Quartz. Now Spam?

So I installed Quartz to help out with the impact of lag on my shot rotations.

I don't know if I'm doing it right.

The only noticeable change to my UI is a big casting bar in the bottom-middle of my screen.

The bar has a small red section at the end to indicate my server's lag.

What am I supposed to do with that?

Do I wait until the casting bar reaches the very initial tip of the red zone, thus snipping out the lag?

Do I still have to wait until the cast bar runs its full length before casting another shot?

Speaking with another hunter who does some stellar DPS and uses Quartz, he just said "spam the buttons and forget the rest".

So I spammed

Anticipate what shot will be fired next (using the priority of Explosive > Kill > Serpent > Multi > Steady), and begin spamming it as soon as you identify that its the shot you'll be wanting to fire once the GCD is up. (I waffle between ES or KS being first, but lately favoring ES, dunno why).

And my DPS went up considerably. I've only raided Sarth+3 and Malygos so far with this, which does not really give a scientific benchmark since Sarth is soooo mobile and dependent upon variable factors, and Malygos changes by how many sparks you stack and the ridiculous dragon vehicle mount in phase 3 messes up the combat log. But a general comparison of my standings overall in my raid show a big improvement by spamming.

Really?

After 4 or however many years, is that the best Blizzard has come up with?

No good way to solve the lag between client and server, so spamming buttons is the best because it will fire the shot as soon as physically possible, rather than waiting until some visual cue says you are ready to fire?

I had no issue spamming a single button in TBC. It was actually fun, and became the source of many jokes when I'd key my mic during combat and my raiders would hear the slamming of my #3.

But switching between spamming 4 buttons? Stupid.

I take no issue with needing to choose between 5 available shots and have to effectively give priority to the proper shots at the proper times. It adds an additional technical component to combat as a hunter, and I've grown to enjoy it.

But having a several hundred DPS difference between firing a shot the moment the visual indicators say a shot is ready to fire and spamming a button so as to have the shots fire sooner than the game is saying they're available?

This is stupid.

But I'll do it because I'm a big fan of more DPS, in case you're new here.

ORA2 Tank Frame Misdirection Addon?

Quick question to readers:

I would find it very useful to be able to click (or right click, or whatever, just no menu systems during combat) on one of the tanks specified by the raid leader in the oRA2 Tank Frame window to cast Misdirection on that player without changing my current target.

Is there anything out there like that?

Need a little help

Ok, time to help a sister out.....

1. Professional Cooldowns: Anybody know a good addon for managing professional cooldowns? Remembering to log into each of the toons that have a transmute, inscription research, whatever, is not really working for me.
   
   
   
   • Requirement: convenient, difficult-to-miss notification. Can't be some obscure calendar entry I'll never look at.
   
   
   • Requirement: must work across all alts on a single account
   
   
   • Nice to Have: twould be nice if it worked across all alts on multiple accounts
   
   
   • Stretch Goal: twould be even nicer if it stored its data server side (perhaps in a calendar entry, lol) so it'll work across multiple computers
   
   
   
   



2. Professional Leveling Ingredients: Looking for an addon that'll help me know if an item is useful for leveling a profession on one of my toons. An example would be Fel Iron. Amava farms it and wants to sell it for mass profit, but her Engineering cousin is looking for a couple stacks to level her profession. Would be great if there was an easy way for me to know if a given material would be useful to another toon before I sell it. NOTE: I've used BookOfCrafts, but its little popup windows became too much of a nusiance, and it didn't handle things properly when I dropped and changed professions.
   
   
   
   • Requirement:: convenient way to display to me whether an item is useful to another toon's profession or not.
   
   
   • Requirement:: must work across all alts on a single account
   
   
   • Nice to Have: twould be nice if it worked across all alts on multiple accounts. I'd be ok with this one if it wasn't some server-side data, and therefore was not super convenient across multiple computers.
   
   
   • Nice to Have: The interface should indicate whether the item will be used for a skill-up recipe, or the color of the recipe (orange, yellow, green, grey)
   
   
   • Stretch Goal: Allow me to specify which recipes I want to make to level up, and have it flag items for that. (ie, you have 4 orange recipes, but one is substantially cheeper than the others. would be great if it only flagged ingredients for the recipes I specify I want to use for leveling)
   
   
   
   



3. Auctioneer Database: Looking to get my auctioneer data into a more usable format. I find the LUA difficult to parse, as I cannot locate a spec for the file format. I'm specifically referring to the simple market value and trading volume data, and not necessarily too much of the auctioneer statistical data. I wrote a make-shift parser, that takes several assumptions about the file hardcoded into it, and I'm not really happy with it.
   
