Druid DPS and Heal macro help

[Starbuck_Jones]

So ive been trying to make a single button smash easy button for my druid slaves. Im playing a paladin and 4 druids.

Here is my current boss fighting dps macro.

/castsequence reset=10 Insect Swarm, Moonfire, Starfire, Starfire, Starfire, Insect Swarm, Rejuvination, Wrath, Wrath, Wrath

With the glyph of starfire extending the moonfire dot by 9 seconds and various haste procs I can reliably get through this entire rotation well before Moonfire falls off. The rejuvination they cast on themselves and this has GREATLY enhanced their survivability on bosses that do odd things like AOE attacks or some other splash damage that hits the whole group no matter what.

What I have been trying to do is use two /click commands, put in some extra commas so it will trigger a heal on the paladin. Im attempting to get 4 rolling lifeblooms, So far its not been very successfull.

click1 = /castsequence reset=10 Insect Swarm, Moonfire, Starfire, Starfire, Starfire, Insect Swarm, Rejuvination, Wrath, Wrath, Wrath

click2 = /target sbjones ; /cast lifebloom; /assist sbjones

So far no matter where I put extra commas in the dps macro, regardless when im spamming the button about 2-3 times a second in fights or even slower, it always casts lifebloom after a spell that has a casting time. So the spell rotation comes out to be the following.

InsectS, Moon, Star, LifeB, Star, Lifeb, star, is, rej, wrath, lb, wrath, lb, wrath, Then repeat. Problem is this stacks lifebloom instead of letting it roll and bloom. It chews up way too much mana. I Have tried putting a bunch of commas and spaces in the lifebloom macro, but it becomes really really random if it decides to cast it or not then. Sometimes it will cast it after every other spell, other times it wont cast it for 20 seconds.

Anyway, If anyone has a macro already set up or has any input, I would like to hear it.

[wendalf]

Nevermind, you weren't talking about the second macro.

[Taliesin]

I think you found the same complication I ran into last night playing with the shaman macro here ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=203940#post203940').

While casting Starfire in the /castsequence, it will continue to try sending Starfire to the server until it is actually cast, but the client likely cancels the command before sending since you are in the middle of casting it already (why spam the server with something it is already doing). Since that command fails for now, it falls through to the second /click, trying to send the /cast Lifebloom. Since there's the known lag of castsequence waiting for the server to respond that the cast is done and the sequence can be advanced, in the background it may catch the lifebloom request that has been spammed in the meantime and accepts that as the next input before you get your next sequence spell off. The lifebloom may seem random because it will depend on whether the timing was just right to send that right as the last sequence spell just finished (and before the client receives it's update).

Instant spells won't suffer from this, as there is no casting to wait on, resulting in the server immediately telling the client to advance the sequence before you even press the key again (unless you're really clicking like crazy).

Hope that makes sense. Not sure I can explain it much better. I'm not sure how to improve these hierarchy style of macros without just managing it manually.

[wowphreak]

click1 = /castsequence reset=10 Insect Swarm, Moonfire, Starfire, Starfire, Starfire, Insect Swarm, Rejuvination, Wrath, Wrath, Wrath, <- extra comma

click2 = /target sbjones ;/castsequence lifebloom, lifebloom, lifebloom,regrowth; /assist sbjones

this may work just a though yeh could also place that extra comma in another place with yer other druids.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Humm. Ill give that a try, Im at work and not able to test till later. I am wondering though maybe im doing it backwards. I read up on a few other posts useing /click and dot's. Maybe change it to the following.

/castsequence lifebloom ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, (2presses per second, give it an extra second)
/dps macro

Thus in theory the lifebloom will get cast every 16 presses of the button. Rest of the time the dps macro is going. Im thinking this will work, but how to get it to roll lifeblooms across 4 druids at a 2s interval.
This might work.
lifebloom ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ,,
,, ,,Lifebloom ,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ,,
,, ,, ,, ,,Lifebloom ,, ,, ,, ,,
,, ,, ,, ,, ,, ,,Lifebloom ,, ,,


Basicaly a druid will fire off a lifebloom every 4 presses of the key... But im not sure how it will work with starfire and wrath. If its casting the spell and im still hitting the button, I can see this just bunching up all the lifeblooms after the first 3.5 second cast. Im sure they will all do it ok, but instead of a nice smooth lifebloom roll going, it will be weaksauce HOT and bunch blooming for mass overhealing instead of a nice bloom every 2 seconds or so. I dont expect it to be perfect but a more evenly spaced heals.

