Hi guys, you may remember that I had an idea for an addon that would help us hunters figure out what DPS we’re leaving on the table and improve our game. Well, luckily, one awesome reader stepped forward to code this. Pherra has already written the first version of the addon! It’s still in pre-pre-alpha, but we’re getting there :)
The goal here is to have an addon that will silently collect information about the currently unquantifiable “hunter skill level”, and help you improve. You will be able to look at your performance after your fight (or night) and see where you lost some DPS, as well as how you’re progressing. We might consider eventually having it tell you “oops, you shouldn’t have done that” during a fight, but not by default. The default will be a quiet addon with a small footprint that will tell you (and only you) how to become a better hunter.
Here’s the list of features we want so far. We will set the addon up so that it only tracks what you do on boss fights.
- Count the number of global cooldowns not used while in a boss fight
- Ignore cooldowns not used when stunned, when you’re not targeting something attackable, when you’re out of range, and when you’re delaying explosive shots because of a lock and load
- Track auto-shots that didn’t go off
- If you are moving when the swing timer is done, you miss a shot
- If your add dies while you’re volleying, you won’t start auto-shooting until you target a new add
- Track ticks of explosive shot clipped by other explosive shots
- Track the number of times you cast a steady shot when a better shot is available
- Also maybe check other shot priorities
- Track whether you’re using serpent sting appropriately
- As marks, you should be re-applying your sting whenever your current +% damage and crit are higher than the one that’s “saved” on the boss’s sting
- As survival, you should try to keep a high uptime, but never reapply a sting unless it has expired
- No hunter should sting a target that only lives for a few seconds
- Track your viper management
- If you go into aspect of the viper, never run OOM, and finish the fight without ever having gone below the point where you would have run out of mana without the viper, you wasted DPS
- If you run OOM, you wasted DPS because some of your shots that are off cooldown will be unusable.
The reason I’m posting this is that I realized that the sum of the knowledge among the people who read this blog is far greater than my own. If you folks see something that could be made better, have ideas for features, or some other inspiration, let us know in the comments!
I like this idea, but I guess you’ll just have to look at your results with a grain of salt. On a fight like sindragosa with phases and the “stop attacking” debuff, it wouldn’t be very helpful.
We would code those in, and obviously it wouldn’t compare your autoshots on a fight like festergut to a fight like sindragosa.
I’ll have to see the finished product I suppose :). On Sindragosa, I guess it would ignore p2, or when you’re targetting an ice tomb in p3. Each fight might need little tweaks like that. Sounds like a lot of work, good luck!
i don’t had any stop dps on sindragosa … i got the debuff the stacks were rarely going up so …
Whatever this ends up looking like please do NOT attach any sort of score to it. We cannot have a ‘skillscore’ addon. This cannot and should not communicate with other players either. We don’t need anything else to trivialize our gear/ability as a player.
As I said, this is only for the hunter, and it’s not going communicate with others.
I really like this idea and am interested if you could keep us updated on your develpment. This would be an invaluable tool to “look in the mirror” at your rotation, etc. You can fine tune where you didnt realize weaknesses were or even add a line on a macro to compensate for your own play style shortcomings. This should hopefully give you some good data to analyze but (hopefully) not have to relearn or majorly change the mechanics that you are comfortable with!
Just when I was testing it, I discovered I have a tendency to cast steady shots too much- I am going to write in a /stopcasting into my other shots now to compensate.
I tried the /stopcasting before but found it impractical for my play style (Keymashing). I like to spam chimera while my last SS is casting so it goes off as soon as SS is done. I would loose the last SS with /stopcasting macroed.
(1) I would add prolonged melee attacks to the list of feedback. While some fights will undoubtedly involve being “surprised” by a mob, any extended periods of melee activity typically suggest a failure on my part to get or maintain the distance required for ranged attacks and therefore a loss in DPS.
(2) On boss fights, an estimate of the missed number of controllable buffing cool downs. For example, if the encounter lasted 6 minutes and I never used Readiness as MM and only got off one Furious Howl then the count would be the number of possible controllable CDs that were missed.
