The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
Followup on Little Trouble
by Vonya
My post yesterday about LittleTrouble hinged on autoshot clipping being a Very Bad Thing.
Esoth pointed out that autoshot clipping is no longer really an issue for hunters, which blew my fragile little mind.
Until Tayt grows up a bit more, I can’t TRULY test this. Zasp (being the totally awesome and wonderful and in-posession-of-a-level70-hunter person that he is) tested it a little for me yesterday. His tests seemed to bear up the absurd allegation that hunters really don’t need to worry about autoshot clipping anymore. At they very least, they didn’t DISPROVE it.
(Before you ask, yes, I have a perfectly good level 70 hunter of my own. I, however, was on a mission yesterday, shopping for silver sandals to wear to my friend’s wedding. Some things take precedence.)
So what I promise is this : I will test it.
As soon as Tayt gets high enough to have Steady Shot, I’ll do some testing and get back to you. And then I’ll test again when she’s got really nice gear, to see if the increase in RAP and soforth has any effect on it.
For those who, like me, hadn’t heard of the change, the long and short of it seems to be that only the first bit of Steady Shot’s cast time has a chance to clip an autoshot. Or something along those lines. This isn’t an official post from me on the subject because, as you can see, I don’t understand it well enough yet to offer advice.
So for now, take the theorycraft suggestions behind yesterday’s LittleTrouble post with a grain of salt. The addon still does what I say it does, it just may not actually be the huge boost to dps that I thought it was. I will definitely still be using it, especially when testing the clipping and soforth, so I’m not detracting my recommendation for using it.
Yet.
=]
Many thanks to Esoth for pointing that out – gives me something to look forward to! I love answering questions like this – what’s my dps spamming Steady Shot? What’s my dps with a Steady/Auto rotation? What’s my dps using my old Auto/Arcane+BW/Auto/Steady/Auto/Steady/Auto/Arcane+BW rotation? What’s my dps using a macro? What about this other macro? Does it matter if it’s a boss fight versus trash mobs?
I love testing that stuff. And with Recap I get instant gratification to find out where that dps came from. And I can use WWS reports for full-length run testing!
I may not get into the nuts and bolts of the numbers, but I can definitely provide proof of concept.
In the meantime, feel free to do your own testing, and hopefully come back and post your findings in the comments!
April 18th, 2008
[...] the many classes in the World of Warcraft gaming universe. « Combat Leveling – Part 1 of 3 Followup on Little Trouble [...]
April 18th, 2008
A handy tool if you didn’t know about it is Cheeky’s spreadsheet http://forums.tkasomething.com/showthread.php?t=8616
It has a pretty steep learning curve, but you have the ability to enter all of your gear, create custom gear, enter your talents, choose and spec your pet, select your shot rotation, etc. It will then calculate your theoretical dps on the Gear tab. Now this will basically assume that you are standing still, not worried about aggro, and all of your procs and crits are normalized to where they will be. That is, this is a model, not a substitute for testing in game on boss fights. However, I have found it to be a very, very helpful tool.
April 18th, 2008
Also, I would like to point out that auto clipping is still in issue, just in a different, confusing way. It’s like they made the system a little more forgiving and potential to more easily do more dps, but much more complicated. My brain hurts.
April 18th, 2008
Auto shot clipping to me is a serious issue as our white damage is most of our damage. And depending upon spec steady shots rise up as a probably the second most for damage. I will check out Cheeky’s sheet though I’ve been meaning to but keep forgetting.
The primary time I’ve seen that clipping auto shot is needed is in a pvp situation where you need some burst so you throw out all your special shots. Even then you’ll probably have an auto go off in the middle
May 1st, 2008
Always nice to stumble upon a website that mentions my addon, as for the disucssion about clipping id say its still an issue. But even with a macro for shoot rotation i still use LittleTrouble, sometimes to time specials or to see how much lagg is affecting my rotation. Or for my favorite use, to time movement between shots if needed. I gave the swing module of quartz a try, altho it is as accurate as my addon, it sometimes bugs out so i went back to LittleTrouble