[Starbuck_Jones]

I got it to work. I was right and that I needed to put the heal macro first over the DPS instead of trying to comma drop the dps macro down to the heals. For my button smashing speed, I needed 4 commas to = a second. I am pretty sure im not wailing on the button 4 times a second like some soccer mom on speed, but whatever, thats what I needed to get the timing to work. Here are my findings and macros for my 4 druids. Im not going to put in useing trinkets, silenceing ui errors or targeting, Just the stock macro part. The spaces just make it easier to read and see the timings than a long unending string of commas.

D1:/castsequence reset=10 Lifebloom ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, Lifebloom ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,,
D2:/castsequence reset=10 ,,,, ,,,, Lifebloom ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, Lifebloom ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,,
D3:/castsequence reset=10 ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, Lifebloom ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, Lifebloom ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,,
D4:/castsequence reset=10 ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, Lifebloom ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, ,,,, Lifebloom ,,,, ,,,,

Makeing the macro at a target dummy wasnt too hard, however I didnt have any real dungen experience as to if it would heal enough. You can see my druids talent spec in my sig. All of them are Ballance and none are speced for restoration. Each lifebloom ticks for about 180hp every second. This tick is a lot faster than the other HOT's but no where as much, and the bloom is healing 1800-3600 and that is going off roughly every 2-3 seconds on average once the roll starts. For normal instances, this is SO overhealing its not even funny. Lifebloom refunds half its mana when it blooms so its sucking less mana then I was useing for 4x rejuves. However I was doing the healing on the side so there were a lot of times I just did not heal. So mana consumption is a bit of a mixed bag. If I dont need heals this is a waste, when I do need them this works well. I may just spread it out more to reduce the healing, but thats all just fine tuneing I can do later.

Now the reason I have the above macro listed out for two cylces of the life bloom is for the following reason. I tried this macro in Heroic dungens and it was not enough to keep me alive. It did a decent job and if prolly 2 of the druids were resto speced, it prolly would have. My solution was more healing so right after the first lifebloom in each macro, I put in the instant cast Rejuvenation. 4x rolling lifeblooms and 4x rejuvenations was enough to keep me alive in Heroic Drak'Tharon Keep where I tested this. With the global cool downs and stuff. Rejuvenation lasted near perfect with the duration of two Lifeblooms. This really sucked the mana though. Its possable I just never paid attention, but for 3 heal spells over 18 seconds on paper used only 1300 mana, but it seemed to me to just chew through it like crazy.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Now that I have the healing out of the way, I really really need some help with getting my druids to DPS. They are sitting at 1000 spell power right now. Against the non epic target dummy I can eek out about 1200 dps. In a dungeon, they are only pushing out 800-900 dps. I know I have to be doing something wrong where my DPS is less than my spell power. My paladin with consecration and Hammer of the Righteous out DPS's my druids by a factor of two.

My normal non boss, trash killing, questing dps macro is a very simple /castrandom wrath, wrath, starfire. This pretty much gets the job done as most things are dead long before a DOT would have time to tick to duration. My boss fighting macro ive already posted in this thread. Maybe im just have completely messed up expectations when it comes to druids pew pew power, but with talents. Starfire has 1200 spell power and Wrath is 1100 spell power and im poop poop ing at 850 on average. :(

If anyone who is playing a boomkin in their group that is putting out some decent dps could share their macros or rotations I would really apreciate it.

[Smoooth]

My 73 boomkin in my mixed group has 1050 spell power and does 1100 dps. I use the mage's focus magic on him and have about a 23% crit chance. I use a very simple dps macro.


