The ballad of sad shaman

Given that some people were so horrified by my last admission of stupidity that they've stopped reading my blog, I almost didn't post this. But then I remembered this isn't a blog about making me look good. There would be a lot more epeen and loot linking if I was out to impress.

No, I can assume that anybody looking for nothing but a marginally competent wow player to learn from has already gone elsewhere. And if that sounds vaguely like an insult to you, dear readers, I can only protest that it is not. I know you are all better than me, I just hope you enjoy the tales of my incompetence with a fatherly smile instead of a sneer.

Yesterday, I learned something. The story doesn't paint me in a good light, but it might — just — be news to one or two of you too, so I share it in good faith.

This is a post about my initiation to RankWatch, an addon that looks for players in your party who are using downranked spells and whispers them about it. You already see where this is headed, don't you?

I had caught the odd reference to the addon before, but didn't think it applied to me. After all, I haven't downranked since before they changed the mana costs of spells, and only then when healing.

So there I was in Heroic Pit of Saron on my resto shammy, bravely trying to heal a good-but-undergeared tank and agrowhore dps who didn't care who the mob was hitting when I get a whisper from one of the dps. Apparently I'd just used a downranked chain heal. And then there was another for a downranked healing wave. And then lesser healing wave!

Clearly, I was horrified. I had to halt the group while I scrolled back up and read the reams of info from RankWatch. It turns out there's a bug with duel spec toolbars where the rank of a spell on your unlearned toolbar (the spec you are not currently using) does not update automatically when you learn a new rank of the spell. So if, like me, you levelled with a secondary healing spec but tended to visit the trainer in your dps spec, there's a very real possibility this could apply to you too.

What a really stupid bug, right? I mean, who ever checks their spell ranks? Clearly not me, but if someone felt the need to write an addon for it, I can only hope this problem is more common than I fear. So, for what it's worth, here is another cautionary tale from my adventures of incompetence and proof if any were needed that you learn something new every day.

If I stop drinking, will my brain cells grow back?

Addon crises and epic instances

I think the to-do list definitely helped because the addon crisis, when it arrived, wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared.

DoTimer was up to its usual patch-day hijinks, plastering every single timer in existence on the screen. But instead of ignoring the problems and praying for a speedy update as I normally do, I bit the bullet and went shopping for something new. And boy, am I glad I did.

Based on recommendations on shadowpriest.com and various blogs, I installed fortexorcist. The interface is a little scary, but I quickly discovered that the addon is very simple and intuitive to customise — at least, to my level of detail.

By default, it places two bars on your screen — one for timers, and another for cooldowns. So far so DoTimer. But to customise anything you see, you just have to right click on it to open the interface; it even knows which section to open at. The options, which are many, often have useful tooltips, which are a huge help, and give you a lot of power when it comes to setting up your display. What this means in practice is it's very easy to stand in front of a target dummy casting spells and setting it up on the fly.

But it's the cooldowns display that really impressed me about fortexorcist. Instead of a huge list of yet more timers, it gives you a single timeline. The icons of your spells move along the timeline until they drop off in a flourish, indicating that the spell is ready again. You can scale this bar, have it run horizontal or verticle, and have the timers run to the left or right. It's a brilliant piece of design.

I've got my cooldowns running perpendicular to my timers, so I can easily track both in the same space (they run up the side of my timers list). This is a huge improvement on my DoTimer setup where I had cooldowns in a different part of the screen to avoid visual conflict with the timers. As one of my biggest failings is not casting mind blast enough, it will be interesting to see if this setup has a positive impact on my dps. If you promise not to faint in shock, I'll try and remember to take some screenshots tonight for use as illustrations!

The only downside I've noticed so far is a slight lag between casting a dot and seeing it on the timer list; DoTimer is completely instant.

