What's up with the gank squads?

It's probably worth a guide at this point, but a few other tips since we're on the subject.

One is to always play with sound on. Hearing a gate open, or someone recall in, seems to have a further range than seeing their name approach onscreen. Or maybe it's just that you may not be looking where their name appears, but you'll always hear the footsteps or the gate.

Two, always have an escape plan. In the elder gazers rooms in Shame, you typically have some advantages due to lack of line of sight when people recall into the hallway there. Other locations, like perhaps Yew liches, are fairly close to town. Start running with your mouse, and keep your other hand on your Use Once hotkey for trapped pouches, and you're in good shape.

Three, always know the status of your magic reflect. Sometimes it's difficult to see what spells it is reflecting, so you're not sure how much remains of it. Mana Drain yourself to fully remove it, then re-cast it when possible. You'll be a bit more vulnerable for the 45 second cooldown or whatever, but you'll be aware of your vulnerability and can keep a finger on a Recall hotkey or whatever.

Fourth... I always see people recommend a full macro that includes Recall and a target rune. I strongly advise against this. For one thing, since you're recalling around to other places too, not just your town rune, this means you're using regularly using a different hotkey than your escape hotkey. This is bad; you'll be out of practice. You want instinct to kick in when you need to recall away. Further, if you're dying a lot and getting looted, you'll likely forget to set a new Absolute Target rune. And if you're only dying occasionally, you'll really be out of the habit of re-setting this macro target. If you keep a town rune in the same spot, in all your packs on all your characters, it is very easy and you have 1.25 seconds (I think) to move your mouse to the rune and target it.

Great advice Dalavar. If I used a recall macro that targets the rune I'd be afraid it'd get me killed more often than not. I agree fully.

lol

You have no idea. When I see a red, I get so nervous I couldn't even target a cloak.

All the buttons of my numpad activate my recall-macro so I just hit the numpad with my forehead.

PKing and Reds are actually a bug in the original game. That's why murders are red and ressing them is so bugged it might mess up their skills.

Thank god this was all fixed with the big "trammel" patch. It's taking Telamon forever to port this patch into the crappy outdated RunUO scripts.

lol at slamming your face into the numpad to eject...thank you for that.

lawl.. Thanks Wodan.. I needed a good LOL in order to hit the sack.


PS: Telamon, where is the Trammel patch? HURRY!

It was about 6 weeks ago, I think. I guess it's in my char history.

The other issue is, if you have multiple characters you play, you need a different recall/target macro for each one. It's just annoying.

In the last 5 years, I think I've died twice because I fumbled during a recall and didn't target the rune fast enough. I'm certain I would have died far more times - to players, and monsters - if I tried to have a macro target the rune automatically.

All of my chars, have the exact same escape hotkey set. Why confuse yourself?

What does it do?

I also use the same hotkey on all chars


Mine is cast spell recall, wait for target, absolute target I have a gate on too

Same here. I have a recall macro for all PvM characters who aren't generally equipped to fight back. None of my PvP capable characters have recall macros.

The more advanced farming chars (bard and tamer bard) have "recall to the bank drop off gold restock all supplies" macros.

My macro is simple: cast spell recall, wait for target, target runebook. The runebook is preset to go to my safespot. I edit the "wait for target" timer and reduce the wait to only timeout for 5 seconds in case something screws up with the macro, it won't get hung up for 30 seconds and put me in a bind. I kept it simple as far as the hotkey goes and set it to ctrl+S (S standing for safety), so that it's not easy to forget. I put this on every single one of my chars in case i'm ever in a bind and need a quick out.

Yeah, I edit my timeout to 3s personally and on the two aforementioned characters, they both have blessed runebooks and the default rune is the bank, so the macro just targets the book.

My hotkey is always Alt+4 (which coincides with the bottom/left most key on the G510 keyboard I use). This is identical on all chars that have the same type of macro. Every character has the same UseOnce hotkey as well, except my bard has a macro for his that Executes UseOnce, Casts Magic Trap, targets the same pouch, then adds it back to the UseOnce queue. If there's para spam, I'm pretty much hosed, but I don't care to hold a dozen pouches on every char.

So what you're saying is an escape macro isn't going to work...

• If you set it up incorrectly
• If you forget to use it

Got it.

Little hint for the recall macro ... start it with a "Clear target queue" from the razor hotkeys section.

I start alot of macros with "Clear target queue" ... very important for the "all kill" macro as well ... tamers know why.

There's some great advice here and also some that just doesn't make much sense (thanks Basoosh for highlighting a bit of it )

In Razor, it never hurts to have a separate "farming profile" that simply uses keys on the keyboard without the need to alt/shift/ctrl combinations. I use this when I'm solo and don't expect to chat much. While ctrl-r might be my regular recall cast, I can simply hit "e" (for escape) when I'm in my "farming profile" that fires off whatever macro I need to get out of a sticky situation. Various things that usually require a key combination now is simply mapped to a single letter. Just don't plan on doing much chatting with people in such a profile unless you want really confuse those around you...

The talk of an escape macro being a bad idea is hogwash. If you are that dedicated to being safe, while checking for supplies a quick check of your escape macro becomes part of your regular routine. I've seen some bad advice given, but that one takes top prize.

I've pked a lot of people that got on IRC and said THE ONLY REASON I DIED IS MY ESCAPE MACRO SCREWED UP

So I totally get what Dalavar is saying. I just cast recall and target my rune in my backpack. I trust my ability to click it more than my ability to keep up with a razor target being set on 5+ characters that I actively play daily.

In the end - this isn't something to argue about. People should just use which method works best for them. Human error will come into this equation one way or the other.