Stacking and Snapshotting with Procs: Addons

One of my goals for this blog, was to have a little bit of content for a lot of different hunters.  I may occasionally go a bit overboard with the math and spreadsheets part of it, so today I want to take a minute to talk about a really basic part of your hunter UI, which is incredibly important to maximizing your DPS.

There are two addons (as far as I know) which are commonly used to track important buffs, debuffs and personal mechanics:  Weak Auras 2, and Tell Me When.   A lot of hunters are using Tell Me When these days,  but it seems like, at least in the states, Weak Auras is still over all a bit more common, so I'll use that for our examples here.

Earlier this week, I posted about how to read logs to see how well a hunter is utilizing their trinket procs, but I didn't mention how to monitor those procs when you're in game (for more on why DoT snapshotting is important, click here, for more on stacking CDs, click here).  Regardless of which addon you use,  the point is to know if you're trinkets are proc'ed or not, and how long their proc has left.  This is where Weak Auras or Tell Me When comes in.

If you're unfamiliar with Weak Auras or addons in general, you can install it automatically using a program like Curse,  just google for Weak Auras and from there you'll be able to download and install it.  Once you have it, you can type "/wa" into your WoW Chat box to pull up the interface you see in the picture above.

You may want to learn to create auras on your own, but for now you can just import this very simple weak aura string that I put together.   Click the Import button at the bottom of the gui, and then copy and paste the string at this link.  When you paste it, a little window will pop up saying the name of it; if you hit the import button it will load it.

What you now have are some little icons that will pop up when the buff from AoC, TED or Haromm's Talisman procs, as well as when your scope procs, and I've thrown in a timer for Virmin's bite, just for good measure.   You can move these to anywhere on your screen by just clicking and dragging them, or you can change the size using the display tab, clicking on individual auras, but that's all you'll need to adjust.  Fairly painless, right?



Need to Know

There's one other addon that's going to give you a lot of help in utilizing your trinket procs, Needtoknow.  You can actually achieve this same function using WeakAuras, but it's much more complicated to set up, and we don't want to bother when there's already a great addon like NeedtoKnow.   

NeedtoKnow is basically just some bars that will go on the side of your screen, somewhere out of the way, but where you can track the cooldown of your ICD trinkets.  In 5.4 Assurance of Consequence is the only ICD trinket we've got,  but it's a huge, 20 second buff, so it's worth knowing when it will be available again.  

If you'd like to import my AoC settings for NeedtoKnow,  go ahead and download/install it, and then right click on the bar you'd like to use (the top one) and click "import/export bar settings".   Copy and Pasting this string will get you set up with a timer, which will get smaller and smaller as the ICD winds down:

bv1:{cdd="105",Typ=BUFFCD,Aura=Dextrous,Clr={b=0.16862745098039,g=0.78039215686275,r=0.054901960784314},TF=Fmt_TwoUnits}

The reason you want a timer for ICDs when available, is you'll need to save your major DPS Cooldowns, like stampede, or Rapid Fire for Marksman hunters, for when you have procs up.  I generally can get off a Stampede on every other AoC proc, and a Murder of Crows often on every proc.   However, if your stampede or aMoC comes off cooldown while your fight is getting close to the end, you can look at how much time is left on the timer. If you're not going to get another AoC proc, you can go ahead and use everything you've got to get through that last bit of the boss faster.

This should be enough to get you started monitoring your procs, and help you take advantage of them.  There are several other things you may want to monitor with Weak Auras or Tell Me When.   I have giant dummy lights set up to give me warnings if my Serpent Sting, Black Arrow, or Steady Focus fall off.  I also have smaller, less blaring timers set up to tell me things like how long I have left on SS, BA or SF, as well as tracking all of my DPS cooldowns.  And finally, I use it for boss specific mechanics, like monitoring your shield on Malkorok and Shamans.  We'll have to get into that another time.  If you'd like any of the strings I use for those, feel free to email me, Delirium . 1500 @ Gmail.com, and I'd be happy to share anything, or offer any UI guidance I can.