[In Devlopment] Cast Theory (name subject to change)

[maxel]

I'm a programmer by trade and a resident 5 - boxer. Currently, I'm boxing a Paladin, Priest, Warlock, and dual Mage setup. While this team has been great, and I've found sites such as this and WowHead tremendously beneficial, I've been smacked in the face with a missing requirement. Something that can allow me to quickly look at boxed classes and group spells and abilities by there type, cast time, and direction so that the macro-ing logic becomes a lot easier. This utility would allow me to "theory-craft" easily to see what would be the most efficient and least over-whelming for any group of characters I might conceive to throw together.


As such, I have begun development on a database driven application that will allow me to categorically store said information and display groups of spells that would appear to work the best when cast together. I hope in addition to this to provide the option of generating macro text necessary to facilitate their use. At any rate, I hope this has all made sense. The reason I post now is to gather some feedback as to what else might go into an outside the game utility such as this that might benefit us "boxers" the most.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks and enjoy your boxing!


Maxel

[Chorizotarian]

Doesn't wowhead already provide an API for accessing their database? Seems like you would be better off using that at your backend.

[maxel]

I did not know that, I'll certainly check into that. That would be a great start. Thank you!

[Edit]
Checked it out, looks like they aren't supporting direct queries:

By Malgayne on 11/13/2007 at 19:20
This is a discussion that we frequently touch on internally, and something we struggle with both on an individual and a corporate level. The trick is to give people tools that they can't find anywhere else, without exposing our system to the point that anybody can cruise in and build their own Wowhead, or build tools that use our database but don't return traffic to our sites. I can't promise you anything at this point, but the question is in our minds and we're always trying to find ways to improve the site.

[Chorizotarian]

Those bastards! I can certainly understand their motivation. I guess that lightheaded just uses a dump of the wowhead pages, not the actual data. Oh well. GL and keep us posted.

[daviddoran]

I for one would love such functionality, as I am ever in flux about my squad, and am trying to level 3 teams of 5 so I can swap out n stuff. I'd love to be able to search by cast time, I made a macro that does "long" spells and one that does "short" ones, and achieved some good synergy with cast times (pyroblast takes a while, so I can get a long and a short from my priest/druid before the mage's big one goes down)

Ideally it would be a cool addon like Atlasloot, so I could look at spells in game on one wow window...

[Frosty]

It would also be more useful if you could input your talents that reduce cast times for certain spells.