macro REF "powexec_location me barrier reef$$petrename_name "barrier reef" "Harrier Beef" 

That macro is I'm pretty sure correct from a syntax perspective, however it might run into an issue where pets when summoned cannot be selected or affected immediately, it might need to be pressed a second time to rename once the pet is fully summoned. I'm about to fire up the game and test it myself, I've never used rename commands through the chat bar before. 

::Edit:: Tested it and at the very least the rename scrip works as pictured, as to renaming it on summon with one press not sure I haven't made a marine. Is it a stationary pseudopet? A follow dumbpet like singularity or  the rain power from storm blast? 

 

Yours works, but I get a "PetCommandFailNoMatch" error the first two button presses...then it renames the thing.  It takes a few seconds to spawn Barrier Reef, so it makes sense it cannot rename it until it's spawned.  Of course, Devs being Devs, the damn thing resets its name every time I go through a door, use an elevator, etc.  So I'll just be pressing the button a few times to get it right.

 

EDIT: Spoke to soon, since you can resummon Barrier Reef and it just kills the old one and resummons the new, I have to be careful to only press this macro button when I have no Barrier Reef spawned, or it kills the renamed one and replaces it with....wait for it.....Barrier Reef again.

 

Still beats doing it manually, so thank you!

Edited September 4 by Crysis