No more delay between gathers / Prevent Ninjaing

1. Click on the item to be gathered
2. As soon as it pops up in your inventory, hit any movement key, in any direction and instantly click on the next item to gather.

You shave off the 1-2 seconds waiting time before you have to try again. It becomes especially useful against people trying to ninja the next attempt from you. I am guessing this should work against the bots as well.
This works while flying and picking up Aether as well, every second up there counts, right?.

I wondered if its possible to have a macro for gathering, since it can become extremely boring.

Since the time it takes to gather is always random, its not possible to get a perfect macro to gather all 3 items with one click – at least it won’t be efficient to use a macro that way.

Best you can do is create a macro that breaks the animation after gathering and starts gathering the next item with minimum delay.

Well, this is the best i have come up with so far, and i thought it would be worth to share with you.

Create a new macro and put this in:

Code:
/attack
/select [%Variable9]
/delay 0.1
/attack

Of course, use whatever variable you like.
Save and drag the macro icon down on your quickbar.

As you can see, my macro will use a variable to specify the item to gather, so you will have to set it once you logon, or want to gather a different item. put this into your chat (it doesn’t matter which chat or tab):

/variable 9 ItemToGather

Again, use the variable you set in your macro. as item you need to specify the actual name shown if you hover the item node with your mouse, don’t use brackets or quotes. be aware that variables won’t save when you log out.

Now you’re set! go to your favorite gather spot and move close to your item of desire, and hit the macro key, your toon will run up to it and start gathering. take care that you won’t pull any aggro – if you get hit while gathering (note: each time you get dmg from DoTs, it will count as a hit), you will loose your current gather.

Once you hear the finish sound, instantly hit the macro key again and the macro will break the animation and get right back to gathering.

observations:

• This macro is not quite as fast as using your movement keys to interrupt, however i found it to be satisfying for my lazy needs.
• The item you want to gather has to be in range, i estimate the max. range to be around 25-30m
• After you finished gathering all 3 items, the macro would still try to gather from the (now gone) node, you will have to move closer to an existing node or wait about 1 second after the node is gone.
• The further afar an item is from you, the longer the macro will take to find it.
• If you hit the makro key while gathering, it won’t break your gather (at least it didn’t for me), so you could just keep smashing your key and it will gather everything in sight.

That said, if you don’t want to put up with setting your gather item every time you logon, you have two possible options:

1.) set the item to gather right in your macro instead of [%VariableX], don’t use brackets or quotes, and create different macros for different items if you need. these will save then.
2.) you can also put several /select commands one after another in your macro, the macro should then in theory pick the last item which is in range and gather that. however this didn’t work out too well for me – sometimes it just won’t find items in range. and it seems, the more /select commands you use, the longer the macro takes to complete, up to several seconds, which renders the macro useless in terms of efficiency. maybe you have better luck with that, please hook me up if you find a working solution.