Class and spec macros

[p3lim]

The macro UI is one of the few remaining parts of the UI that has yet to see a proper update after the Dragonflight revamp, and out of those few it is by and large the most used one.

It's safe to assume an update to this part of the UI will happen at some point. In recent times we've already seen some further restrictions applied to it, which came with 6 (much appreciated) additional slots for the character-specific section.

With an impending rework I thought I'd bring up one of the restrictions/problems with the current design that has remained since its inception, in hopes it could be addressed.

The problem

With a character limit of 65 characters per account it's safe to assume that a player will have multiple of the same class, and probably play multiples of them as the same specialization as it is convenient. In these situations it's a real pain point having to manage macros between characters. In particular class and/or specialization specific macros for spells and talents.

One could copy+paste macros between characters to try and manage them this way, but it's a really impractical way around it.

There are a few ways to solve this.

Solution 1: Just use general macros for everything

With 120 account-wide macros already there for the taking, this would be the solution right? With 39 specs in the game you'll surpass the limit in this section pretty quickly, it only takes 3 macros per spec to hit this limit, having to resort to copy+pasting the remaining macros in the character-specific section. It's also a practical nightmare to browse through this section, even when "gaming" the sorting algorithm by prefixing the names with the class and/or spec name (which just makes the text useless on action bars).

This "solution" is not sustainable.

Solution 2: Use an addon for it

This is the current workaround, and is kind of the mantra of Blizzard when it comes to extended features, but it leaves a lot to be desired. There are addons like Mega Macro which partitions the existing macro space into more subsections, in particular the class and specialization specific tabs. The problem with addons like this is that they rely on syncing the macro storage with savedvariables, and it can sometimes be faulty, and migrating to/from addons such as these tend to be a real pain.

Solution 3: Expand the macro tabs

This is a prefered solution. Instead of having a general and character-specific section you'd expand them to include class (and spec, preferrably). With this solution there would be less of a demand for general and character macros, so in a pinch to save some server space those could be reduced in size, as most players use macros for class- and/or spec-specific spells and items.

As far UI/UX goes the aforementioned addon deals with this in a satisfactory way, but it could be improved upon. Think of this solution as an easy way out, as the macro UI still needs a refresh.

Solution 4: Redesign

Instead of having tabs in the same sense that we have now, in a future redesign of the macro UI one could do a bunch of different things to improve this. One thought would be to not have visible slots and instead use a list of macros (similar to how the stables UI was redone). The macros themselves could have extra metadata, such as categories or tags. In a design with categories the player could categorize each macro to be one of account-wide (call it "Warband" if you'd like instead of general/global), class, spec, or character specific. Macros could be filtered based on these same categories/tags in the UI, in addition to search by name/content, making it easy to find them.

This redesign could also improve upon other sections of the UX, such as syntax-highlighting in the macrotext area and a searchable icon list, but that's outside of the scope of this feature request.