Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Its really not a plan

To keep my notes ongoing on my progress, I'll just float the latest update to the performance plan.

Its really not a plan at this point, its just a series of continuous tweaks as I identify areas of hidden DPS just waiting to be poured into raid bosses. Kinda like when you make a little bowl out of your mashed potatoes so as to hold more gravy. Sure, the mountain of potatoes with all its nooks and crannies of fluffy goodness can do just fine with a drizzling over the top, but with a simple spoon flick depressing the middle of the pile, you can really make the most of any gravy situation.

Small tweaks for big impact. That's what we're all about.

Mmmmm, gravy.

Last week



So, last week was my big "lag" revelation.

When LK rolled out, I stopped my TBC habit of hammering my shot key.

I mean, since I'm no longer macroing my shot rotation, and I'm selecting between a variety of shots in a priority order, I might as well just press the button once as soon as the GDC is up. Right?

Yeah....no.

Changes this week



I did install Quartz to help visualize the impact of lag. I honestly have no idea what I'm looking at, or more to the point, what to do about the information that Quartz is providing for me.

So the only real change I made this week was to spam the hell out of each attack. While the GDC from the previous shot was ticking away, I'd continuously hammer the key for the shot that'll be fired next.

The priority rotation stayed the same, the timing of haste pot & rapid fire & call o' the wild remained coordinated with heroism, kill command & savage rend remain together on a macro to be triggered each minute on the dot.

Only change was key spamming.

Oh, and properly tracking an attackable trackable (undeadables), rather than last week's wastable improved tracking on the non-attackable minerables. What????

Results



We'll go ahead and give it the ol'...Daddy's Back!

Lets take a look at the last 3 weeks:

Week 1 (simply pressing keys the instant the GDC was up): 4.4K DPS

Week 2 (carefully trying to press buttons a drop before GDC was up, to nip the lag): 5.2K DPS (includes adjustment for stupid tracking choices)

Week 3 (spam the bejezus out of the keys): 5.5K DPS

I'm going to go ahead and say that its a bit annoying that abusing my keyboard results in a solid DPS improvement, but oh well, I suppose I'll have to live with it.

94,000 DPS



The raid had a collective 94,000 DPS, which was just sweet to see. Almost got Patchy down in 2 minutes.

It feels pretty good being part of a team with every DPS player above the 4K watermark, most above 5K, and even players breaking the 6K barrier. Not many raid bosses can withstand firepower of that magnitude.

And you know you're pushing the limits of your gear and spec when two Hunters standing side by side end the fight 1049 damage apart from one another.

At the DPS we're doing, that's less than 2 tenths of a second between us.

And to think, I let my serpent sting fall off for one tick during the fight :-0

But its all good, and definitely reassuring to know the Hunters and the whole raid are putting up outstanding numbers as the T8 content is coming into swing.

And how cool to be able to get some payback from Hodir in Ulduar for all the crap we had to go through grinding rep with his damnable Sons in Dunder NIfflem.

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