   
   
   • Best: program I can execute that'll take my auctioneer lua file and populate either a Mysql, OpenOffice Base, or MS Access database
   
   
   • Good: Java library that'll take in my auctioneer lua file and give me some objects with reasonable API to access the data
   
   
   • Ok: program I can execute that'll take my auctioneer lua file and output a CSV or some other easier to digest format
   
   
   • Yucky: file format spec for the auctioneer lua files, and I'll write my own damn parser
   
   
   
   



4. Shammy Totems: I'm not even looking for an addon to manage these at the moment. What I'm looking for is a way to disable the silly circles that the Blizzard default UI puts right near my Unit Frame to indicate which totems I've got down and their time remaining. I disabled all addons and still see the circles, thus confirming they're from the default UI. They are positioned directly over my X-Perl character buffs/debuffs and its hugely annoying. How do I disable these totem indicators from the default UI?

Help me with some or all of these, and I'll be your best friend.

I think I figured out why I pulled aggro

Here's an eye-opener for me.

I've had many different times over my raiding career where I'd feign death, have it actually succeed and not be resisted, see my name disappear off the Omen danger zone, only to have the boss suddenly come straight for me, one shot me, and maybe wipe the raid.

As a habitual chain feigner who feigns early and feigns often, I've always found this rather confusing and offensive.

I think I might have figured it out.

With patch 3.0.2, we now have direct access to the Blizzard threat table for the mob, no longer do threat meters need to analyze your combat log and make guesses about threat levels.


When I feign death on a boss fight, I'm usually interested in resuming DPS as soon as possible. Seems natural, yes? Laying there dead is not a good way to win at WWS.

So I'd feign, hear the little female night elf moan of death, see my bar disappear off of Omen, and very quickly resume pew pew.

Usually works. In a rare circumstance, but frequently enough to piss me off, I'd then pull aggro when Omen is telling me and my raid mates (since I've discussed this with them, so ask ppl to watch me also) that its safe for Amava to start drumming, bestial wrathing, bloodlust brooching, rapid firing for massive DPS output.

Well, now that I can see what Blizzard thinks about my threat levels, I think I see the problem.

Looks like you've got to stay dead for a longer period of time, or else your threat level doesn't change at all.

Last night, I've got Bubbles tanking some massive tree boss in Dire Maul East, I start getting close to her threat level, and I'm watching Omen closely.

FD, hear female night elf death moan, immediately hit an arcane shot and resume battle.

Looking at Omen, I see my threat go NOWHERE. I'm right up the tank's butt. FD didn't take, even though the animation and sound effect both triggered, and there was no indication of a resist.

So I tried it again a couple times, and it seems repeatable. Resume attack too quickly after a FD, and your threat stays where it was.

Lets go back to the good old days.

Prior to version 3.0.2, Omen is watching your combat log.

It sees that you FD. It sees that FD was not resisted. It now reports that your threat level is zero. And you and all your omen-toting teammates feel safe that the DPS Queen is not going to pull aggro.

But Omen was wrong. Due to the timing of resumed attacks, the threat didn't reset.

So the question is: Is this a bug in WoW? I mean, FD was cast and was successful. No indication in the tooltip that there's a delay, no matter how minuscule.

n00b or bug?

Am I the first person to encounter and/or observe this? Or am I a total n00b and all other hunters know that you FD, kiss the gf, hum the Star Spangled Banner, make some ramen noodles, and then, and ONLY then, do you resume DPS?

Measuring Threat

Omen version 3 uses the new Blizzard API for measuring threat.

Supposedly more accurate because they have direct knowledge of the mobs' threat tables.

But comes at a price.

Firstly:

You gotta be in combat with a mob in order to view its threat table.

Send pet into a mob, wait for threat to build up, then open fire.

Well, you're not in combat when you send the pet in, so you gotta throw a shot in there if you want to watch the threat build up.

Ok, use a Serpent Sting, or fire a single auto-shot. Now you're in combat, and you can monitor for when your pet has sufficient threat for you to open up.

Don't really like it, but not the end of the world.

Second:

Supposedly there's a small lag in blizzard's threat data. They provide hyper accurate data on the threat levels, just not quite as timely as a local addon that's parsing the combat log.

Havent been impacted by this yet, but for anybody who likes to hover at max range and sit at 129% of the tank's threat, you gonna have some issues. Then again, if you're doing that consistently, you've probably already got issues (or maybe a crit rate that's so low that you never burst and grab aggro, lolz).

That's all I got to say about that one.

