My DPS test - click macros vs. the old way

[wyofiddler]

So I have spent a couple hours scouring the threads on click macros and decided to be a big boy and set up the examples from the wiki for my lvl 70 destro 'lock (gear is a scattering of crap/quest greens from northrend) who runs as #3 dps in my mixed caster group (prot pally, mage, mage, lock, holy priest).

Cut and pasted the examples from the wiki - many thanks to Fursphere I believe it was for posting them there - and tweaked for my spam rate.

Old macro was this:
/petattack
#show Chaos Bolt(Rank 1)
/castsequence reset=12 Chaos Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt

(Don't even remember why I had a pet attack in there.... I should clean house more often LOL)

Set up the new macros and went to Org to try and kill the lvl 70 target dummy there. Failed, because he survived, but he was scared for a sec, I could see it in his eyes.....

Old marco/technique: DPS from Recount test today made 558dps through a whole mana bar, without lifetapping during the fight.

New macros: DPS from the Recount test of the new click macro; same test, no lifetapping, through one mana bar: 993 dps!!!!

As a side note, I had a booger of a time in Heroic Ramps yesterday and now I begin to understand why.....
(Prot Pally is lvl 72 w/ full cobalt defense set, all casters are lvl 70 geared as above)

Much work remains to be done, but for anyone interested in my results, click macros set up well seem to be night and day better than just throwing some spells in a macro and mashing the button.

Go figure

BTW.... Thanks everyone for a fantastic collection of info here, I only hope I can participate long enough to contribute something useful myself


Edit: Question for anyone know cares to chip in: click macros require a very constant spam rate, so what can I do about fights where the tank needs to move a lot or gets kicked around, knocked back etc?

[Solon]

Answer: Don't alter your spam rate. /click macros don't require a set speed, they just perform more uniformly if you keep a certain pace. If you slow down your spamming to move or whatever, just click your normal rate and everything will work itself out, with just a minor dps loss.

[Dorffo]

during movement intensive fights I'd tend to drive my tank with the mouse, leaving left hand free to move the dps toons (as needed) and maintain a nice click rate.

[wyofiddler]

@Dorffo: I drive with the mouse a good portion of the time when I am soloing so this is pretty familiar to me, but for my team I have all my priests' targeting/healing macros set up on the numberpad and use my right hand there during a fight to cast heals rather than having it on the mouse 100% of the time.

Does it work better to set up heals another way, or do most people constantly switch back and forth with the right hand, with the danger of being slow on a heal cast due to having my hand 6 inches away on the mouse? I realize the time difference is pretty small, but on occasion a timely heal can make all the difference.

Please feel free to add suggestions for other ways to control the healer for my team, I am still new to this whole experience and the learning curve can be steep at times

My current setup for heals is the following: (all the following keys are numberpad keybindings on the far right action bar)
macro on key: + = target tank by name
macro on key: 9 = target mage 1 by name
macro on key: 6 = target mage 2 by name
macro on key: 3 = target warlock by name
macro on key: . = target healer by name
1,2,4,5,7,8 = macros for various priest healing spells, cast after targeting the desired member with the macros above
0 = fade

Sounds complicated when I wrote it out, but if you look down at your numberpad it might make more sense.

Again, any thoughts on a different way to take care of healing would be welcome

[Khatovar]

Cut and pasted the examples from the wiki

Old macro was this:
/petattack
#show Chaos Bolt(Rank 1)
/castsequence reset=12 Chaos Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt

Old marco/technique: 558dps

New macros: 993 dps

Now, I'm all about DPS improvements from from click vs castsequences, but...Chaos Bolt is the end talent in Destruction, which is a FIRE heavy tree. Shadow Bolt is used heavily in either of the other trees, and is not used at all in a Desto rotation. If you went from SB spam to a standard Desto rotation of Immolates, Conflagrates and Incinerates as listed in the Wiki, I would expect a major increase in DPS, click or not.