After I'd sorted out my addons, I signed up for the new 5-mans as scheduled and trotted off to look for the entrance. I didn't know about the teleport thing. How cool is that? All that time and gold I've wasted flying to Nexus! Sadly I ended up healing, so can't tell you what's happened to my dps, but in the process of running them I managed to collect several items that pushed my haste up to around 600 with only a minimal loss of spellpower and crit. Must get to a dummy tonight to test it out.

I was a bit too focused on Grid to fully explore the new instances, but I was generally very impressed with the designs, the way they were held together by a fantastic storyline, and the way they climax in a truly epic final encounter. I never fully appreciated how intense Sylvanas was before last night. You couldn't go out with her, could you? It'd be exhausting.

But the highlight of the night? The funky porno-style music during the Bronjahm fight. Seriously, so good I nearly died humming along to it.

And I am loving the new daily dungeon quest — 10 badges for spanking Patch on 10 man? Yes please! Even better, according to today's hotfix, you can now upgrade emblems of triumph for emblems of frost. I'm not sure this is the right thing for the game, but it's certainly the right thing for me. Bring it on!

My next job is to replace ag_unitframes, a prospect that fills me with dread every time I consider it. I've heard good things about shadow unit frames but I don't think it's on Curse (I couldn't live without the Curse client). If you are all selfishly keeping the world's best unit frame addon to yourself, now is the time to take pity on me and break silence.

Patch day torment

Patch days are torture. I have nearly 40 addons, 10 characters, four dual specs, and - worst of all - two computers with different screen sizes to update, which even ordinarily are a headache to manage. The pain is usually offset by the excitement of new features and content, but for some reason I just can't get worked up by this patch. Clearly there's nothing good for priests, and even the new raid hasn't got my blood pumping. It's just not that... exciting.

For the first hour last night I was stuck in a logon loop that saw me kicked instantly every time I tried to access any character in Dalaran, like some digital sisyphus. I spent some time on my enhancement shaman Uglybetty instead (female troll, natch), and was very annoyed by the earth shock change. Now I have to hotbutton wind shock too. (Who said this game was getting easier?)

When I eventually did get back on Merlot I went straight into a raid with no chance to test my addons. I discovered the hard way that dotimer had decided to helpfully display EVERY debuff on the boss and EVERY raid-wide buff on ALL 25 PLAYERS, ag_unitframes had given up changing names on target frames and showed the same name regardless of who I targetted, and grid had reset my profile and lost all COLOUR. That's right, my grid is now black and white. There were the brand-spanking new patch day updated versions, too. I had no choice but to continue raiding through the chaos, automatically closing lua error windows every couple of minutes as we went. Badges are badges, right?

We raided so long I didn't have time to look at the problems afterwards. So I have one computer in complete chaos, and all of this to look forward to tonight when I log on to the second.

The patch mess will pass, but I still need to think about how I can simplify the general customisation process. The two-computer setup is a problem, but it's not going to change as long as I spend my weeks at two different locations. What I need is shared network location for my addon settings, or an easy way to sync the two. Is there one easy folder I could backup to the internet, perhaps?

On a more positive note, I also trialled a neat little addon called mind flay timer last night. You probably have this already, right? It's really simple: it posts a raid warning and chimes every time your mind flay ticks, so you can keep track of them. I don't like nochannelling macros so this is a better solution for me to ensure I don't clip my flays. What I discovered while using it is just how erratic my mind flay ticks are. The first two ticks often bunch together, and the third tick quite often doesn't kick in till the channelling animation and cast bar timers have ended. This sounds like a bug that appeared when Wrath first launched, but it's been long fixed. So I am assuming this is either a symptom of my own lag or an issue with the addon itself. I'm guessing it's lag. When I eventually get my timers back I'll be able to spend some time on the dummies to work it out.

All in all, a very frustrating night, but no worse than any other patch day.

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?

Merlot reviews an addon ...and it's got pictures

I'm not very addon-literate. I don't understand how they work and struggle with the setup and management of some of the more complex ones. I like things that I can just load and forget.

