DPS Tuning, the start of a series
Posted December 21, 2009 at 05:45 PM by Argath
I consider myself a lucky warlock. My guild has had a very stable and collaborative roster of raiding warlocks. We're always trading ideas and sharing tips we've picked up. I've been starting to compile some of the things we've shared with each other and figured this would be the perfect place to put them. So this will hopefully be the start of a series of posts on fine tuning warlock PvE raiding performance.
A good starting place is having the right toolbox. Probably the single most important add on for a warlock to have is a dot timer to give you very visible user interface feedback on when your dots are going to expire on a target. Blizzard has improved their stock UI tons over the years, but a good dot timer is one thing you really must have for raiding. One thing I'm not going to do here is recommend a particular dot timer. Instead, I'm going to recommend the features I consider essential to a good dot timer and explain why.
The first essential feature of a good dot timer is it must have an intuitive, easy to monitor display of your active dots that doesn't interfere with everything else you need to watch. This is the most basic and important job of a dot timer, and also the reason I won't recommend a specific one. Some people feel comfortable with big honkin bars counting the time. Some people like seeing only numbers and target names. It's all about what works best for you. You need to find one which is easy for you to keep track of, but doesn't get in your face so you can't see yourself standing in fire.
Another important feature is the ability to monitor dots on more than one target at a time. This makes a big difference when dealing with fights that are more than just a simple tank and spank. A good example of this is Lady Deathwhisper in Phase 1 if you're tasked with burning her mana shield and helping kill adds too.
A personal big feature for me is the ability to display damage ticks for each dot and channeled cast currently up. This is super helpful for timing when to stop a drain soul channel early if you need to refresh dots. There's a good bit of time between damage ticks on drain soul and if you stop the channel right before a damage tick is about to happen, that's a damage opportunity lost.
Similar to damage tick displays, another feature I like is spell refresh markers. These are on dot spells which aren't instant cast, like Immolation and Unstable Affliction. The refresh markers are a visual queue which show when it's safe to recast one of these spells with out clipping the last tick of the dot.
These are the things I consider must haves on a dot timer. There are many dot timer add ons which do them all and then some. I use the dot timer in the ForteXorcist package, but as I said earlier, I'm not endorsing this as the best dot timer for you. It's important to experiment with multiple add ons and find the one that suites your personal style and performs best on your machine. If you've got your own personal fav, feel free to share it here.
A good starting place is having the right toolbox. Probably the single most important add on for a warlock to have is a dot timer to give you very visible user interface feedback on when your dots are going to expire on a target. Blizzard has improved their stock UI tons over the years, but a good dot timer is one thing you really must have for raiding. One thing I'm not going to do here is recommend a particular dot timer. Instead, I'm going to recommend the features I consider essential to a good dot timer and explain why.
The first essential feature of a good dot timer is it must have an intuitive, easy to monitor display of your active dots that doesn't interfere with everything else you need to watch. This is the most basic and important job of a dot timer, and also the reason I won't recommend a specific one. Some people feel comfortable with big honkin bars counting the time. Some people like seeing only numbers and target names. It's all about what works best for you. You need to find one which is easy for you to keep track of, but doesn't get in your face so you can't see yourself standing in fire.
Another important feature is the ability to monitor dots on more than one target at a time. This makes a big difference when dealing with fights that are more than just a simple tank and spank. A good example of this is Lady Deathwhisper in Phase 1 if you're tasked with burning her mana shield and helping kill adds too.
A personal big feature for me is the ability to display damage ticks for each dot and channeled cast currently up. This is super helpful for timing when to stop a drain soul channel early if you need to refresh dots. There's a good bit of time between damage ticks on drain soul and if you stop the channel right before a damage tick is about to happen, that's a damage opportunity lost.
Similar to damage tick displays, another feature I like is spell refresh markers. These are on dot spells which aren't instant cast, like Immolation and Unstable Affliction. The refresh markers are a visual queue which show when it's safe to recast one of these spells with out clipping the last tick of the dot.
These are the things I consider must haves on a dot timer. There are many dot timer add ons which do them all and then some. I use the dot timer in the ForteXorcist package, but as I said earlier, I'm not endorsing this as the best dot timer for you. It's important to experiment with multiple add ons and find the one that suites your personal style and performs best on your machine. If you've got your own personal fav, feel free to share it here.
Total Comments 4
Comments
-
I like how you say you aren't endorsing forexorcist, but pretty much all the features you are listing out are things that exist pretty specifically as fortexorcist in one package.
Personally I do use Forte, but I just found your statement kind of funny. I think your review of must have's is somewhat tainted by what you are using. Of course you use the best addon for the things you think you have to have. :pPosted December 28, 2009 at 09:15 AM by dyson
-
You're right, dyson, I am biased by it. But it comes with a ton of other stuff that someone might not want to use, and it is a bit of a bear to configure. So ya, I'm biased toward it, but wanted to try to make a point that there's others that do the job too. I used Dotimer for ages and it worked great, I ended up switching to forte for the soul stone tracker, health stone, and summoning tools late in BC and just picked up using its dot timer cuz it was there and did the job just as well.Posted December 28, 2009 at 12:47 PM by Argath
-
Hrm, on an unrelated note: How does the styling on comments go bonkers like the one I just made? It's unreadable in my browser without hilighting the text and I didn't do anything to customize the styling.
Edit: Nevermind, I figured it out.Posted December 28, 2009 at 12:51 PM by Argath
Updated December 28, 2009 at 05:01 PM by Argath -
I just downloaded Forte last week, and it will take a while to get the hang of it. I like how your post mentioned the "clipping" of DoTs. I will pay more attention to that in the upcoming raids. All of the 'Locks have been Demo that have given me advice, and I've tried to spec out Destuc... thanks for the post.Posted January 04, 2010 at 09:15 AM by Muskal
