Training Wheels, State Machines, and the Optimization Trap

Dec 18, 2025

Buck Rennicker

DeerDown82

What a decade of healing in WoW, a decade of high level WoW healing, a Rogue opener macro, and a “boring” PPL routine taught me about getting good at anything.

For almost ten years, I lived in a familiar prison: I healed in World of Warcraft at a high level and told myself I would always be bad at DPS. Then I finally committed to Rogue, and something clicked. Not “I found the secret spec” clicked. More like: I finally stopped making my brain fight my tools.

The part people love to argue about is class tuning, tier lists, and “best” builds. That is not what did it.

It was the user interface.

I borrowed my keybind philosophy from my healer setup and rebuilt my Rogue around the way my eyes and hands actually work. Plater. ElvUI. Gladius. GladiatorLosSA. Arena target macros. OmniCD for cooldown clarity. The whole point was simple: when something happens, I should not spend even a fraction of a second searching for the information. The information should already be where my eyes naturally go.

That is when I stopped “playing Rogue” and started managing states.

From binary decisions to state management

When you are new, you want the world to be yes/no.

“Do I kick?”
“Do I stun?”
“Do I press my go button?”

At higher levels, that fantasy collapses.

The real game is a chain of priorities and constraints: what class is it, what DR is active, what cooldowns are still available, what happens if I spend X now and they answer with Y. I’m not making one decision. I’m stepping through a state machine.

In practice, it looks like: if I can kick the high-priority spell, I do it. If kick is down, I look for the next best stop. If that’s down, I look for the next one. Then I layer in kill-window logic, because blowing your big buttons into Ice Block is not “aggressive,” it’s just waste.

The biggest upgrade was not mechanics. It was pre-attentive cognition: building the screen so my brain recognizes the state before I consciously “think.” Then making the actions so ergonomic that execution is basically automatic.

Once that’s in place, performance stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like flow.

Beauty is not fluff. It is compliance.

This part sounds silly until you live it.

The colors, the spacing, the alert sounds, the clarity, even the vibe. If it looks and feels good, you show up more. If it looks like trash, you avoid it, procrastinate it, or tell yourself you need a “better setup” later.

People treat aesthetics like vanity. I treat it like behavior design.

If I want screen time, I make the screen something I actually want to look at.

The Rogue opener macro: training wheels that matter

Here’s where the “macro” idea becomes useful outside of games.

I had a Quantower trade-management plugin built that handles scaling and trailing stops based on conditions. It’s basically an automated manager once I’m in the position.

I know what that is, conceptually.

It’s a Rogue opener macro.

At a high level, no serious Rogue is running a one-size-fits-all opener because the opener changes with comp, win condition, and what you’re trying to force. But when I was learning Rogue, having an opener macro did something important: it freed my brain to learn everything around the rotation.

Target priority. Interrupt discipline. Positioning. Line of sight. Recognizing patterns. All the stuff that actually wins games.

Then later, when the training wheels came off, my rotation got cleaner because I finally understood the context the buttons were supposed to serve.

That is the key: training wheels are not shameful if they buy you time to develop the real skill.

The mistake is thinking the training wheels are the skill.

The gym taught me the same lesson

In the gym, I learned the hard way that YouTube is often the enemy.

Not because information is bad, but because content rewards optimization fantasies. Steroid physiques selling “natural” routines. Endless micro-tweaks. The illusion that the missing piece is one more video, one more program, one more supplement.

In my head, I map that to trading perfectly: steroids are demo accounts. They create a distorted sense of what “normal” looks like, and then you spend months chasing a reality that does not exist.

What fixed it was removing the internet as a primary coach and focusing on what real operators do. In the gym, that meant listening to actual trainers and strong people in the building, not the algorithm. In trading, it means paying attention to the handful of people who can prove they pay their bills doing this, not the loudest Twitter thread.

Then I applied a rule that sounds almost insulting in its simplicity:

You do not earn complexity until you prove consistency.

My gym path was:

Beginner PPL: copied a basic push/pull/legs routine and ran it for two weeks. No debates. No “is this optimal.” Just showed up.
Improved PPL: after I proved I could show up, I built a slightly better version using what I’d learned.
My PPL: after a few weeks, I could finally tell which movements I actually responded to and liked, so I built the version I could repeat forever.
Only then did I add MacroFactor, supplements, creatine, protein powder, and all the “serious lifter” extras.

This sequence matters more than people want to admit.

If I started with MacroFactor, supplements, and the perfect program before I had the habit, I would have fallen into the optimization trap. I would have felt “productive” while avoiding the only thing that creates results: reps, days, weeks, months.

What this looks like in trading

When I try to translate this to trading, the blind spots get loud.

In WoW, I understand what makes the game move. Positioning makes sense. Cooldowns make sense. The “why” behind actions is intuitive because I have years of reps.

When I look at NQ or ES, part of my brain still goes, “What actually makes this chart move?” It’s an index. It’s an average of many things. Now the slippery slope appears: do I need to track news and earnings across hundreds of names? If yes, that changes the whole craft. If no, then I need a different explanation for why price does what it does.

That uncertainty is what tempts people into buying the equivalent of a shake weight for trading: a magic indicator, a paid strategy, a “god setup.”

I’m trying not to do that.

So I’m aiming for the same sequencing as the gym and Rogue:

Make the screen beautiful enough to show up daily.
Use trade management “training wheels” so I’m not bleeding out from bad exits while I’m still learning entries.
Build screen time, because every real trader I know says screen time beats everything.

For entries, I’ve used the “level map” approach: previous day high/low, opening range high/low, previous week high/low, Globex high/low. Plot them, watch reactions, learn the personality. I keep hearing VWAP from profitable people too.

And then the real question shows up, the one that no indicator answers for you:

If price touches the level, how do you know if it’s going to bounce or break?

If you’ve read enough quant, you start hearing random walk in the back of your mind. You start thinking, “Is this mostly noise and I’m just pattern-matching?”

That’s where I’m at: refusing the shake weight, but also refusing the cope.

I’m not looking to feel like I’m doing trading. I’m looking for results. I want a path that gets me reps today, a habit this month, and competence that compounds.

The point

This is the pattern I trust now, across anything hard:

Start with a simple, stupid-proof routine that gets you to show up.
Use training wheels strategically to buy learning bandwidth.
Evolve from binary choices into state management.
Earn complexity only after consistency.
Build your own system, because copying is how you stay trapped.

A Rogue opener macro is not the endgame. It is a bridge.

A beginner PPL is not the “best program.” It is a bridge.

MacroFactor is powerful, but it belongs after the habit exists, not before.

And in trading, I’m convinced the same rule applies: the goal is not to find the perfect trick. The goal is to build the smallest repeatable system that forces screen time, then slowly evolve it until it becomes real decision-making, real state management, and real edge.

If you’re in your own craft right now, ask yourself:

What’s your beginner PPL?

What’s your opener macro?

And what would it look like to stop optimizing and start earning the right to optimize?