Tank Frames and Main Assist

I run XPerl unit frames (and raid frames, I think).

It has a cool little feature where it provides a little box with each of your tanks in it. And their targets. And their targets' target.

Hugely useful, because you can always be sure you're picking up a tanked target as you switch between targets.

For the Main Assist (a dps player who everybody else should be /assist'ing to change targets), a tank frame is vital. Everyone is depending on that person to choose the proper target.

In Tempest Keep, there are a few very chaotic trash pulls near the beginning. Using a Main Assist is clutch, to keep people focus firing and burning mobs down, rather than everybody fighting their own target and having 7 half-dead mobs.

The problem with the tank frames.

Out of the box, XPerl will populate your Tank Frame with all Warriors in the raid.

Ok, nice, our Main Tank is a Warrior. And one of our normal Off Tanks is a Warrior.

But what about my beautiful Paladins and Bears? No where to be found.

And what about that Fury Warrior? He's in there.

Makes it tough for the Main Assist to pick up targets during the chaos pulls.

oRA2 to the rescue.

I installed oRA2 last night.

Fiddled a bit, and figured out how to designate the tanks, so my Fury Warrior was out, and my Pally and Bear were in.

Vunderbar!

But other players in the raid didn't get the updates. I was hoping that the Raid Leader could specify the tanks, and everyone would get it.

Nope.

But wait, that's not all folks. Then while twiddling my thumbs, looking for a second Warlock to bring along, I found a nifty "Broadcast" button.

Click. And presto, everybody's got their Tank Frames updated.

Very nice. I should have installed this puppy months ago.

As we burn mobs down, when the current target hit 5%, I was able to choose the next target from any of the available tanks, and as soon as the current target was dead, the raid could easily choose their next target immediately since I was already switched over.

This was far and away the most efficient use of the Main Assist that our Guild has ever done, and the progress through the trash showed massive improvement.

Pulling Aggro

I got issues. Anybody who knows me or reads my stuff knows this.

But I got one in particular for which maybe there's an answer. Maybe you know it. Maybe you'll share it with me.

As a non-tank, pulling aggro sux. I try to avoid it. No big surprise there.

Why I write this, though, is that its happened to me three times recently. And I need your help figuring out why.

Some background....

I feign death proactively during Boss fights (and trash, but w/e). That is to say, I don't wait until I've pulled aggro, but rather, I FD just about whenever the cooldown is up.

Given the dramatic disparity between my two raid tanks' ability to generate threat and my own, the initial parts (a minute, a minute and a half) of a boss fight are dicey.

Naturally, I open up with a Misdirect. I generally go Aimed, Arcane, Auto for the 3 misdirected shots.

Then I fly on auto-shot for a little bit. If I had at least two crits during the Misdirect, or if there's a second Hunter throwing a Misdirect on after mine, I can go 1:1 Steady:Auto for a little while.

Doing this, I'm up my tank's butt in about 6 or 7 seconds, so I nail my first FD.

In the ensuing 30 seconds of FD cooldown, I generally start off with 1:1 Steady:Auto. And I need to get Bestial Wrath, Bloodlust Brooch, and Drums of War/Battle going, so their cooldowns will be ticking and ready for reuse later in the fight. Before Bestial Wrath is up, probably 15 seconds into it, I normally have to go Auto-only, and perhaps even just stop firing all together, because I'm tailgating the main tank pretty closely by this point.

Second FD. Generally somewhere around 40 seconds into the boss fight.

During this next 30 seconds of the boss fight, I go balls wild with the 1:1 rotation. During this stint, its usually near the end of the 30 seconds that I'm switching to Auto-only, but even at this point in the fight, I'm still pretty threat-bound and FD-cooldown bound.

Third FD, Generally somewhere around the 1:10 mark of the fight. Now its mostly free sailing, hitting FD pretty much as the cooldown is up, but not staring at it, trying to burn a hole through my FD button with my eyes like during the first minute or minute and a half of the fight.

Heaven forbid one of these first three FD's resist, then I just stand there and twiddle my thums regenerating mana doing nothing but allowing Condoleezza gore the hell out of the boss and Commanding her to Kill should I actually get a chance to fire and crit.

So the problem.....

The problem is that three different times over the past 2 weeks, I pulled aggro. Nightbane. Prince. Nalorakk.

And I don't know why.

My eyes are pretty much glued to my Omen window. Like a hawk during the initial stage of a fight. Attention shared 49% Omen, 49% FD Cooldown, and 2% rest of what's going on. Later in the fight, when there's more cooldowns to manage (Hunter's Mark, Fel Mana Potion, Bestial Wrath, Bloodlust Brooch, Drums, Feign Death, Misdirection), my attention is a little more spread out, but I also have a much bigger threat buffer to make up for it.

