(Edit : The contents of this post may or may not be useful anymore. Check out my followup post to see why.)

First off, I should probably tell you my philosophy on addons.

I’m not a fan.

Oh, sure, I use some, but I generally need a very compelling reason to use them. I’m not necessarily a purist, but I do believe that the game itself should contain all of the tools necessary to become a good player.

Those few times that I find the game lacking is when I start looking for addons.

On my hunter, there is one addon that I firmly believe is almost necessary at higher levels.

Little Trouble

It does exactly one thing – it puts up a shot timer bar in the center of the screen.

Other addons do this as well – along with a plethora of other things. Quartz, for example, will give you a shot timer, and time all of your debuffs on the mobs. I use the timer on my actual debuff to do that, so I prefer LittleTrouble, since all it does is give me a shot timer, and all I need is a shot timer.

Shot Timer
It’s very important that I tell you what I mean when I say “shot timer”, since it may not be the same thing that everyone else means.

This is the same thing as a swing timer is for melee.

It looks like a cast bar. It constantly refills and redraws itself, every single time my hunter makes an autoshot.

It does not “track” cast times on shots, like Steady Shot or Aimed Shot.

All it tells you is when your character actually shoots their weapon for an autoshot.

The only in-game equivalent is listening or watching your character. When do they rock back? When do you hear the sound of the gun cracking or the arrow loosing?

This is not nearly exact enough for my liking. When does the actual shot timer begin? at the beginning of the rock? Before the shooting sound? After it?

When you start timing your shots (ie : after you get Steady Shot), knowing the exact moment that your autoshot rotation resets is hugely useful.

When I say that LittleTrouble is a “Shot timer”, I only mean that it tracks your autoshot for you.

Clipping
Clipping your autoshots is bad. If you “clip” your autoshot, that means that by casting a special (Arcane, Steady, etc), you delayed the shooting of an autoshot.

Autoshots are your bread. Clipping them, delaying them, that means that your dps suffers. And if you do it very often at all, your dps can REALLY suffer.

And Blizzard apparently doesn’t care, because the only way that a hunter can KNOW about this is to visit blogs or Elitist Jerks. The game never teaches this to you. Never shows you when you clip an autoshot. Without some kind of addon, you can never truly know whether or not you’ve clipped an autoshot.

LittleTrouble shows you when you clip your autoshots. It doesn’t give a giant flashy warning, but if you’re paying attention, you can see it.

LittleTrouble’s User Interface is just a constantly refilling cast bar. Over and over again, starts at the left, fills up to the end, then starts at the left again. Predictable as memory loss in Lex Luthor on Smallville.

If LittleTrouble ever hitches…pauses a moment before beginning a new cast bar? That means you clipped an autoshot. The next autoshot didn’t begin when it was supposed to, it was delayed.

Before I got LittleTrouble, I’d have sworn to you that Arcane Shot couldn’t clip an autoshot. And that surely Kill Command wouldn’t clip. After all, it was a pet attack, not a personal attack, right?

Wrong.

LittleTrouble doesn’t lie. It simply tracks when your character does an autoshot.

If that autoshot gets delayed, it tracks that too.

How to Use LittleTrouble
I use LittleTrouble to perfect my shot rotation. I know exactly where, on the little cast bar, I should push the button to cast my Steady Shot. (for reference, its JUST as the cast bar finishes. If I wait till it starts a new one, I waste time).

I can use it to test a theory on shot rotations. I use it as a constant reminder not to clip my autoshots.

And if I’m playing horribly, it tells me that, too. If I get lazy and stop paying attention, my dps suffers. I can see that on the dps meters (I use Recap, for reasons I’ll explain in a different post), but I can see it DURING the fight, too. Just by watching LittleTrouble.

Summary
LittleTrouble is THE hunter addon for me. By doing one, simple thing – tracking my autoshot timer – it teaches me to be a better hunter. I can use that one piece of information to tweak my performance, to enhance and polish my shot rotation.

That’s the kind of addon I love. The kind that doesn’t play the game for you, but gives you the information I need in order to be a better player – in this case, just reporting something that I feel all hunters need to know.

If you don’t know when your autoshots fire, how can you possibly avoid clipping your autoshots?

Hats off to you, LittleTrouble developers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 and is filed under DPSers, ~ Vonya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.