Excellent suggestions, thank you! I might make the first one “meleeing a lot when disengage is off cooldown”, but these are very nice :)
I want to add useing cooldowns like RF right and pet coldown and orc cooldown and trinkets and…
this may be hard : /
A cooldown management section would be nice to have, but we’re looking at the low hanging fruit first. If it’s really ambiguous and there’s more than one right (or acceptable) answer, we’ll probably leave it out until we have all the obvious stuff done properly.
BTW you know if you pull this off, every dps will reroll hunter and Frostheims dream of a 25m hunter raid will come true on every server^^
It’s 25M raid night. The countdown to this thing telling me how bad I play is on. I gotta re-focus. Excellent idea, though, and I’m thrilled you got someone to code it.
But along the lines of the earlier missed-cooldown tracker, might there be a way to track how many cooldowns we manage to stack? And conversely, when we could’ve stacked cooldowns but didn’t? Even if the latter isn’t possible, a “you stacked {x} cooldowns this fight” would be helpful, so that we can shoot for {x+1} the next time we do the same fight.
I’ll add that to the wish list then :)
Ah, just thought of this: turning the counter off when deterrence is up, during the “oh Pants!” moments where we need to stop taking damage.
I’m MM: Boss time. I nuke boss. Adds spawn. I dps adds but want to keep up my Piercing Shot bleed on boss at the same time. Want to know how well this is going
Adds will be our weak spot. There’s no obvious and always correct way to handle them. For example, even a hunter without improved arcane in their build will often open with an arcane because of the lack of armor debuffs on adds.
This sounds like alot of work and I’m glad someone will and can do this. But we are at the end of WotLK and the hunterclass will be redone soon. Hope you guys do not do lots of work for nothing
We’ve got plenty of time until the next expansion. Late this year, according to most rumors.
Could we track how much time we spend channeling steady shot when a better shot has come off the gcd? It might be nice to compare that against the time we spend waiting to use a gcd.
Can we track the amount of time our pet wastes between when an ability becomes available and when it autocasts? Also, can we track how many pet gcds are wasted by the pet not having enough focus?
Could we track buff uptimes? For SV, I’d want to track time spent without Expose Weakness (to see if you need one or two points in it) and time without Sniper Training. Seeing wasted charges of Lock and Load would be good too.
Can we track resisted or mitigated damage? This would be helpful I think for reorganizing our shot usage on Deathwhisper adds.
I like your idea for tracking casting steady vs waiting for a better shot. Much simpler and more robust than the ideas I had floating around my head. Most of it involved useing average shot damage per GCD and trying to calculate the optimum point of waiting over using steady. Once this point is determined you could track the time spent casting steady when you should be waiting.
WTB someone who can clearly put my ideas into words.
It’s called a spouse :P Mine doesn’t play wow (or any other games) but she sure helps me figure out how to express what’s rattling around in my head.
Are you suggesting I purchase a mail order bride?
ZOMG no! Do it the old fashioned way. Much more fulfilling.
I think the obvious will be differences in spec. You will need to enter a spec, or have it recognise it. (Like the “common shot priority” on Zehera’s Spreadsheet) I dont need it telling me I didnt use Arcane shot, when I dont have it specced.
What about pet damage? Some sort of “black mark” for letting your pet stand in the fire and die?
We will make sure that if it ever tells you you did something wrong when in fact you did it right, we change the code.
Also, fires make pets stronger. If mine ever gets below half health, I just toss out a mend pet/cower macro and laugh at all the melee foolishly running about trying to avoid stuff.
How does this macro work? Does it toggle, since it will need to be turned off again?
Also, is there an addon that will warn me when I need to us it, i.e. an addon that will track pet health? Can power auras do this?
The addon doesn’t work yet- we’re developing it now.
I love the idea of this. I can’t wait until it’s ready for beta consumption. I would love to be one of your testers to see if it gives me any extra insight into how I can improve my DPS.
Maybe something to track pet focus? eg. If you’re wasting focus or if your pet is focus-starved.
