Druid DPS and Heal macro help

[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-w...s_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. 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)
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

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Moonkin Cast macros[/url]

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]

Moonkin Cast macros[/url]

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.[/quote]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.

[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.

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.