Why do I have to create a macro for it?
/cast [help] Righteous Defense; [target=targettarget] Righteous Defense
Wait, a little background.
There we were. Honorus, my Paladin, and Effilda, my wife’s Mage. We’re in the Hinterlands, and we’re doing quests. We’ve wrapped a few up and decide, I decide, to tackle getting us hammers from the Altar of Zul. I’m level 46, my wife is 44. We work our way up the steps of the altar, it’s not that easy. Those casters pack a punch. But, anyway, we reach the top. I see our target. A level 50, sigh, and a couple others. I assume they’re the same level as what we’re fighting already. Yellow, and not orange, to us. Ah, no.
To our credit we actually kill one of the three that come at us, the 50 we want to sheep is resisting my wife’s spell, and we’re borked twice. (Casters versus Pally sucks.) Having not played my Pally in a while, I don’t find my “Lay On Hands” spell quickly enough. Or my Bubble shield. The wife’s taking a pounding and I try to use Righteous Defense. But that means I have to untarget the enemies and target her to cast it. Upon which 3 mobs targeting her would switch to me. Alas, that doesn’t work. Imminent death isn’t the time for careful target selection. We try twice and then ride off, simply turn in the quests we’d done, ding 47 and 45 respectively, and call that a wrap.
I’ve now got the macro prepared.
But should I have to create a macro for this spell?
Casting Righteous Defense on a target will pull up to 3 enemies attacking that target and have them attack the casting Paladin. That sounds downright glorious, don’t it?
And without a macro, there is only one scenario I can see how this is supposed to work.
You’re an Old Style Healbot from pre-TBC. You’ve probably got a tank targeted for healing. Heal, heal, heal your plate armored heart out. I guess, when the crap hits the shinola and your tank is going down, you cast Righteous Defense, rather than a heal, and take up the mob. Why not? You’ve got plate. You’re a tank. Right? But do you really want 3 mobs on you. This “taunt” ability works on 3 targets. Sure hope you brought your +healing plate because if that mob’s taken out your tank, he’s going to take out a Clothadin.
This wouldn’t work if you were tanking, and you didn’t have the macro, since you’d have a bit of a time trying to find your loose mobs target, since you’ve got a handful of them, right?, and then target that target, then cast your RD and get the loose mob back. Is the “target of target” frame supposed to make that easy? When you’re faced with a mob, are you expected to cycle through enemies, find the one targeting something they shouldn’t have targeted, retarget that target, and cast the spell?
You must be running a grayed out instance too, because in a Heroic, clothies are one-shotted. You don’t have time to cycle through the mobs and check out what’s up with them, their lives, what movies did they recently see, and what the hell they’re pounding on with intent to kill. Yeah, the clothies need to let the Paladin secure Aggro, guarantee it, and it’s easy enough for them to do with consecration, and at that point why even bother having a spell like Righteous Defense?
You know, in the old days, when you had 2 mobs to deal with, maybe. Those weren’t the days of 4 Centurians and 1 Captain all loose on you. Or those Bog bugs in CFR. TBC Trash Mobs come in mobs.
It’s broken if I have to use a macro.
And if we all have to use that macro, or one like it, then why isn’t it simply built into the functionality of the spell? Or, why not just give Paladins a 3 target Taunt? Yes, I understand how “Righteous Defense” is supposed to work in fairy tales and story books. But in-game, it requires some adjustment.
And, yes, I use X-Perl. I could have cast the spell targeting her party frame. It just seems ackward to do it that way. Maybe it’s intended to be that way. I don’t know. Seems dumb to me.
Kinless Chronicles 
Righteous Defense is not a taunt for a reason, and clicking on a party member’s unit frame is simply one of the easiest methods for using it properly. Rather than thinking of Righteous Defense as a taunt for your existing target, it’s a fail-safe for a party member pulling aggro from other mobs.
For example, if a Hunter pulls an extra mob off the tank because he Multi-Shot and Feign Death is on cooldown, or the healer pulled aggro from a patrol, Righteous Defense does what it does best. It’s a “ranged” taunt, which IMO is much better than traditional taunts in that the Paladin doesn’t need to run over to a mob across the room just to keep it off her friend.
Paladins have so much up-front aggro, their concern usually shouldn’t be losing aggro from their main target, especially since they can generally pull such aggro back from holy damage alone. However, for unexpected aggro on a teammate, a “reverse” taunt applied to a party member is pretty kickass, IMO.
So because you have a hard time clicking on your wife’s character while in combat, the skill is broken? I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising if a one-line macro is already a challenge for you. Maybe you should play something simpler… like some other game entirely.
Wow. You hit the nail on the head there. Hmmm. Yeah. I probably have reached my level of ability here. Heh.
To be fair, before I went to the trouble of creating the macro (I decided to see how far I would get before I needed it) I just used the ‘f’ key (I think it’s the ‘f’ key…).
It’s just the assist hotkey (I’m an old hunter raider, so a dps assist was pretty basic for us if we lost our target). I had target of target always up, so I’d taunt when I saw it target someone else.
So I’d just hit ‘f’, then tab to retarget the mob.
When did this finally break down? I was well into 70… tanking heroics and such before I felt a ‘need’ for the macro. And to be fair, it just saved me alot of key presses. I got into the habit of ‘double tapping’ the assist key. Something like this would happen: dps pulls aggro, press ‘f’, click or press the ‘righteous defense’ hotkey, press ‘f’.
Now, theoretically, everything is happy now. Honestly, this worked *most* of the time and became automatic. But sometimes the mobs use random targets… and it might be a healer… so you wind up targeting yourself or another random party member. There are many scenarios where in a multi-mob pull or more complicated fight that you *don’t* get your original target back. It’s just a waste of time (valuable time in heroics where your dps may be going balls to walls).
I agree, the macro mechanic should be built into the game. If you righteous defense a hostile creature, it should cast the spell on it’s target. The lore is solid the way it is now, the target of the spell is a friendly… but this isn’t how the game works or is played. Such a simple, basic, low-level macro shouldn’t really be necessary.
But in the end, the change would have 0 impact… every serious tankadin already uses the macro, and in the upper 40’s, you can get away with using assist keys 98% of the time.