[zenga]

If you want to spend the money, get yourself some kind of a pedal (a special input device or a race pedal, both will do). You can bind your dps / heal / tank to those and while moving with your hands you just keep doing what you have to do by using your feet. The result for me was amazing (same feeling as when i started to use the click macro's).

I'm trying an idea out now where i have a leading shaman that i control with my left hand and the tank with my right hand. Basically a macro that tells my shamans not to follow the tank/leader but my shaman chief, as i have found that moving 4 chars at a time is very inaccurate (i can only assume due to lag). With that i mean that the forward/back/left/right are send to all toons at the same time. Now the fun part in what i try to master is that i give that command via voice. So far it's promising, but i haven't really tried it in a hard situation, only in AV. The reasoning behind it is that i'm a new player that don't know the fights in the instances, that is not very familiar yet with all the buttons on my keyboard and that i run in trouble when i miss parts of the fight by looking at my keyboard too much. Saying what i see/want goes faster then hitting the propper button.

[SmartJelly]

/castsequence reset=12 Chaos Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt

Hiya, it seems like you may be changing your rotation and moving over to /click, so this may not be of much help to you, but the following tweak could give you higer dps. (although no substitute for a nice /click)

/castsequence reset=12 Chaos Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt, Shadow Bolt
/cast Shadow Bolt

If you want to spend the money, get yourself some kind of a pedal

Oooh, there's an interesting idea, thanks

[wyofiddler]

Khatovar - thanks for your thoughts, I agree that I should not be surprised by playing more to the strengths of the spec. I have had this char on auto-follow whenever I have played this team over the last four months (i don't level very fast after RAF runs out - too many RL commitments) and I think what surprised me was how bad the performance numbers were for the old way that I have been running all this time. Just reinforces to me how important it is to keep up with and actually adjust to changes as they show up....

[Ualaa]

If your pet is a melee pet, then /petattack is fine.
If its a caster pet, like the Imp, which is the defacto destruction pet.

You'll want to use:
/cast [pet:imp] Firebolt

That way, when you spam the macro, the pet continues to cast Firebolt, rather then reset its attack sequence and possibly never get a spell off.

With low latency, there's no difference from a castsequence to click, assuming you have enough characters in your castsequence.
Click is better, in that you can create a priority based rotation, which will go on forever provided you have the mana.
It also allows for as many characters in the DPS sequence as you'd like to use, you're not limited to 255.
For a short sequence, given low latency, there's not a whole lot of difference between the two methods.




For click to work properly, you need to know your own personal spam speed.
And then you incorporate the correct number of commas based on your speed.

The click sequence can work fine, at 2 clicks per second.
It can go at 7 clicks per second, if that is a speed you are comfortable maintaining.
You configure the commas, in a click sequence, to your own speed.

Whatever you set it at, for optimal DPS, you'll want to spam at that speed.




Chance are, the best Destruction rotation is something very close to:
Immolate - Conflagrate - Chaos Bolt - Incinerate.

With click, my Immolate refreshes in the global in which is expires.
Conflagrate goes off every 10 seconds (have it glyphed).
Chaos Bolt goes off every 10 seconds (have it glyphed).
Incinerate fires off if everything else is on cooldown, and Immolate is on commas (dot ticking).
Because my lock is hit capped, I will never attempt to Conflag or Incinerate, without Immolate already being up (unless its pvp, and it was decursed).

[wyofiddler]

One other question that I came across while setting this up is about using corruption in the rotation. A while back I solo'ed a warlock from 1-55 as affliction spec, using CoA/corruption (talented at the time)/Immolate the drain life.

What is the reason for leaving out corruption on this /click sequence? Is it simply the fact that it is shadow damage in a fire focused spec, as Khatovar pointed to in her earlier post? Or does it actually take more time out of the rotation than it offers in dps?

If there is more theory behind it than this please