The Night I Killed a Woman

[Drazaan]

I generally feel that I'm about 3x more a mess (read: do dumb things) than most other people in Elanthia.

Last night I was riding high after having received the better part of the first Dreavening(TM) in many months and the whole world was looking brighter. I was out having a great time on a late-night Tsafari with some classy people when I end up Spike Thorning a member of the group into death without ever explicitly trying to do such things to her. My jaw was on the floor as I looked at my computer screen. I was horrified and knew deep in my heart that I had no sense of decency.

I looked at my Stormfront scripts/macros. A few months back I switched several of my basic scripts/macros to make use of TARGET/INCANT rather than PREPARE/CAST. I thought I was being smart as using INCANT might improve some of my script logic so to speak and prevent horrible things from happening. That wasn't the case. By doing this, it led to this poor woman's death because earlier in the bandit bounty I had casted benefical spells on party members (Spirit Strike) and she remained the TARGET when I casted an open-ended Spike Thorn with the intention of hitting any of the still-living bandits (I've found in group hunting situations, PREPARE/CAST macros can lead to wasted time and mana when I end up casting it on a mob that is already dead).

What's the best solution to script writing to avoid this? I was wanting to avoid the PREPARE/CAST route because this would allow to attack mobs without having to identify a specific one. I ended up switching all my benefical combat spells back to PREPARE/CAST, so friends wouldn't end up being TARGETed across spells. And then on my offensive spells, I put in a TARGET CLEAR at the beginning just in case I at some point acquired a friendly as a previous target.

Is there a better way to do this? I'm sure I'm missing an elegant solution here. As a sidenote, I know next to nothing about scripting or obviously I wouldn't have had this problem in the first place.

Thanks for all the help.