21 April 2009

Skada redux

Quick update on skada, the damage meter I reviewed the other day.

As promised, I took it into Naxx for a more thorough road test.

The first thing I noticed when logging in on Merlot was my old paladin data. Oddly, it does not work independently on each character. Is that going to be an issue? Probably not, I don't know.

We zoned into Naxx, I reset the counters, and off we went.

You'll remember I mentioned it tracked overall data and recorded individual fights at the same time. This made it much easier to track my personal performance as well as the raid's overall on the fly. From one window, you can click through to total or single mob breakdowns - and if you can do this easily on recount, I've never figured out how. It's a sad reminder of just how sluggish I am on bosses compared to trash.

The actual data seemed to tally closely with recount's, which is encouraging. But I surprised myself by wanting to see how much my dots were ticking for, and how big my thadius crits were, and that's something I can't find in skada.

I really don't want to have to run two damage addons at the same time (my system's creaky enough as it is) so I hope the skada dev is looking into this. I'll leave an encouraging note on curse.

Overall, I'm still impressed. It works out of the box and it seems to work well, and there's probably a lot more I don't know about buried in the options.

BTW, what happened to my dps in the patch? Have I forgotten how to play or have all the other classes left shadow in the dust?

6 comments:

Ho Ho said...

"BTW, what happened to my dps in the patch? "I'm not sure what it was but I like it! I'm pretty much constantly #1-3 caster in 25-man raid, though we often have 3-5 melees in front of us. Overall for yesterday's 3.5h raid I was #5 on overall damage done. Definitely not bad :)

Before the patch I was around #10-15 on Patchwerk, though still in top #5 overall on bosses.

Merlot said...

That's not good - I've moved in the opposite direction (from 3-5 to 9-10). It's me then, I'm shit :P

CC said...

If it's any consolation, it's happening to my shadow priest, too. Or at least it did in our first night of 25s. I barely cracked 3k a lot of attempts. Just take another look at your rotation/priority scheme. Especially on fights like XT, it is IMPERATIVE to keep DoTs up all the time. I wasn't doing it and my DPS suffered. They can crit now, after all.

Good luck ... at least for now, all I can say is SHADOW BUFFS MY BUTT, BLIZZ.

Azurae said...

Heyla,

Your dps drop might have come from your gear. We have 2 SP in our raids, I tend to prefer crit over haste due to latency issues, and the other SP was the opposite. Pre-patch he was slightly ahead of me, but we were still pretty close. Post patch in Ulduar I came out ahead quite a bit. So that could be what happened with you?

Merlot said...

Azurae, that's a very smart suggestion. My latency isn't too bad but I do have a very low frame rate, and that chews up any benefit I might gain from haste. And yes, my crit rate is relatively low. I've written before about how saturated the dps cloth is in haste, I've simply not been able to find enough crit gear with hit to stay capped. Looks like I'm going to have to work harder to turn that around.

Rizz said...

I was always around the top of the meters on dps pre-patch, but now I'm much lower. I've looked at my equipment, spell rotation, glyphs, etc. and can't find the problem. Did everyone else get ALOT better? I'm very discouraged =/