/cast [nostance:4] Moonkin Form
/castsequence [target=focustarget,harm] reset=combat Moonfire, Insect Swarm, Starfire, Starfire, Starfire

I haven't got around to getting any glyphs at all yet. I have a lot more buffs than you do but I still don't see why yours do such low dps. Before I put insect swarm in my macro I was doing 1200-1300 dps but figured the -hit debuff was worth a little drop in dps.

[Starbuck_Jones]

I have no idea either. Im at the point where im starting to try Heroics and I have more than enough healing to live, but it just takes forever to kill things with 60-80k hp trash. The first boss in Drak'Tharon Keep is a simple tank and spank DPS race. He slowly hits harder and harder to the point where he eventually just 2 shots you. Hes got like 450k hp and I can get him down to about 75k hp when my druids get one shotted from his aoe shadow suck and my paladin dies right after on the next melee hit. Thats around 20 stacks of his +damage buff. I know I can take him, I just need more DPS. About 20% more. So going from 900dps to say 1200dps should not be too hard I would think and 1000 spell power at level 80 to me seems 1200 dps should be easily attainable.

[Smoooth]

Maybe your spells are missing level 82 and 83 mobs too much. If you use improved faerie fire on the bosses you need 10% +hit or 262 hit rating to be capped. But from 0 hit rating to capped is only 14% damage or about 100-150 dps in your case.

Also I don't even spec eclipse, it's hard to get it to be useful and can only happen every 30 secs.

With your spell haste if your wrath cast time is more than 1.3 sec than it is more dps than starfire. I use starfire because I spam my dps button a little slower than most I think and can get more out of fewer, slower casts. If you use wrath you really need to be hitting that button fast for it to be worth it.

Try going into normal violet hold or something to fight lower level bosses. If you do alot more dps to them then its really just a gear issue of having low +hit and spell pen. If it doesnt go up much its probably a strat/macro issue. Let us know if you figure it out, I'm interested in how to get the most dps out of a boomkin while boxing.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Im about to leave for a weeks vacation so no wow. Thus it will be a week or more before I get back to this thread. I did some digging and came across this post.

http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t37800-wrathcalcs_moonkin_dps_spreadsheet/

Its got an excell sheet that will calculate your dps. With my stats punched in I should be seeing 1300+dps on just dry wrath spamm and up to 1700+dps if I want to juggle eclipse procs and DOT's. Just keeping moonfire up and spamming wrath should top out at 1500dps. Thats a lot more than teh 800+ im getting now. It made me do some chin scratching and I punched in 0 for the spell power and it came back with a 700-900 dps. and thats where im pretty much sitting.

Seeing how my DPS hasnt really changed in forever even though im now at 1000 spell power and proir to lich king I was at about 300, I can remember back to all the problems I had with Utguard Keep and not being able to beat that second boss till I was like level 76. Im wondering if my guys are bugged or something. A more reasonable expanation is I just suck and im doing it wrong and all my QQing is just that! LoL. Ill do some target dummy testing tonight and post some numbers later.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I've run into this as well (the DPS thing) and I notice that different DPS meters will register different DPS. With about 1600+dmg on my guys, normal instance runs net them about 1k DPS but with wrath hitting for 3k every 1.3 seconds (critting for 5k+) and both insect swarm and moonfire ticking in the background, I know that's pure bullshit. I've pretty much stopped watching the DPS meters as it is a non-productive exercise.

Most of the time, though, it's less an issue of gear and more an issue of making your DPS macros "automatic," which you seem to have gotten done pretty well. Also, not being in moonkin form means you're sacrificing a notable amount of DPS to maintain heals, ESPECIALLY with the recent change to convert 30% of spirit into spellpower while in moonkin form. I chose the 1 tree, 3 moonkin option. Haven't bothered with heroics yet as I'm still learning the normal dungeons and finishing up basic gearing and faction stuff/achievements, but the tree druid's wild growth AoE heal usually does an excellent job of keeping my alts alive. It's an option, anyway.