Thanks for the suggestion Phyllixia! I was actually thinking of something like that, but I reasoned that (especially with our current ridiculous levels of hit) any hunter with a single point in GftT would never want for focus again. I know my pet hasn’t seen the bottom of his bar since about Ulduar :)
Additionally, the addon is supposed to be about tracking how you use the abilities you have during combat, whereas managing focus balance is more about how you set up the hunter spec and pet.
posibly off topic a bit but is there and addon to see ur serp sting timer on a target ur not targeting or on focus if not maybe this could be incorperated into it
You guys are looking for dotimer I think.
ForteXorcist’s spell timer also does this.
Gefro
Thats an interesting thought, but I THINK that should be a separate addon, if it doesnt already exist.
Euripides got me onto Quartz. Would that be able to do this? Even just a stacked cooldown bar, with SS1, SS2, SS3 etc…
REALLY REALLY looking forward to such an add on !
Thx for all your work !
“As survival, you should try to keep a high uptime, but never reapply a sting unless it has expired”
If all my insta shots are on CD and I still have to keep moving I think its appropriate to refresh your sting early on the boss/target.
How are you writing your stop casting macros to start the next shot? Do they only stop the steadyshot if the other shot is off CD or any time you hit the macro?
I know other addons can do some of this already, but be neat with timing long term CDs if it told you your avg kill time on the next boss either when you target him or the fight starts etc allowing you to better plan your CDs ahead of time.
For viper tracking, sometimes its a good idea to go into viper even if you end up needing it, but you might. I.E between phases on professor putricide, but easy enough to ignore the addon’s results for that.
Again other addons could do this, but maybe track that your getting all of your buffs (or least maybe display their uptime after the fight). I.e did you move out of range of your dreani. To far away for battle shout, not getting your 10% ap from enh shaman, out ranging totems etc. Or even more simple things like you have a pally in your raid (and of course he messed up buffs) and didn’t give you kings.
What about adding something about not using disengage when you could’ve done? It’s so useful in some fights to jump sudden distances. But then again, it would have to know your situation in the fight and why you didn’t use it I suppose.
Anyone know if exist addon which can spam button instead of your spaming key? I mean you will hold that button and that addon will spam that button to minimize your delay and not have health problem with your wrist?
that’s called a bot and they’re illegal
What your looking for is a keyboard macro function Like the logitic one g15 if I’m not mistaking. If you can’t get a keyboard with that function. Then speedy action add on can help reduce the input lag. What it does is it fires your ability on the button press instead of the release. Also saitek pgcu has this function and is very affordable. I think it cost 20 dollars at the wowhead store.
Also the macro feature is not illegal if your using just to spam one ability. It’s illegal when you use the macro ability to hold down one button to do a series of abilities.
Yes it is. The G15 being used to repeat a single key breaks the ToS- one hardware action, one game action. That’s the rule. Anything else can get you banned.
I think Kripparrian went over configuring the G15 key spam macro in his video blog on how to top dps in WoW.
A possible addition to lost DPS counter it:
When you volley on 2 or less mobs, you lose DPS compared to single targetting. I think volley becomes viable on 3 or more mobs.
Ack, my comment isn’t posting. Either that or it’s not showing up on my cpu and I’m about to triple post. Anyway…
Euripides, what addon are you using to track auto-shots? Or others, for that matter. I’m having trouble finding one. Thanks in advance.
I use AzCastBar swing timer, the one from quartz dosen’t work
Thanks Niko! I’ll have to give that one a shot (pun intended).
:-)
It is possible to download the pre-alpha?
This sounds like an excellent project and I’m looking forward to see the first alpha/beta release.
To provide some input you might want to look at the following.
A_d_d_o_n_: Phoenix Style. This is a raid addon that reports on some “fails” or timings on mechanics during a fight. This is not Hunter/class specific but I’m envisioning some kind of similar functionality/feeling to the addon that you are talking about.
P_o_s_t_: at EJ about Hunter DPS analysis. http://elitistjerks.com/f32/t42610-ideal_log_parser/
Some of the links at that page leads to some statistical measurements for analysis that you might want to include or could get ideas from. (http://forums.tkasomething.com/showthread.php?t=12851)
A_d_d_o_n_: There is an addon called “hAutoShot” at WoW interface. (http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info15879-hAutoShot.html). I have not tried it myself but maybe it contain code that can be of use to track missed autoshots.
Can anyone update this to this year? lol