5-druid experience

[tldr]

I've been playing a team composed of five druids the past few days, and have leveled up to the high-30s at this point. So far the experience has been successful if a bit underwhelming. That is, I haven't died anywhere near as much as I had been with the warrior/priest/mage team, but progress *feels* slower, and frankly the game play has been fairly dull.

To be more specific, I have a resto, guardian, and 3 balance druids. It's still pretty early on so I don't have all the "interesting" spells yet by any means. The balance druids have been the most frustrating because I haven't figured out a sensible spell rotation that can be managed with key broadcasting. I suppose one option is to have four separate keys for attacking on each druid, and for the dps, have one key do wrath, one do moonfire one do sunfire, and the last do whatever it is that builds up to solar eclipse. Otherwise it's nearly impossible to keep all 3 dps toons in the same "eclipse" state at the same time. The result of that has been that I've just been spamming sunfire, which is where the dullness originates.

The other complication is with the "Shooting Stars" proc. I can't really figure out how to take advantage of that proc when it could be happening on any one of three toons. That is, what would be a reasonable way to have it cast just on the toon where Shooting Stars proc'ed? I thought of maybe having a HKN-managed button bar to do this, but that seems a bit dodgy.

[JohnGabriel]

I haven't found a reason to only cast starsurge when it procs because it has such a long CD, so always keep it on CD by spamming the keybind. When Shooting Stars procs you'll get the instant.

I use Jamba to tell me when an eclipse procs and switch between wrath/starfire then. Its true they never really all eclipse at the same time, but switching all of them at once keeps them fairly close, just a couple seconds difference.

Mastery increases damage from eclipse and since boxing I am not perfect on the eclipse I just stack crit and reforge out of mastery. I only really use 3 dps keys for my boomkins and 2 support keys, using IsBoxer I just send 1-5 to every toon and have decent dps for my iLevel compared to others in LFD.

[Khatovar]

Well, there's a couple things you can do. For the Starsurge and associated Shooting Stars proc, a fallthru macro seems to work well enough on my solo druid.


/castsequence reset=target/10 Moonfire, Sunfire, Starfire, Starfire, Starfire, Starfire, Starfire
/cast Starsurge

/castsequence reset=target/10 Moonfire, Sunfire, Wrath, Wrath, Wrath, Wrath, Wrath, Wrath, Wrath
/cast Starsurge

The fallthru combined with spell queueing is enough to keep my solo druid using Starsurge whenever it's available. My Custom Lag Tolerance {Interface > Game > Combat > Custom Lag Tolerance} for "spell queueing" is set at a little less than double my latency. So if my latency is sitting at 60, I set it to about 100. You'll have to experiment to see what feels best to you.

You'd have to adjust the number of Wrath/Starfires to account for your own haste and you might need to putz with the reset time to keep Moonfire up or spamming back to back as you swap between the two macros, but it should make it all pretty hands off.



As for swapping between the two macros, you should be able to use the Buff Tracking setup I go over here (http://genus-industri.us/wp/2011/09/10/pitbull4-for-proc-management/) to set up a place to see where each druid is in the Eclipse rotation.

Follow everything down to Unit Formation as described. In this case, because you are using multiple druids with the procs, you don't want to condense the icons down so they are on top of each other. They need to be separated. So for step 4 there, use

4. Vert. Spacing 0, Hor. Spacing 3. Units per row 5

For the Auras section, the spells you'll whitelist are Eclipse (Solar) {id 48517} and Eclipse (Lunar) {id 48518}. You'll want to whitelist them both.

You can skip the second filter {where I set up a count of 4 for my MW} since there is not count for Eclipse procs. Just go right to the Meta Filter part. Just fill in the first buff and leave the other line at None. You can follow everything else as it is described.

One additional thing you might want to do -

Go back in to Layout Editor > Current Layout > Eclipse {or whatever you named your proc there} > Aura > Borders. Under Current Border, disable My Own Buffs on Friendly Units and Others' Buffs on Friendly Units. I say this because the default border for these is blue and it makes telling the difference between the Gold Solar Eclipse Icon and the Blue Lunar Eclipse Icon difficult.


Now you have a few options.

You can set up buttons or click-based regions that tells the selected druid to /swapactionbar 1 2 to a secondary bar, where your alternate macro sits. I wouldn't recommend a mouseover for this because you don't want to accidentally keep swapping the action bar. So you would start on your normal action bar, where the Wrath macro sits. When Eclipse shows up, click the icon and the appropriate druid should trigger a macro that changes to a new action bar that is an exact duplicate of the first, but replacing the Wrath version with the Starfire version, allowing the others to keep going until they proc for switch.

In this case, you will need a means to manually reset the bar when you need to. Create a macro for /changeactionbar 1 that you can hit when everyone needs to be on the same page {everyone is at 0 solar/lunar power}.

That setup can get rather chaotic because you'll need to watch for each individual proc.

Alternately, you can just watch until all your balance druids have triggered the same Eclipse so you can get them all caught up and changed at the same time instead of worrying about swapping individually.

[tldr]

Wow, that's a lot of info to take in. I put what you wrote into a single macro on my druids, and it still worked better than what I had been doing, by a fair amount. I'm sure it's still not optimal, but it was at least more effective than just spamming sunfire (surprise!).

Between that and slapping together a macro for the bear (that one gets a bit crazy), it made running uldaman a bit of a cakewalk.

I'll have to look into pitbull in a bit more detail - I'm always torn between spending the time doing the set-up and actually playing the game :-) so my UI is pretty clunky as a result. And pitbull looks pretty intimidating to get set up at first glance.