Skada’s threat interface is pretty much just like Omen’s. The only thing I think it lacks is the overbar that you actually have to surpass in threat in order to pull aggro from the tank. I don’t think that’s necessary for most situations, though; measuring against the tank’s bar is a more conservative way to play.
I don’t think each person’s highest overall threat expressed as a number is very useful, to be honest. That forces you to compare numbers which, while easy, requires at least a few mental CPU cycles which could be better spent on healing or tanking. Bars such as what Omen and Skada provide are a lot easier to get immediate information from. I use Grid rather than Healbot, and while Skada tells me the threat table of the individual enemy I’m targeting, Grid tells me who has aggro. So in a crowd of trash, if an enemy latches onto someone not the tank, the player’s unit frame lights up with a red border. You can’t watch all the enemies’ threat tables all the time, so that winds up being very useful.
Besides all that, Skada also provides a lot of other meters, like healing, overhealing, damage taken, damage absorbed, and other things, even how much each individual spell contributed to overall healing for one person. That’s a very useful tool for analyzing your gameplay. Recount does it too, but Skada does all that plus threat meters, and seems to do it more efficiently than either one.
While we’re on the topic of Skada and Recount, I can’t get them to work. I’d tell Recount to whisper to me and nothing would happen. I tried Skada this morning telling it to track DPS and alert ‘Self’ but nothing ever shows up. Help?
I’m not sure how much help I can be, given that I’ve gone through the entire list of options for Skada and not one thing says anything about alerting ‘Self’. I’m honestly not even clear on what you’re trying to achieve.
Skada and Recount output their reports in a dynamicwindow, updated in near real-time, for your personal benefit. You can choose to send a snapshot report to a channel of your choice, including a whisper, but that’s the kind of thing you really want to have control over.
First time inside ICC 10 - interesting. Those trash are hard - we had a semi-wipe when one of the tanks set off a trap while trying to gather a trash pack, and half of us didn’t know to immediately head for the hills. Otherwise, just about every trash fight someone or another died. And after about an hour of clearing trash, we were one pack from the first boss when I had to go.
One nice thing to see was that my name was right up at the top of the damage meter when people spammed raid chat with it - makes me feel like I actually AM ready for ICC
I found Recount most useful for my own toon tweaking. I usually bring it up when practicing against those target dummines in the capital cities to see what combination works best.
I was plenty surprised, for example, to discover that my Gnome warrior did about 40% more damage in Battle Stance than he did in Beserk Stance – just the opposite of what I would have thought.
Works for me though – I’m much more comfortable with my Battle Stance rotation than Beserk roation, so now I don’t have to worry about getting comfortable with the latter.
By spending 1 hour farming ~330 Small Eggs and about 40 gold on Mageroyal and other supplies, I’ve raked in about 1200 gold in one day from Delicious Chocolate Cakes.
First actual boss battle in ICC - I caught on with a group that was up to Saurfang the Younger, which meant having to switch to the adds a LOT and using a different rotation on them, as I was trying to get the mind flay slow-down effect working as often as possible. Anyway, after the first wipe they switched up the DPS by having the two frost mages split up; this worked great, and we had Saurfang down to about 150k life when everyone let their eyes get really big and forgot about killing/kiting the adds; suddenly Saurfang got a third of his life back and went berserk. Oops. But the third time, we all stayed on target and got it done. And I won the roll for the nifty staff that dropped, and am finally no longer massively over the hit cap. So yay me.
I discovered today, while waiting for a boat next to a guy on a big mammoth, that I was able to purchase things from Hakmud and Gnimo, the vendors on the mammoth. Bought me some Draenic Silk Robes
Our guild has officially given up on kiting the adds on Deathbringer Saurfang. We did the zerg last nite on 25 man and it’s now our standard operating procedure. A few of the people we PUGged were dubious but we took him down no trouble. All you do is just have the tanks AoE when the adds spawn to keep them up on the platform and have the DPS single target damage them down (because they are immune to 95% of AoE damage). You take more stacks that way but you make up for it by finishing faster because no one has to move or CC at all so it works out to about the same. A third person got marked about 10-20 seconds before we finished the encounter. On 10 man we kill him before a third person gets marked.
