Sotaudi wrote:
More important than the fact that you cannot shift the HO, it is, in my opinion, a bad idea to try to complete HOs with the same macro that starts them. The HO starter chain completer (Dirty Tricks in the case above) could be resisted, could miss, or could be interrupted. This will not stop the macro from continuing. It will go ahead and use the HO completer skill (Pierce in the first macro). So the following could easily happen.
You hit the macro, Lucky Break fires off, the HO starter chain comes up. Dirty Tricks queues, but it is resisted, failing to complete the starter chain. Pierce fires off, but it just hits normally. That is, no HO is completed. It takes a moment for you to notice the starter chain wheel is still up. So you hit Evade. Evade completes, advancing the starter chain. Quick Strike is the only available skill to complete the chain, so you fire it, and it misses, failing to complete the HO. Now you have to wait for another skill to recharge before you can complete the HO, but so much time has elapsed by now, the HO timer expires before one does.
Had your macro been just Lucky Break and Dirty Tricks, you could have hit the macro, and determined that Dirty Tricks did not comlpete the starter chain. Hit Evade, then hit Pierce. This would have completed the HO in the above situation since Pierce and Evade fired okay. And assuming Pierce does miss, in the above example Quick Strike would be available to try to complete the HO. As it was, you ran out of skills and could not compete the HO because you "wasted" Pierce because the HO was not ready for it.
I'm convinced that the two step Solo HO macro, suggested by Sotaudi and others, may be the better way to go for most players. I'll change mine tonight and see if it improves my effectiveness (I'm been soloing mostly blues and whites the past few nights and haven't had a problem but I may be able to kill quicker, with less down time, if I remove Pierce from my macro).