First unexpected time that I pulled aggro was on the Prince. We're chugging right along like normal. Beginning of fight goes fine. No resists. No aggro.

I keep my Omen window sized such that only the top 5 people on the threat list are showing. I recently did a FD, so I was nowhere to be seen on Omen.

Next thing I know, Target of Target shows AMAVA and Prince runs at me and squish, enfeeble main tank, wipe raid.

One person claims to have seen me on top of the threat meter during this. The rest of the people who were looking at Omen did not see Amava near the top.

WTF?

Different day. Different computer. Different version of Omen.

Nightbane. Mid-way through the second ground phase of the fight, well past any aggro resets associated with phase transitions, within 5 seconds. 5. f'ing. seconds. of a non-resisted FD, I pull aggro and get spanked. Tank had tons of threat advantage over me. Tank got feared. During the fear, I did get a few crits in a row, so it is possible I blasted out substantial burst of threat, but again, on my Omen, I was not appearing in the top 5 most hated players. 5 f'ing seconds after a FD.

Perhaps an aggro reset when he casts fear? Perhaps my burst was bigger than I thought? I dunno, but this is getting old.

None of the other raiders noticed Amava on top of Omen, but then again, none of them also reports having been looking at Omen at that moment.

Yet a different day. Same Computer as Nightbane. Different version of Omen.

Nalorakk. Late in the fight. Tanks have giant threat buffer. I've been proactively FD'ing through the entire fight up to this point. Admittedly, when the sht hit the fan, I noticed FD was not on cooldown, so I did miss an opportunity to reset my threat. My bad. But. But. But.

I was staring at Omen at this point. S.T.A.R.I.N.G. In fact, my Warlock buddy was exceeding the tanks by 10% at this point, so I was moments from chiming in on voice for him to watch it. Sure, you don't pull aggro until 130% when at proper range, but we all generally try to stay below 100% to protect from this bursty maddness.

Top 5 threat table members are Warlock, Warrior, Warrior, Mage, Rogue. Big big gap between position 4 and 5, which means that Amava wasn't lurking just a smidge below the tanks, but still off the radar due to a closely packed top-5 hated group. So Omen is telling me I've got nothing to worry about.

Also, not closely associated with any phase transition, so no suspected aggro resets are in effect.

And this was not his charge attack he randomly does to raid members. This was a bona fide aggro pull and turning a Hunter into peanut butter and jelly.

Once again, mixed reports from other raid members looking at Omen. One says I was way over the top with aggro. Others saw me way down low on the threat list.


Is Omen busted? Are there aggro resets or other such nonsense I'm unaware of? Am I just stupid? WTF?

Raid Frames???

Whatcha got for me?

I love the look of Perl Classic Unit frames. It gives me a great view of the targets of each of my party mates, including all buffs and debuffs. Gives me nice view of my target, his target, and his target's target. My focus, and focus's target. Also party pets.

Vunderbar.

But now I'm all demanding. I'd like to see my whole 10-man raid in that same view. With the ability to specifically single out the two tanks would be nice.

Whatcha got for me?

Can Perl classic do it? I can't seem to find any options to expand out to the raid.

I installed CT Raid Assist last night. Gives a condensed view of the raid, but not as nice as Perl. Bah.

Quest Helper Link

By popular demand, the link I used to access the wonderful wonderful addon Quest Helper.

I've read that some people don't actually like the addon, because it makes questing too easy, and takes some of the zest of exploration and challenge out.

Personally, I love it. When I first started playing WoW, I didn't know about WoWHead or thottbot, or the likes. I found the nature of what I came to call "blind" questing to be hugely frustrating. Its not like you're trying to solve puzzles or creatively tackle problems. No. You've got to find the one spot in this giant world where the one type of mob among thousands drops the one item you want.

If the only "challenge" to a quest is to blindly kill random stuff until you find the mobs that drop what you want, then that kinda bores me. Its bad enough that once you find the mobs that drop what you want, you still have to grind through piles of them to get your items. So I research the quest on WoW Head, or Thottbot, to remove part of the drudgery.

When I first found those research sites, it was a giant improvement to my play time, especially because I've got 2 computers with monitors next to eachother, making access quite natural and easy. But even when one is shut down and I Alt-TAB to WoWHead, its still better than the in-game quest text.

QH takes it one step further, and integrates the experience.

And the benefit to parties? HUGE. How cool is it to be able to see shared quest goals so your party can really go help each other clear out those pesky group quests that're just laying there in your log for ages and ages.