Final thought: druids != shamans. Can't play 'em the same way. ;P

[Starbuck_Jones]

I spent about 3h last night beating up target dummies. wrote down all my results and left my notepad at home so I dont have them. :( Ill try to cobble this together from memory.

My first baseline test was just wrath spam while naked. I had 17 spell power and I could only cast about 18 wraths before OOM. The end result was about 500 dps average. Glyphed moonfire on its own did about 115dps, and Insect Swarm did about 104. If I doubled up on the DOT's they dished out right at 200dps. So I figured if I double DOT, wrath spam, I should hit around 700dps. Wrong. I tested this over and over, not useing a cast sequence or anything, just drag and drop the spell from the book to my cast bar. I could not get over 550 dps before oom. I bet I spent a good hour on this before comming to the same conclusion Ughmahedhurtz ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=User&userID=843'). DPS meeters are inaccurate peices of junk. I was getting off about 2 less wraths due to the mana used to cast the DOT's and the total damage done was a good deal higher at the end. No way +50dps was all. It took about 30 seconds to go oom. Thats like 1500 more damage over a 30 second period for these two DOT's.

I drank beer

So with everything equipped. My wrath spam clocked in about 950 dps. Took a lot longer to go oom. I was getting in about 56 casts of it before OOM. Moonfire and Insect swarm went up a bit too. I remember about 530dps when combined. Both DOT's and wrath spam checked in at a solid consistant 1100 dps.

I drank more beer.

In the end. I wound up reading a post from Fuzzboy that was 90% shaman info and 10% druid info.
WotLK castsequences for shaman/druid (theorycrafting/long) ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=14312')
He had a big long macro for both classes to rotate and stack dot's and debuffs. Then like 13 posts later there was this.

Yeah, after a lot of back and forth I ended up with this simple, yet effective druid macro:

/castrandom starfire, wrath

That's all. It'll take advantage of your casttime-shortening talents and do loads of damage. On my shamans I had (all three are retired now) FS applied manually and then:

/cast Lava Burst
/cast Chain Lightning
/cast Lightning bolt

and just reapply flameshock when needed. Still my druid with the simple macro above would outdps the shamans by more than 500 DPS. Also tried manual FS and /castrandom lava burst, lava burst, chain lightning, lightning bolt which didn't work well. For boss fights you may want to debuff the boss first with the druid. For mobile fights, you want to include insect swarm and moonfire. /castrandom Starfire, Wrath
/face desk
I tried it and maintained an easy 1300 dps on the target dummy w/o dot's. I tried to macro and manualy add the dot's and I couldnt get it to reach the DPS as just a 50/50 spam of thoes two direct dammage spells. I put in my rotateing heal macro and it dropped down to about 1230 reliably.

Conclusion: Dont really have one, I still cant kill the first boss in Drak'T Keep on Heroic and the only way is to increase DPS so back to the grindstone, and Recount cant count.

Theorys: Wild variance in DPS all came from crits. A few times I peaked out on a druid in the 1900dps range and it was due to a lucky streak of crits. And the opposite was true. I had a couple runs of 0 crits and ended up in the 600dps range when fully geared. To see big increases in DPS, you need to crit. Target dummy you cant miss and it doesnt resist, so Hitcap>Crit>Spellpower>Haste is my theory.

Ill worry about DPS suckage after I get done completeing Northrend of its available quest content and see where im at. I still do have a lot of crap gear on my druids from level 74-76 quest greens and blues.

[GreyGore]

My first baseline test was just wrath spam while naked. I had 17 spell power and I could only cast about 18 wraths before OOM. The end result was about 500 dps average. Glyphed moonfire on its own did about 115dps, and Insect Swarm did about 104. If I doubled up on the DOT's they dished out right at 200dps. So I figured if I double DOT, wrath spam, I should hit around 700dps.The problem is, instant casts trigger your global cooldown. So even though the cast is instant, it's still equivalent to a 1.5 second cast time, minus haste effects. So casting both DoTs means you can't cast Wrath for those 3 seconds while recovering from GCD. Hope that helps.