It was a really solid run. We got the first tier bosses plus the raid quest and the miniboss.
14 frost badges and not a single wipe.
My guild finally took down Putricide with our ICC10 “progression” group. (As compared to our “alts” group which is further behind.) I wasn’t raiding, but my husband was one of the two healers. Putricide took a few attempts, but on the last one, everything just clicked, and he went down fine. People were cheering so much and assembling for the traditional “first down” picture that they ignored the loot! (Turned out to be two tank items that got split between the tanks on the run, I don’t know what they were.)
An old guildie happened to pop onto our Vent server during the last takedown attempt; I heard my husband saying “Bad timing <char name>, bad timing!” Then he kept sending tells to hubby who was ignoring him due to healing. This guy left because he wanted more raiding progress, among other reasons, and was lured over to another guild by his progress-hungry buddy who’s a big guild-hopper. When he ended up “being there” for our first Putricide kill, he was shocked - his new guild hasn’t come close to downing him.
I had a fun random heroic in UK yesterday. With a gearscore of over 5500 I was the lowest-geared member of our pug, most of whom were over 5700 and putting out 6-9k dps. The tank was gathering up two rooms of trash at a time. We couldn’t have been in there more than 10 minutes. Unfortunately due to houseguests, thunderstorms, and epic flooding in the area, I didn’t get to do any raiding this weekend.
Why would you feel bad about that? In any 5-man group someone has to come in 4th. Were you that far behind #3?
Did they ever find a DPS counter that accurately records DPS data over cross realm groups? Last I knew Recount had an issue that it would not get accurate DPS damage results the futher apart the group was. So the Tank’s Recount result would be vastly different then a ranged DPS’s result for the gorup as the two would get different data points for the other members.
Recount’s window never reported anything for me - it would just sit there, innocently. After I had installed Skada, played a bit, exited the game and then came back later Skada kicked in, so I’m happy now.
Good news, everyone! [del]I fixed the poison slime pipes![/del] I may have a new guild option! I did an Uld10 drake run on Friday night, and happened to bring my pocket healer with me, since he was online. And who should be in the raid but one of his old guildies from <Last Stand> back on Trollbane! Turns out he’s one of the frontrunners of a whole group of people who are transferring to Stormrage, including a number of others Cap used to raid with. And, gee, they just so happen to have an opening for a tank *and *a healer. I wanna say they’re 9/12 on ICC25 HMs now and have their 10-man drakes. Squee! I really hope this works out–the one thing we’d been hoping for was to find a guild where at least one of us knew someone, to avoid getting blindsided by crazy like happened with the last guild. So, keep your fingers crossed!
Geared m’self up some more this weekend: I finally dropped the cash on the crafted boots and the BOE ring, which set me back about 13k (way cheaper than it could have been, since I found an old guildie with the recipe and got the ring for well under market). Then, the shield off of 10-man Gunship finally dropped when I was the only person who needed it! To top it off, I decided to pick up the Frost badge cloak, since who the hell knows when the RNG will decide to show me some more love.
Got a bit closer to my Ulduar drakes this weekend, after a 10-man run on Friday and a 25 on Sunday. Picking 10-man up where we left off on Friday, but I’ll probably miss the 25 on Sunday, which is too bad, 'cause I’m now down to only three achievements 'til my drake there (Flame Levi+4, Freya+3, and Yogg+1). My pocket healer, the lucky bastard, only needs Freya+3.
If someone wants the meters, they get it whispered. Period. Unless it’s, like, a guild run, and the RL posts it or asks someone to do so.
Psh, you call *that *a wall of text?! Weak.
