Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them, brought to you by David Bowers and Dan O'Halloran.

Macros used to be a very mysterious thing, involving lots of "if" clauses, "/script" commands, and parenthetical programming language that lots of people don't understand. For some, of course, it's exciting to try and figure it all out, but many people play for a long time before realizing that macros even exist, and then get intimidated by them once they do.

When WoW 2.0 was released, however, so much of that changed. Many of the most complicated scripting functions were disabled, but many simpler functions were put in to help common people get a better sense of how to use them. There are still strange elements in it sometimes, but overall it's much easier for an amateur to understand. I managed to learn the basics and design some of my own shapeshifting macros to replace both my old copy/pasted macros, as well as an addon I had used originally to help make shapeshifting more manageable. I love being able to tailor my macros to my own play style.

So today I'm going to share with you some examples of handy shapeshifting macros to illustrate how to work with your own, and give you some resources to continue using macros if you are interested. For those of you who are expert macro users and just want a list of macros you can copy/paste into your game, have a look at this excellent list. Some of you may already be very familiar with macro construction, but to many of us it is enlightening to discover how to use macros to do several things in one step, activate different abilities in different situations with a single button, or even make existing functions more efficient and useful. You'll get a good sense of how macros can work from these few examples and be ready to go out and find some more that you might like to use, or even design your own. (Non-druids interested in getting started with macros might like this too.)