But over time, I have wrestled with a few beasts like ag_unitframes, grid and auctioneer. I use the curse client to keep them all up to date (when it works) and even occasionally delve into the murky depths to see if someone somewhere has invented something to do that special thing I've been struggling with. That's how I found shacklewatch.

Recount has been my constant companion since I began raiding. But, like my computer, I am vaguely aware that is capable of much more than I use it for. I have no idea what a lot of the tick boxes do, and when it starts reporting strange numbers and randomly loosing data, I have no understanding of why or how to fix it.

Trouble is, I wasn't aware of any other options besides wws, which frankly looks even scarier than recount, doesn't deliver real-time information and requires all that fannying about afterwards.

But last night, while browsing curse, I saw "skada damage meter" in a list of popular addons. It promised something similar to recount in a simpler format (or words to that effect...)

So on a whim, I installed it to my paladin alt and set off for some questing in dragonblight to give it a road test.

Skada's report window is clean and smart. It uses a simple system of left-click to drill down and right-click to move back up the navigation. It's a bit disorienting to begin with, without a navigation bar, but it very quickly becomes second nature.

It provides many of the main top-level reports that you get in recount, but this main view shows you a useful overall summary:

Drill down — into damage, for example — and you get first the totals:

Then a summary of where that damage came from:

And finally a full breakdown of individual moves:

I like the recount pie chart, but doubt I'll miss it.

If skada records the minimum, average and maximums of each move, like recount does, I couldn't find it. I like looking at those numbers, but I'm not sure I need them for performance analysis.

Skada makes accessing individual fight data much easier than recount, as you can see from this view:

You then drill down to see your performance against each individual mob. This might rapidly get unweildy in trash pack scenarios, I'm not sure. But I assume it would come in very handy for boss kills and consecutive boss attempts.

I have yet to test skada in a raid setting — that's next — so I can't comment on its accuracy or on how it handles data for 25 people. It promises a low system profile, but I admit I don't really know how to test this claim or how it stores all this data without hogging at least some resources.

Skada is slicker and more intuitive than recount in many ways, while superficially appearing to provide close to the same level of data. But it is not as neatly packaged as recount. You do not set up and control skada from the report interface. In fact, there are two — yes, two — separate menus for doing this.

To configure what skada records and how you share it with other gamers, there is a minimap button with a simple but extensive list of expanding options, much as you get with, say, grid. To send a report to chat, you've got to go into several separate lines, check the appropriate options, then click a separate option to send the report. It's not hard, but it's not as easy as recount.

Then, to control the appearance of skada, and a few other things, there is a separate set of options via the in-game addon menu. These are fairly standard too, but resizing the report window could be easier than it is.

A lot of these limitations and frustrations may simply be down to the addon's immaturity. Over time, the developer may well improve and extend how it works. From what little I've seen so far, I believe they have a very strong foundation. I'll be taking skada into my next raid with Merlot and seeing how it functions with 24 other people to watch.

Have you tried skada? What did you think? Any hints or tips on getting the most out of it?

Shackliscious

Two things every priest should have by the time they hit auchindoun: a shackle macro and the addon ubershackle.

Auchenai crypts and sethekk halls are the first instances in Outland with undead, which is why I picked auchindoun as a starting point. If you are still levelling through Azeroth and plan on running scholomance or stratholme, they could come in handy much sooner. Either way, it's time to elbow that mage out of the way and show them all some real crowd control. None of those fancy shape-shifting tricks, this is all about power.

Shackle Undead is an awesome ability. It roots an undead mob and prevents them from acting for up to 50 seconds at max rank. Other classes can crowd control undead too (paladins can fear, hunters can trap) but a shackle is the safest and most reliable form.

The hardest part of crowd control is ensuring the target stays locked down as long as required, and the biggest danger is that it breaks early or breaks and goes unnoticed. So we're going to tackle these issues with out neat new tools. The right macro will make the job of shackling much easier, while ubershackle will keep an eye on the shackled mob leaving you to focus on dps.

