OutDPS!

Hi guys, you may remember that I had an idea for an addon that would help us hunters figure out what DPS we’re leaving on the table and improve our game. Well, luckily, one awesome reader stepped forward to code this. Pherra has already written the first version of the addon! It’s still in pre-pre-alpha, but we’re getting there :)

The goal here is to have an addon that will silently collect information about the currently unquantifiable “hunter skill level”, and help you improve. You will be able to look at your performance after your fight (or night) and see where you lost some DPS, as well as how you’re progressing. We might consider eventually having it tell you “oops, you shouldn’t have done that” during a fight, but not by default. The default will be a quiet addon with a small footprint that will tell you (and only you) how to become a better hunter.

Here’s the list of features we want so far. We will set the addon up so that it only tracks what you do on boss fights.

• Count the number of global cooldowns not used while in a boss fight
  • Ignore cooldowns not used when stunned, when you’re not targeting something attackable, when you’re out of range, and when you’re delaying explosive shots because of a lock and load
• Track auto-shots that didn’t go off
  • If you are moving when the swing timer is done, you miss a shot
  • If your add dies while you’re volleying, you won’t start auto-shooting until you target a new add
• Track ticks of explosive shot clipped by other explosive shots
• Track the number of times you cast a steady shot when a better shot is available
  • Also maybe check other shot priorities
• Track whether you’re using serpent sting appropriately
  • As marks, you should be re-applying your sting whenever your current +% damage and crit are higher than the one that’s “saved” on the boss’s sting
  • As survival, you should try to keep a high uptime, but never reapply a sting unless it has expired
  • No hunter should sting a target that only lives for a few seconds
• Track your viper management
  • If you go into aspect of the viper, never run OOM, and finish the fight without ever having gone below the point where you would have run out of mana without the viper, you wasted DPS
  • If you run OOM, you wasted DPS because some of your shots that are off cooldown will be unusable.

The reason I’m posting this is that I realized that the sum of the knowledge among the people who read this blog is far greater than my own. If you folks see something that could be made better, have ideas for features, or some other inspiration, let us know in the comments!

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