Mage macros (retail)

Kick through your own cast, poly on the cheap modifier, and the escape key. The mage macro kit, retail edition.

The kick that lands through your own cast

The reasons mages lose interrupts are (1) they were mid-cast and (2) they were aimed at the wrong caster. This bind kills both causes: stopcasting first, then kick whoever your cursor is on, with the focus caster available on shift:

#showtooltip/stopcasting/cast [mod:shift,@focus,harm,nodead] Counterspell; [@mouseover,harm,nodead] Counterspell; [harm] Counterspell

Arena players hold shift for their focus caster; everyone else just hovers and kicks. The pattern is the focus page's gift to mages.

The polymorph modifier

One key, two poly targets: shift for the focus (the kill target peels off), plain press for the current target:

#showtooltip/cast [mod:shift,@focus,harm,nodead] Polymorph; [harm] Polymorph

The escape key

Blink deserves the least decoration of any bind in the game: one line, one intent, never a chain that can eat it:

#showtooltip/cast Blink

The frost nova embrace

The crowd-control bind for the ring on the floor: nova your current target when it is crowded, keep it simple otherwise:

#showtooltip/cast [mod:shift,@player] Cone of Cold; Frost Nova

Shift throws the cone out of melee range; plain press novas the crowd. Both gates are from the conditionals page, and neither needs a proc, which is the whole mage macro lesson: your macro-relevant tools are the deterministic ones. Everything else lives in theaddon half.

Questions people ask

Does Counterspell still exist in retail?+
Yes, mages still have Counterspell, and it remains the macro-poster child: a kick that must land through your own in-progress casts, which is exactly what the /stopcasting setup exists to solve.
Can I macro spellsteal or other procs?+
No. Proc-driven abilities cannot be gated by the macro language, because macros cannot see your procs. That is the boundary line this site draws in macros vs addons.
Do these macros survive an expansion launch?+
The patterns do. Counterspell, polymorph, and blink have been in the kit for decades across multiple class revamps. If the WoW: Forever revamp renames one, the fix is a one-word edit and the bind works again.