The Rabid Paladin

You'll often find two powers in City of Heroes to be mutually exclusive such that turning one of them on will turn the other off. My favorite example of this is Super Jump and Combat Jumping in the Jumping travel power set. Since Combat Jumping is a useful defensive power, my characters that use jumping to travel pretty much always have one or the other active at all times.

As useful as they are, however, it is a pain to have both of them in your action bar at the same time. You only have ten assignable "hotkeys" active at a time and once you reach your high teens or so, each slot becomes precious. It'd be nice if you could have a single button that switches between two powers seamlessly. Well, with macros you can do just that.

Macros allow you to put a group of commands together into a single button press but have the significant limitation that they can only activate a single power in a given macro (this is an anti-bot limitation that prevents players from creating bot that they can leave running all the time for XP or influence peddling or what have you). You can, however, have a macro turn off as many powers as you like and you can have as many chat commands or emotes as you like as well.

The cool bit is that you can leverage this limitation to create a simple toggle really easily.

To create a simple toggle between two powers you use the "powexec_name" command twice. Here's the command to create my jumping macro:

/macro Jump "powexec_name Combat Jumping$$powexec_name Super Jump"

This macro creates a button on your action bar labeled "Jump". I'll break down the active bits. The /macro command takes two arguments, the first is your macro name and the second is the text. Since the second argument is likely to have spaces, you have to wrap it in quotes so that it treats the whole macro text as a single argument. "powexec_name" executes one of your powers just as if you pressed that power's button on your action bar. "$$" is used to separate two commands (note that no "/" is needed to indicate that these are commands in a macro. The "/" is assumed in each case).

Here's what happens when you hit this macro:

• If neither power is currently active, it attempts to activate two powers simultaneously. Since this is illegal, it actually only activates the last power in the macro. In this case, Super Jump. Since the first thing I want to do when logging in is  travel somewhere, I put Super Jump deliberately last in the macro so that it is the first power turned on when I hit the macro button.
• If Super Jump is already active, it toggles Super Jump off (just as if you had hit the button) and toggles Combat Jumping on (again, just as if you hit the button).
• If Combat Jumping is already active, it toggles Combat Jumping off and toggles Super Jump on.
• If both were on (this is impossible for Super Jump and Combat Jumping, but you could use this macro with any two powers you wanted to alternate between), it would toggle both powers off.

I love this macro. It's simple, but combines two powers into a single button.