Would love a Cast bar update

[enora09]

As you cannot remove the current, I as a Shadow Priest need a more smooth casting bar. The nUI cast bar just seems really slow compared to Quartz. I love quartz mainly because this one plugin I can add to it made especially for shadow priests which shows the 2nd tic to my mind flay and quartz also shows latency in the cast bar and with the plug in it would also show the latency of the 2nd tic on the cast bar for my mind flay

I can take a picture of this if that would help explain it better.

[spiel2001]

nUI does show latency in the cast bar. I'm always miffed that people don't realize that. It's the blue bar that slightly leads the regular cast bar. The "lead" difference is the latency. i.e. the blue bar shows your cast with latency accounted for. When it disappears, you can recast even though the "regular" cast bar is still displayed.

As for the second tick - I'll have to look into that. I have a lvl80 shadow priest of my own. If you care to explain exactly what it is that you're looking for, I'll see what I can do.

[enora09]

It's quite hard to see if you ask me the casts can be quite fast and it would be hard to notice something so thin, what quartz does is it has at the end of the cast bar a section in red which is the latency difference

it is considered to be better for dps if you have to break after that 2nd mind flay tic for a mind blast and possibly renew a DoT, thats why I like it to show the latency for that tic as well so I know when if I can to cast mind blast to break it.


Heres 3 images it's kind of cluttered, quartz also shows buffs and debuffs on the target that you have done to it, thats what the little cast bars coming out of the top right is.

[spiel2001]

I actually disagree with you on the latency thing. If the casts are so fast that you can't tell when the latency bar vanishes, then there isn't a snowball's chance in hell any latency indicator is of use because if the spell is so fast you can't see the latency bar, then it's too fast for you to react to anyway.

I find it *much* easier to notice when the latency bar vanishes than to detect when the cast bar has reached the small latency indicator in the Quartz bar. But, again, I guess this is preference. None-the-less, I have no intention of changing it though I plan on offering three different ways of displaying latency in nUI6 -- that may address your concern.

I should add, as well, that nUI also displays the HOTs/DOTs that you have on the target.

Anyway... that's all beside the point. So, what you're driving at is that you want to know when each tic is going to occur so that you can abort the mind flay after the second tick and start a different cast, yes?

[Xrystal]

Rofl, thats probably why my shadow priests dps wasn't as good as the other in the guild I usually completed the duration or stopped the cast regardless of how many ticks. If only mind blast was up Id wait. if other dots were needed to be cast I would stop the flay and refresh dots.

But yeah, if it was possible to add a tick marker in there somewhere it would be good.

[spiel2001]

I'm going to have to look and see if there's a programmatic way to determine the tick rate for a spell. I'm loath to do it via a predefined table because that's always the first thing to be broken when Blizz patches.

[Xrystal]

Hmm, sounds like a plan. Wonder if I still have my combat log parser addon I wrote rofl.

[Xrystal]

Woot, with a bit of tweaking I got my combat log mini addon working enough for me to check this out.

It looks like at first glance, and my screen shot shows what I output as information, that Mind Flay shows each tick as a SPELL_DAMAGE event type.
When fighting a wolf under Dalaran she completed each Mind Flay with 3 ticks it seems with a Mind Blast to separate the casts. If the target dies before the Mind Flay completes you don't get the extra tick(s).
When I tested it against a treant there it must interrupt the spell somehow as I don't get a full tick the second cast round sometimes. But, I don't get a SPELL_INTERRUPT or SWING_INTERRUPT.

Anyway, here's some screenshots so you can see. Each time I do a complete cast of Mind Flay then a Mind Blast, repeat the Mind Flay and then whatever spell takes my fancy if they haven't died by then.

[spiel2001]

Hmmm... what comes to mind is what effect does spell haste and pushback have on the ticks and how do you predict when the tick will be pro programmatically?

[Xrystal]

I suspect haste will simply change the timing on each tick. Looking at the differences in timing each tick varied from less than a second per tick to 1.4 seconds to tick. Pushback I suspect would be similar to the apparent interrupt affect where the tick didn't happen but the spell cast completed with just 2 ticks.

My priest has a haste of 213 so you could test your priest out similarly and see what timings/results you get and see what the differences are.

I don't think you can programmatically predict it as if you look at the timing of each of those screenshots the time differences differ per screenshot despite being the same type of mob with the same spell order and same initial buffs/debuffs. Maybe all you can do is watch for a SPELL_DAMAGE name repeat and mark it as a tick on the cast bar say so that if you do want to drop off before the third tick once the second tick has happened you can stop casting. So, if you look at it as we don't want to know when the third tick is coming but more that we want to know when the second tick has happened.

SPELL_DAMAGE Mind Flay ( tick 1 )
SPELL_DAMAGE Mind Flay ( tick 2 )
SPELL_DAMAGE Mind Flay ( tick 3 ) .. SPELL_DAMAGE name completed ( for mind flay anyway )
SPELL_DAMAGE Mind Blast ( tick 1 )
SPELL_DAMAGE Devouring Plague ( tick 1 )

Now the question is how do we determine whether to display ticks if it doesn't tick like Mind Blast and Devouring Plague. From the looks of Enora's images the first tick is immediate so maybe all casts are treated as 1 tick spells except when they have more of course.
Also, what I didn't test is switching between targets and doing mind blast on each so that you would have something like this.

Target 1 : SPELL_DAMAGE Mind Flay ( tick 1 )
Target 1 : SPELL_DAMAGE Mind Flay ( tick 2 )
Target 2 : SPELL_DAMAGE Mind Flay ( tick 1 )
Target 3 : SPELL_DAMAGE Mind Flay ( tick 2 )

So not only would it be validating the spell sequence but the target sequence too.

[spiel2001]

Yeah -- from what I can see, it's a case of marking on the bar when a tick happens. However, this would only apply to channeled spells, of course.

So, I supposed what I could do is watch for a channeled spell to initialize and register with the combat log for data on that spell, then mark the bar as each tick occurs. Of course, there would be latency introduced by the fact that we have to wait for the combat log message to be sent by the server before we see the tick.

[Xrystal]

Ah, that was the term, CHANNELLED spell rofl. Was racking my brains out trying to remember it. I'm not sure if I ever saw that one appear on my initial spamming of the combat log notes. But I could have just missed them when screenshotting.

[spiel2001]

There's a WoW event that alerts you when a spell start occurs... one for regular spells and another for channeled spells. I can use that to determine when to register for the combat log events. Just going to have to do some homework on the combat log.

[Xrystal]

I'll probably play with my addon for a while next week. Want to make it more useful and flexible instead of keep having to hard code different tests in.

[Xrystal]

Well, decided to write stuff to variables for my combat log debugger addon and this was the final result after tweaking the code.

There I was looking for the SPELL_CHANNEL_START type and after re-reading how SPELL_CAST_START/SPELL_CAST_SUCCESS works again I can see it is definitely showing as a channelling spell as you said rofl.

It looks like the times that I don't finish a complete 3 tick cycle is due to damage received from the mob so perhaps that is the equivalent of a delay to the sequence which then doesn't get a chance to tick again before it runs out.

Hopefully it will help you compare haste/latency etc as I can tell you my latency is usually between 260 and 360 on a good day and my haste rating I showed you below.

[spiel2001]

Thanks Xrystal.

[Seer]

You may want to take a look at gnosis. I kinda like that cast bar myself.

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-a...ls/gnosis.aspx