Many moons ago, Euripides put out a call to arms – would anyone be willing to write an addon to check for preventable hunter DPS losses? The call was answered promptly, but over the following months, it seemed like the hunter DPS addon was somewhere between vaporware and a blogger-style urban legend. With the ensuing rush of Cataclysm announcements, some even bet that it would be finished, but only when the stutter-step impaired could run around with adequate DPS. Well, such dismissals are no longer needed. I am happy to announce that the availability of the addon, DPSCheck.
The first function of DPSCheck is to check for sources of missing auto shots. If you fail to fire an auto shot because you are moving, it will be recorded. If you get too close to the boss and hit it with whatever stick you have handy, it will be recorded. All of these will be tallied to estimate the total number of auto shots you should have fired and compare it to what how many you actually fired. If you were moving, the half second delay until you try to fire again is compared against your current ranged attack speed to compute a fractional lost shot. If you took a melee swing, it is always counted as a lost auto shot. (Technically, melee and ranged attack speeds should be compared, but melee hunters are beyond uncool now.)
The second function of DPSCheck is to look at your shot selection and point out priority problems. At the moment, priorities are up in the air as 4.0.1 hits the live servers, so only Arcane Shot and Readiness usage are checked now. The Arcane Shot checks make sure our heavy duty shots like Chimera Shot, Explosive Shot, and Kill Shot are not skipped. Later, they will be aware of the need to save focus and switch to Steady or Cobra Shot. The Readiness checks are just a reminder to use Rapid Fire before you reset the cool down. These checks will be expanded over the next few weeks as real priorities are finalized for each spec.
Using the addon is pretty simple. First, go out and kill stuff. Then look for the DPSCheck icon on your minimap and click on it. (If you have a fancy data broker display, you’ll probably see an icon in your bars too.) Once you click on the DPSCheck icon, a report window will open up. You’ll see a row for each fight you’ve been in with a bar illustrating your performance that fight. If it is all blue, you’re doing things right. If it has more grey, then there’s room for improvement and there will be an explanation of where things seem astray below the bar. The default report is for missed auto shots, but you can look at other shot usage or filter which fights you are looking at with the pulldown menu at the top of the report window.
Developing this addon did wonders for my personal DPS. Hopefully it will help yours too. Please try it out and let us know what you think.
[Edit: Uploaded to Curse too now.]
Awesome job on this.
Will you be updating this for 4.0.1(focus and new rotations) or is this already update for 4.0.1?
The code already supports 4.0.1 but most of the priority checks are disabled as the optimal rotations are still being worked out. It isn’t 100% clear what shot damages are rolling out today since there have been significant gaps between the PTR and Beta recently. I hope to reenable the priority checks with something reasonable within the week.
Any chance of hosting this on Curse?
Sure. I’ll probably get to that tonight.
I uploaded it last night, but it’s waiting for approval still.
Finally got it up this morning – http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/dpscheck.aspx
Awesome stuff, big thanks for making this.
I’ll probably wait for priority checks to get polished first.
Wow I was starting to doubt that this would never happen but now that its here I can’t wait to try it out. Congrats on making it this far. I hope that when Cataclysm goes live that you guys will be able to take into account the time in Aspect of the Fox that could have been spent studder stepping instead. If this works as advertised I think this will be a major leap forward in helping the common hunter lift themselves to the top of the dps meters through self improvement.
Aspect of the Fox was redesigned, so stutter stepping is still needed. Now it makes Steady and Cobra Shot work on the move, but you still lose auto shots.
Awesomesauce is the word.
Pherra,
Thanks for the hard work. Will there be a update message somewhere when you put out revisions? Just wondering..
Yes, I will definitely post major feature improvements. We will see about minor fixes.
Everything has been said, so I just write a big large thanks!! we do appreciate all the time you surely had to put here.
Just one thing. That priority list you mention, will we be able to set our own in the future or will we be fixed with the recommended by the addon? I use a priority shot addon (watcher) and can already see me playing around with new rotations and testing how close I actually followed them on my tests.
Half the complexity of our new rotations will be from saving up focus for our harder hitting shots as they come off cooldowns. Exposing all the complexity there is unlikely to happen any time soon. A simpler interface just saving focus for one shot (a la Zeherah’s focus simulator http://www.femaledwarf.com/focus/ ) would be manageable, but would be behind coding up basic checks for the evolving best practices.
Another possibility is following the priority list of Watcher. That has the advantage of not needing GUI coding, which was most of the delay getting the addon released. I’m pretty good with the analysis logic, but my GUI skills are weak. Again, that would be behind coding up checks for current best practices in shot priorities.
I’ve been following watcher closely and encouraging others to use it. Gellin add a new function for us hunters and arcane shot. In watcher you can now add priority list and add a min or max focus/mana/energy required to cast a shot. I’ve found that immensely helpful for SV right now. I got the standard, HM, SS, ES, BA, AS, SS. But I got AS on a min 70 focus. I have been playing with 80, 60, 50, etc. 70 seems to give me the most dps right now. But then, I wanna try it with your addon, so I can see the number of shots I missed due to lack of attention, or just fast clicking, etc. MM seems to be a bit more straight forward (to predict), but we’ll see.
I want to also be able to plot some numbers of ES/BA/SS I missed due to lack of focus using AS on casting when >50, >60, >70, etc.
I went and ran in a 10 man ICC last night. I had this running and found I was missing a number of auto shots. I think it was merely positioning and moving on things like Marrowgar and Blood Princes. Have to check more. Ran Marrowgar as SV (4/0/32) then to LadyD as BM (31/0/5). Was putting out roughly 8.5-9k. Switched back to SV from Lootship on. Pushed to 10k to end the night (cleared through Deathbringer, all of Plague, and Blood Quarters.
I have to say, it was very easy to figure out the 2-3 Steady Shot insert for focus regen. Not sure if it was the best way, but worked for me.
Additionally….Serpent Sting/Multi Shot….WOW. WOW WOW WOW. With the talents to improve the SS damage, as well as the spread feature talent in conjunction of Multi, plus the glyph for SS…this worked very well. I recall with Volley it was really sub par on anything less then 4 mobs. now, even with just 2 mobs up, popping a quick Multi is worth while. At least it seemed so to me.
doing 10k in a 10 man ICC seemed to be an upgrade to me. Anyone feel free to correct me if my interpretation is off.
Thanks!
Q
BTW, any chance you can host your addon on curse too? just for those of us with curse client (I have use the minion thing from wowinterface, but I did not like it).
Already submitted once, but they took a day and a half to come back and say they wanted a longer description. I’ll get it up one of these days.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/dpscheck.aspx