First, the macro. This is the one I use:

#show Shackle Undead
/clearfocus [modifier:shift]
/clearfocus [target=focus,dead]
/clearfocus [target=focus,noexists]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus] Shackle Undead
/p **** shackling %f ****

This is a basic focus macro that you'll find all over the internet. It will set your current target as your focus, shackle them, and announce to your party which mob you are shackling. You can then switch targets to dps. If you click this macro again it will reapply the shackle to the original target without you having to change your current target.

Once your focused target is dead, you can start again on a new mob and it will automatically reset your focus — at the start of a new pull, for example. If you want to shackle a different mob before your focus is dead, you hold down shift to reset your focus.

The beauty of this macro, and others like it, is that you don't have to tab target or click mobs every time you have to reshackle. If you've ever been in a tight spot with four or five mobs flying around you will know how slow and awkward that process can be. The shackle simply becomes another spell in your dps rotation.

But wait — how do I know when to reshackle, I hear you ask. A very astute and timely question.

If you use a dot timer, your shackle should show up. So you can watch it count down. But that won't tell you if the shackle breaks early. You could position yourself so you can see your shackled target, but that's not always easy and it will take your attention from dps. The answer is ubershackle.

This really simple addon by ferdydurke does two things: it flashes up countdown messages at 20 seconds, 10 seconds and 5 seconds from the end of the shackle, and it shows an alert and plays a sound when the shackle breaks. It will do this whether the shackle expires or breaks early. It works by following your focus, so it's only any good if you use it in combination with a macro.

So with ubershackle you should always know the status of your shackled mob, and with the macro it becomes a trivial task to keep them locked down.

A priest who can shackle well is an absolute godsend in these instances, and even more so in karazhan. Mages and rogues will sniff indignantly as you breeze past them to the front of the pack, your mystical chains at the ready.

With the scourge plague in Northrend, and a few tricks like these up our sleeves, I fully predict priests will become the number one chariot at crowd control in Wrath.

Spell rotation? What spell rotation?

Let's say you are a fire mage in Shadow Labs. Your party has arrived at Murmor, the leader has explained the fight and you have been assigned a pillar. You give your tank a few moments to gain agro and open up. You cast five scorches followed by a stream of fireballs. Every 30 seconds you scorch again. You may have to pause to avoid a sonic boom or slow down to temper your threat. But essentially you just carry on. The worst that could happen is the scorch debuff drops off and you have to start again. Life is blissfully uncomplicated.

Not so for the shadow priest. Shadow priests have to juggle an irritatingly complex range of spell durations, casting times and cooldowns in order to maximise our damage output. A resist, some lag or the need to move simply slow a mage down; they make a shadow priest want to scream.

In a typical fight opening, it will take you 4.5 seconds to apply your dots and debuffs — 1.5 seconds for vampiric embrace (global cooldown), 1.5 seconds for vampiric touch and 1.5 seconds for shadow word: pain.

Now you have to decide what spells to cast while they take their course. Your key priority is to ensure maximum uptime of your dots without overlap, so the duration of those spells will determine your next move. Vampiric touch lasts 15 seconds; shadow word: pain, if talented (and it should be), lasts 24. You need to start casting vampiric touch 1.5 seconds before it is due to expire, which gives you 12 seconds to play with.

The easiest thing to do in that time is cast four mind flays, which last 3 seconds each. Then you can reapply vampiric touch at exactly the right moment. You then have time for another three mind flays before having to reapply shadow word: pain. Back to mind flay ad nauseum. This is a very mana efficient spell rotation and will serve you well in long fights where threat is an issue or dps is not.

It sounds simple enough, right? But even juggling just these three spells is problematic. The number of mind flays you can cast in-between reapplying dots varies every time and sometimes they don't fit in the gap at all. It gets harder when you want to weave mind blast and shadow word: death into the mix too.

