Fast targetting on Illhoof

OK, so tell me if I'm preeching to the choir here, but I had a revalation on Illhoof this week: a targetting macro.

You know the fight? At any one time, the dps needs to focus on three different targets. Firstly, Illhoof's pet Kil'rek. Once he's dead, you can focus fire on Illhoof himself. Kil'rek respawns repeatedly so you have to switch back and forth. Every so often, one of the party is shackled by demon chains and you have to drop everything to burn these down quick. Unless it's a mage that can ice block out of it. (Can rogues use cloak of shadows?)

Switching targets quickly is critical in this fight. But this is one time your trusty tab button just isn't going to cut it, because throughout the fight Illhoof summons imps. Dozens of imps. You'll probably have one dps on them full time, but even then they will spawn en mass until it's hard to even see Illhoof, let alone taget him. You need a macro.

I had a nice one that used modifiers, so you could hit it with shift to target Illhoof, ctrl for Kil'rek etc. I was pleased as punch and I published it in this entry. Then Larry Shatzer, Jr. posted an alternative in a comment, which you can read below, and I had to come back and update it. The following macro puts mine to shame and makes me wish I did more research for my posts. But aren't blogs fabulous? I now have the number one chariot of targeting macros, and here it is:

/cleartarget
/target Demon Chains
/stopmacro [nodead, harm]
/target Kil'rek
/stopmacro [nodead, harm]
/target Terestian Illhoof

What this does is target what you need to kill. Every time. Mash it for the whole fight and you will always have the right target. I'm still in awe. Thank you Larry.

One other word of advice for shadow priests out there — bring lots of pots and use them liberally. With the constant change of focus and the need for burst damage, this is a very mana intensive fight. It's tricky knowing when to use your shadowfiend but on balance I'd say you won't have time to use it twice, so my advice is to pot early, pot often and save the fiend until Illhoof is at about 30%. I'll be writing more on the shadowfiend later, when I get my thoughts in order.