Rogues are useful in PvP because of burst damage and stuns, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be taken out. Prot Warriors also have a good number of stuns at our disposal, too–Charge, Concussion Blow, and Shockwave–and we have a lot of survival cooldowns. Plus, we wear heavy armor, which mitigates a lot of the damage Rogues do, which is mostly physical.
This. Personally, for monitoring aggro, I use a combination of Omen + Grid + Tidy Plates (with Threat Plates). Omen gives me the exact threat table for my current target. I have Grid set up to turn the health bar red of anyone who has aggro (so I can see at a glance who’s being attacked in the raid, which is hopefully just me and the other tanks). Finally, TPTP colors the nameplates of all mobs in range based on my current aggro on the target. Anything I’m holding is green; if I see a plate that’s red or yellow, I can select that mob and check who it’s targeting.
With good coordination, it’s actually possible to survive triggering a trap during a pull. Ideally, though, a Rogue should stealth around ahead of time and either (a) mark the location of the trap(s) with flares or (b) disarm them. There are also paths you can take to entirely avoid triggering anything, if you don’t have a Rogue in the group.
These days, the specs are tied very tightly to the stances. Prot should always be in Defensive; Arms should always be in Battle; Fury should always be in 'Zerker. If you’re getting better numbers in Battle but you’re not Arms, drop me a line if you wanna talk shop. You might be better off respeccing/gearing/chanting/gemming.
Yup! The ability of anyone to use the vendors is one of the main reasons to get the mount. I mean, the passenger ability is nice, but the vendors are awesome. It’s great both for farming instances (you can just hop out the door, vendor your trash, reset, and come back in for another run) and for raiding (instant access to reagents for anyone who forgot or is running low).
Woohoo! The fight is crazy, and it really requires *everyone *to be on their game.
:dubious: He went to a “progression” guild… that hadn’t even downed PP? Ooookay. Joke’s on him, I guess.
… Were you in my group? I had a random H-UK where all of us were in the mid-to-high 5k GS range. Which was awesome, because I could pull pretty much everything I wanted.
[quote=“kushiel, post:11136, topic:488294”]
Recount’s window never reported anything for me - it would just sit there, innocently.QUOTE]
Hrm. Was your combat log working at the time? I know sometimes my combat log will bug out and not report anything–my scrolling combat text will stop working, e.g. Also, depending on how I have the report set, it may not show anything, so re-selecting which fight I want to see, or the total, will make it come up again. Moot point, though, if Skada is working now.
Does that path involve skirting around the edge of the place without running into the big middle area? 'Cause I think they were trying to do that, but it was the off-tank’s first time in ICC and he didn’t quite pull it off successfully.
In any case, it was clearly not a group that had a whole lot of experience in ICC; my mainly-232-equipped DPS should NOT have been at the top of the DPS board, but there he was.
Yah, I had assumed you had to be grouped with the mammoth’s owner to use them, but there they were, and I was able to use them. It was actually the first time I’d even seen those vendors on a mammoth, and I finally know what’s up with all that “Why you gotta go and leave Hakmud here?” and “You were Gnimo’s best friend ever!” (or whatever they say, exactly) that I’m always seeing in Dal. Though the way Hakmud’s lines are parsed, I’d always assumed Hakmud was a troll.
I like those Draenic Silk Robes, though - the colors are perfect for my redheaded toon (red hair, pale skin, blue eyes … does that make her a “Summer” or an “Autumn”?)
The Horde version has a troll called Mojodishu, who does have distinctively troll-accented complaints if you eject her. The other passenger is a goblin. Looks like Mojo doesn’t carry pretty dress-up clothing, though.
Hey, I just discovered that the 3.3.3 patch added a new Tailoring-crafted mount, the Frost Flying Carpet. Functionally it looks to be the same as the Magnificent Flying Carpet, but it’s cheap to make so I’ll probably make one just for the hell of it and add it to my random flying mount macro. Although I usually end up using my 310% mount anyway.