Your spell rotation becomes a matter of determining the length of time to your next dot application, factoring cooldowns and avoiding dot voids and overlaps. From this point forward you will need the mathematical powers of a savant.

Smart readers out there will already have spotted other sabats in my spell casting cogs. Lag can play havoc with efficient spellcasting, as can certain debuffs, the need to move frequently during a fight, or a pause to reduce threat.

So shadow priests have very little in the way of spell rotations. This is what keeps face melting so interesting, and what makes it a bit more varied and spontaneous than other magical dps. But it's also one reason why some shadow priests may be performing below their potential (me for starters).

The good news is Blizzard appears to be aware of our pain and looking at a few options for the expansion. In the meantime, all we can go on is priorities, a concept which the dwarf priest established so beautifully in a post a few months ago. If you really want to know which spell to cast, take a look at his flowchart.

And as you should have realised by now, you can't perform your function competently without a solid dot timer. Intuitively, I used dotimer. A cast bar mod will also come in handy — Quartz, part of the Ace framwork, incorporates timers and usefully shows me things like lag and adjusted cast times.

2.4 hangover

While I should be out discovering Quel'Danas and mopping up the gold from a flood of new dailies, I am instead pulling my hair at the damage that 2.4 reaped to my set up. Firstly, the patch update went askew and I had to reset WoW to a previous version. This wiped all my local settings (including, most annoyingly, every macro from all of my 9 characters). Now I am left struggling to restore my UI and get my addons back up and running. The two addons I use the most, recount and omen, are completely dead, but I don't know enough about addons to figure out the problem, let alone try and fix it.

All of this at least means I've found myself standing around in UC a lot, with enough time to scrutinise the auction house and spam trade for goods and services. The upshot is two very nice improvements to my gear.

Firstly, I bit the bullet and forked out 400g for two nether vortexes, giving me the mats for a belt of blasting and ending my dithering over which belt to plump for. The vortexes have only been tradable for a few days, so I probably paid over the odds, but 200g is still better than the 600g people were demanding before the patch so it feels like a reasonable price. The tailor charged me 100g for crafting and now it's all mine!

Secondly, with only a week to go until the darkmoon faire hits Mulgore, I was getting desperate to complete my blessings deck. I picked up my last card, the six of blessings, for 250g; not a very nice price but probably the going rate. So come Monday, I will be sporting the mouthwatering darkmoon card: crusade. I'm desperate for a decent trinket and this will do nicely.

The upshot of this spending spree is that I am now broke. So broke, in fact, I can't afford the gems for my belt. I will have to stick a couple of green spell damage gems in there till I can grind enough gold for the better ones. Once I've fixed my addons, it shouldn't take too long to grind the gold for them. Meanwhile, I've got to look around for a new project. Maybe lower city rep for that gavel of unearthed secrets...

Hunter to the rescue

Thank the Sunwell for Big Red Kitty.

Missing in action

So I downloaded Omen and took it for a test ride in Steamvaults. Was I naive to think it would work right out of the box?

I knew there was a problem when only two of the five members of the team appeared in the threat list — me and a lock, with a separate line for his pet. The addon assumed the lock was tanking, so the threat I recorded was relative to his. When I reached the default threat setting (90%), the screen started flashing red, alarms went off and messages dropped like spam in the chat channel. I thought the world was ending.

I've no idea why the other players weren't on Omen's radar — they were certainly causing threat. I flicked through the setting options but failed to find the 'make sure all your party are displayed' button.

So now I feel incredibly dumn and am in search of an idiots' guide. If you know of one, please put me out of my misery.

I switched it off and ran the rest of Steamvaults blind, so to speak. I took a couple of hits for my trouble but really wonder if Omen would have made any difference. What do you think? Is Omen a must-have for raiding or just another distraction when you're trying to do your job?