Express Yourself With Emotes

Emotes cover alot of ground in role-playing:

They can help express emotion.
They add a descriptive edge to conversations.
They enhance other actions in-game.
They help define character quirks and mannerisms.

Let’s take a gander of what they can do to help your role-playing and how you can use (and not abuse) them. *grin*

We have alot of pre-made emotes in-game in World of Warcraft.

Accessing the emotes is fairly easy for this. See the speech balloon there to the lower left of the image? Right-Clicking brings up the menus. You can also change your Language and use Voice Emotes as well.

Though we have some good choices, it can be very limited once we want to convey other emotions or feelings. But we have away of working around it with the /e command.

This allows custom emotes on the fly. Here’s some examples:

/e 's eyes widen in shock.
Sullivan ’s eyes widen in shock.

/e looks over his shoulder.
Sullivan looks back over his shoulder

/e ponders the question for a moment. "I think not."
Sullivan ponders the question for a moment. “I think not.”

We can also put those into macros if we use some that often to help, especially with slow typers. Take this macro for instance:

/bow
/e grins slightly.

This is the result:

This is a simple custom emote, with a standard “stock” bow emote added. As the character bows, it does the custom one to enhance the movement. Experiment with a few combinations if you feel daring or just want to see about giving your role-playing a little kick. See the notes at the bottom for some guidelines.

Look in my article on “Advanced” RP Macros for some other examples and ideas.

Note with Custom, Standard, and Voice Emotes:
Remember not to spam these, it’s bad form and can be rather redundant. So use these sparingly as a touch of “flair”. Wall of text = Bad.

Example: Looking over your shoulder once is fine. After… 3+ times in say 3 minutes? oh boy… You get the idea.

Not every action or conversation needs emotes to enhance it. But used here and there it does help spice up things - just don’t overdo it and keep it simple.

Practice these in an instance or a remote area if you think you might get embarrassed if the emote does not work right in a macro.

Keep it IC. If you are playing In-Character - keep your emotes consistent with the conversation and your persona.

Respect others. Spamming the /spit emote will not make you any friends - on either side of the fence. Even if in character, use some respect, common sense and tact when using emotes.

Custom Emotes will not be seen correctly by the opposing faction. The will just get a generic message like: (Sullivan) does some strange gestures.

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