MaNGOS-Bot by ike3

Controlling Bots

When you have bots in your group you can control them using commands from chat window. Although this guide uses whisper term it can be replaced with party, raid or guild chat. To know what can be whispered to them whisper

help

They will enlist all avaialble actions. If you whisper something else, they will ignore the command and answer the same list.

IMPORTANT: bots will obey their master only! The master must be in range of 100 yards from bot (configured).

When you want bot to do something, type

do action

in the chat window replacing word action with specific action you want bot to do, i.e. follow, stay, frostbolt, etc.

Examples:

do flametongue totem
do frostbolt
do follow
do grind

do action is just a basic and quick way to tell them what to do. More efficient is to tell them which strategy to use.

It is very important to understand how strategies work as this is the main feature of MaNGOS-Bot. Basically the are three entities you must know:
trigger - triggers when something occured. E.g. target started using some abililty, has some aura, health became critical, etc.
action - something bot can do. E.g. move, cast a spell, use an item, etc.
stragegy - tells bot which action to do if some trigger triggers. Basically they usually say, if something happened, add some action to the bot action queue with some priority. E.g., if target health became less than 20%, add hammer of wrath action with priority 50.

Bot then will pop from the action queue the most prioritized action and executes (if it is still useful). Then it gets another from the queue and so on. Usually triggers will add something new to the queue, so it will never be empty. Strategies can be combined, so they will merge their effects and add even more actions to the queue.

Bots use two strategy categories: combat and non-combat depending on combat status. There is a wide range of strategies available under both categories, for instance frost and fire for a mage; cat, bear and caster for a druid, etc. Some can be used under both categories, e.g. follow and stay. Basically when bot is out of a combat, it uses the non-combat strategy list, when the combat starts it switches to combat list, returning back to non-combat one when the attack is over.

By default bots have some strategies configured. To know which are active whisper to the bot

co ?

and it will reply with list of combat (co) strategies. For non-combat list

nc ?

command must be used and

dead ?

for dead state.

To add/remove/replace some strategy whisper

co +strategy1,-strategy2,~strategy3

Any strategy name begins with '+' symbol will be added to bot strategy list, '-' - removed from the list, '~' - toggled (added if there was no such strategy in the list, removed otherwise)

Some strategies are incompatible with the others, e.g. stay and follow. If you add one to the list, all other incompatible strategies will be removed.

For non-combat strategies, co must be replaced with nc.

Examples:

nc +follow
nc +stay
co +dps
co +tank

Hint: you can create several macros to change the strategies you find useful often.

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