Gregory

[DLoweinc]

We have a thread about this here (moonkin dps macro):



Moonkin Cast macros ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=203350&highlight=#post203350')

[Ughmahedhurtz]

We have a thread about this here (moonkin dps macro):



Moonkin Cast macros ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=203350&highlight=#post203350')That thread doesn't cover having heals in there for brain-dead tank healing while DPSing (which was the original post), nor does it cover how to measure DPS and the wildly variable results with different damage meters.

[DLoweinc]

We have a thread about this here (moonkin dps macro):



Moonkin Cast macros ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=203350&highlight=#post203350')That thread doesn't cover having heals in there for brain-dead tank healing while DPSing (which was the original post), nor does it cover how to measure DPS and the wildly variable results with different damage meters.I wasn't trying to flame at all, just trying to share info. Perhaps i'll just mind my own business from now on.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

As a follow-up on the variability in damage meters, I had both SWStats and Recount running at the same time today during my CoS run. SWStats said 900-1000dps on the OOMkins. Recount said 1100-1200dps. SAME DAMN FIGHTS. I may try using a log parser and see what it reports over the same run tomorrow. I'm flabbergasted at how much differently these tools seem to treat the same damn data. http://ugh.scaredsheep.com/smileys/banghead.gif

[Poetry]

As a follow-up on the variability in damage meters, I had both SWStats and Recount running at the same time today during my CoS run. SWStats said 900-1000dps on the OOMkins. Recount said 1100-1200dps. SAME DAMN FIGHTS. I may try using a log parser and see what it reports over the same run tomorrow. I'm flabbergasted at how much differently these tools seem to treat the same damn data. http://ugh.scaredsheep.com/smileys/banghead.gif
The problem is that there is more than one way to calculate DPS. Some calculate the entire time you are in combat and others calculate strictly your actual DPS time. Likely this is the difference you're seeing. You might want to compare to a WWS parse. WWS shows both burst and average DPS. I'm guessing one meter will match the one number and the other will match the second.

[Taliesin]

Want to make it even more annoying? Run Recount on multiple toons in the same group for all the same fights. The final stats will be a little different for each person recording. You'd think that at least the same program should come up with the same result.

I just use the calculators as a rough estimation of whether I am improving or not over time. I've already accepted that the damage calculators are flawed, but not entirely unhelpful. My tank can have about half the damage of the mage, yet only a third of the DPS. Strange, considering both toons are mapped to the same button and attack at exactly the same time, not counting avenger shield pulls. Also, some of us in the guild were baffled for a while that our hunter seemed to do relatively low damage constantly, until we noticed that pet damage wasn't being calculated very well, if at all. He was beastmaster spec'd at the time, so the pet not counting was a pretty big chunk of damage.

[Poetry]

Want to make it even more annoying? Run Recount on multiple toons in the same group for all the same fights. The final stats will be a little different for each person recording. You'd think that at least the same program should come up with the same result.

I just use the calculators as a rough estimation of whether I am improving or not over time. I've already accepted that the damage calculators are flawed, but not entirely unhelpful. My tank can have about half the damage of the mage, yet only a third of the DPS. Strange, considering both toons are mapped to the same

I'm not sure if any of the damage meters sync anymore (SWStats used to but I haven't used it in ages to say if it still does). And the difference in dps vs damage done always is the one that gets me, but that's where you really see the difference between a meter that does burst dps and one that does average. And then there is the question of when does dps time start? When you enter combat or when anyone in your party enters combat? And as you pointed out as well, do they merge pets (I've seen meters that didn't even merge totems...ouch)?

I am with you on the damage meter thing...great tool for watching your own progression but not much else. But you can still use it to your advantage in a conversation. If someone says "I do 2500 dps" and you only do 2100, you can just say "Well, you're using the wrong method of calculating dps". ;)

For the record, I've recently switched to Skada ('http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info12499-SkadaDamageMeter.html') and I'm really liking it. I like how you can get it to display a threat meter in combat and damage out of combat. I believe it uses an average dps calculation.