Now if it could add a feature that will assist you in bringing a party member up through a quest chain to get sync'ed with the other members? That would be priceless. How often have you been in a group, ask for "share pls", only to find that you're unqualified?

If they could help you get caught up, w00t on them. Those types of features are, IMHO, the exact type of stuff Blizzard should be including by default to encourage socialization and group activity. Sure, sometimes you just want to solo and get away from it all, but if they made it that easy to cooperate with one another, the game would be so much cooler.

Quest Helper, don't leave your hearth-stone'd Inn without it

Earlier in my blogging career (lol, a couple months ago), I got some excellent advice from readers to install two addons that assist with questing: Light Headed and TomTom. LH provides easy access in-game to the wowhead comments about a quest, and TT provides easy to access way-points on your maps to map coords from inside those comments. These have proven to be a nice boost to questing and the efficiency of bouncing from quest to quest without too much extree travel.

Well, step aside LH & TT. My new baby is called Quest Helper. GO GET IT. RIGHT. NOW!!!!

If you've never worked with this puppy, you simpy must try it right now.

It actually makes questing fun. Real and pure fun. And hugely lucrative and efficient.

In a nutshell, it looks through your quest log, and then gives you automatic illustrated waypoints on both your world and mini-maps, tracing the route you should take bouncing from quest to quest, and at appropriate times coming back to turn in quests for credit/next quest in the chain.

But that's not all folks. It also provides a pop-up message when you hover over the way point, telling you what you should be doing when you get to that spot. Perfect for those quests where you have to collect some items that drop off some guys.

Without Quest Helper, you gotta go look up the quest item that you're looking for, look at what guys drop them, and find their location. Well QH gives you an animated flight path directing you to the area, tells you what mobs to kill to get the items you want. Its just simply beautiful.

And if that isn't enough, try running QH with others in a group who also have it installed. The addon will actually communicate and build everybody's quest log into your routing. Its so cool to have it tell you "stop here for your XYZ quest that you and two other guys have, then go here for PDQ quest that just the warlock has, then go here for ABC quest that these three folks have". All easily animated right on your maps, with pop-up windows to help you know what you're killing or looking for.

I just started using it about a week ago, and I think the word REVOLUTIONIZED is not extreme enough to describe how much more fun and lucrative it makes questing. I consider this guy right up there with Auctioneer and Omen as a "killer app" that so dramatically improves WoW, I just love it.

I once was blind...

And now I have blurry vision, but its a hell of a lot better than none at all.

Lightheaded and TomTom

A match made in heaven.

Based on comments by Someone and an anonymous one, I went ahead and installed Lightheaded and TomTom addons.

All I can say is "wow"!!!!!

Ironic that I find this when I'm on the doorstep of 70, because what a nice tool for questing.

Here's how I used to do questing...

I use MonkeyQuest addon because its a much less intrusive view of your quest log. I reduce the font and window size so it doesnt take up that much screen real estate, plus its semi-opaque so you can still see what's going on behind it. The other nice thing is that MonkeyQuest shows you your progress for the quest goals persistently, as opposed to the Blizzard notices that show up on the screen as you make progress, but then fade away.

When ready to begin questing, I'd pretty much just pick the first quest on the list for the zone I was working in. They're default ordered by quest level, and then alphabetically by title. So the end result is that there's not a real reason for picking my next quest, just a way to keep moving.

Once I chose a quest, if it wasn't pretty obvious from the quest text itself, I'd hit thottbot on my other computer and look up the quest. The nice part of thottbot is they have screenshot maps of nearly every mob or item with icon indicators of locations on the map. Plus you get other player comments for the more complex or confusing quests.

Then comes Lightheaded and TomTom.

First is Lightheaded. This guy provides a window right in your WoW screen that downloads the player comments for quests from wowhead.com. Very nice addition, saving me of having to switch keyboards and accessing thottbot (which is a sometimes slow site) on my (always slow) other computer.

Second is TomTom. This little beauty allows you to add way-points to your map so you can have visual indicators of where you're headed.

The true beauty is in the integration. When you have them both installed, Lightheaded parses any map coordinates from user comments, and makes them click-able. When you click, a way-point is added to TomTom for the location. Icing on the cake is that the way-point contains annotation of what the location is for, making it really easy to distinguish between a bunch of quest locations you added at the same time.

I have yet to really start gaining efficiency in overlapping simultaneous quests, but my initial reaction after my first evening is that this will revolutionize how I do my questing, in a similar way that Auctioneer revolutionized my view of the in-game economy and AH.