ISBoxer One Month In (thoughts and discussion)

[Wubsie]

Heya! Glad you're enjoying your experience. I'm quite tired writing this so I'll keep it short-ish but I think there are a few pointers I can throw out that might help out going forward.

... But even single target damage is higher than group 1. I installed a damage meter last night and, low and behold, the mage is doing the least damage of the DPS. In fact, the mage is often lower than the tank! Without more micro-management (which I can't give) the fire mage is simply not living up to it's potential at this level. I will try arcane/frost next and see how that goes.

WoW balancing is such that some classes and specs under perform heavily at lower levels. Some require certain talents (and now azerite traits) only acquired at max level. Some also scale better with gear or require certain haste/crit break points to start living up to their potential. That isn't to say that all classes will be equal eventually, but just pointing out that while the mage might not be doing all that well right now, that might change. I never got mine all that highly geared but my frost mage was more or less keeping up with my destruction warlock, outside of burst damage with all cooldowns running. I also never tried fire, but at least historically that would have been the spec that requires the most "baby sitting" to get the most out of due to it being proc heavy. I'm not certain if that is still the case.

One of my issues was that my healer simply quit working at times. I eventually figured out this was due to my healer leveling and WoW "helpfully" putting spells on my hotbar. So now my 1/2/3 spam was actually causing the healer to cast spells (remember in my setup the healer only responds to alt-# which everyone else ignores). The first time this happened the spell was holy nova.... which quickly led to the priest being OOM and then not responding for that reason (no mana!).

I suppose this is only an issue while you are still attaining new spells, but I guess you could also work around it by either having the correct spells added to those slots on the main action bar, or if you want nothing there, placing a empty macro on them. WoW should not add any new spell you learn to an action bar slot that already has something in it. Or of course you could also remove the binds from those action bar buttons completely if you so choose.

Personally I have no action bars active ingame whatsoever and every single spell I have is stored as a macro in ISBoxer, which are then usable via the ISBoxer addon. This makes working with your rotations a bit clearer and in teams that have X amount of the same spec it of course means you can edit the macros and/or rotations for multiple characters at once. Since you're using mouse over healing that might be a bit more tricky, but still doable if you ever choose to go that route. It's not a necessity at all, but personally I found that the more I learned to work with ISBoxer, the more aspects of my setup I've chosen to do through it.

IWT pathing is NOT IDEAL. The first time I tried fighting the giant worm in RFC while driving from my healer, the tank decided to jump in the lava. Other times, when I use IWT to tell the rest of the group to loot a corpse, one of the toons will start running off in a random direction. And when that happens they don't stop still until they hit a wall (or you redirect with an auto-follow, etc.) I've mapped auto-follow to my middle mouse button so I can respond quickly when this occurs.

This is a known issue with IWT that has existed for as long as it has been a feature in the game. More or less you can think of it as the character failing to find the "edge" of the target so it never reaches the destination it was expecting and thus never stops. John Gabriel found a rather simple fix for this a little bit back. Here is the thread for it.

Also, IWT with my mages/warlock/priest works just as you would want. The turn to face the mob, run to get into range (I think???) and nuke. With melee, they run up to the target and start swinging. HOWEVER, WoW seems to treat the resto druid as a melee. When I drive the 2nd group from the tank and use IWT, the druid runs to the target and starts swinging away! Not sure how to fix this (but I haven't really looked into much at this point either - I just drive from the healer if I need IWT during a fight).

You have deducted correctly. WoW does treat Druids as melee when it comes to IWT. Basically, when IWT was first introduced they baked in how it will work with each class. It does not differentiate between the specializations for each class. If the class has a melee spec available to it, it will always function as if it was melee when it comes to IWT. So Shamans, Druids, Paladins and Monks will behave in this manner even if in a ranged or healer specialization. The exception to this is Survival hunter, which was not a melee spec at the time and due to this will not act as a melee now with IWT.

There are a few ways you could deal with it, but what initially comes in to mind is placing your druid in an Action Target Group and sending a backpeddle key to it on releasing your IWT key. If you're unfamiliar with Action Target Groups, they're basically just definitions you can assign to your characters and then point ISBoxer actions towards. E.G. You could assign your Druid to an action target group called "Druid" and then have ISBoxer do something that affects all characters in the group "Druid".