Friday, October 22, 2010

Using PowerAuras to track Lacerate and Pulverize

I haven't written any 4.01 rotation guides yet because I'm still learning the rotations myself. I could easily regurgitate someone else's findings here, but I much prefer to actually understand things before I talk about them.

PowerAuras is one of those addons I've had for a long time, but have never really used to its full potential. I did a few simple and helpful things with it, but not much more. I think, though, that I'm going to start using it much more often.

One of the new things I've started doing with it is tracking Lacerate and Pulverize. These two abilities are tied very tightly with each other, but are hard to manage using the standard aura tracking because one shows as a buff on you and the other as a debuff on your target. Makes for a lot of eye movement. (Also, OmniCC doesn't seem to be working for me right now, which makes it even harder.)



If you expand the image, you can see how I set up PowerAuras to help out with this. Just to the left of my character I have two auras. The top one tracks the time left on my Pulverize buff. The lower tells me how many stacks of Lacerate I have on my current target.

As the Pulverize buff gets close to dropping off, I make sure I have the full 3 stacks of Lacerate (or as close as I can get) and then consume them and start building again.

One thing I think I may do is add a timer to the Lacerate aura so I can keep track of that as well as the stacks. The idea will be to drop Lacerate from my rotation when it's set to expire 2 seconds after Pulverize. That way I can maximize the bleed damage before consuming the stacks.

I don't know if that kind of min/maxing is really necessary, but it's a thought. Maybe once I get more comfortable with the rotation in general, I'll look at doing that.

4 comments:

  1. I have a VERY similar custom UI as yours... except for the party frames you are using. I've just been using VuhDo raid frames, but I can see where your party frames would give me a lot more information at a glance. Is it Pitbull? or Pitbull 4 or ???
    And yes, once you get used to PowerAuras and take the time to do the setup it can actually replace SEVERAL if not all of any buff/debuff/DoT/Cooldown/Procs tracking addons.

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  2. I use ShadowedUF for my unit frames. I keep my party frames big and detailed like you see in the shot above, but my raid frames are pretty minimalistic.

    Here's a UI Post I made a while ago that goes into detail about what addons I used and such.

    I'm thinking of doing a complete revamp before Cata, but I haven't found the motivation to do so yet...or another UI I'd like to model mine after as a starting point.

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  3. I finally got around to setting my Power Auras back up after I recently rebuilt my UI from scratch. I also ended up turning off the in-game notice for berserk procs and putting a giant notification whenever berserk has procced and mangle is available. I also find it useful to use one for tracking whether or not demoralizing roar/shout has dropped off the boss and needs to be reapplied.

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  4. I've been meaning to set one up for Demoralizing Roar, but I also want to check for Demoralizing Shout and Vengeance. I think one of the Hunter pets gives the same debuff now, too...I'm not sure.

    I know you can link several aura checks together, but I need to research how to do it, and I've been too lazy.

    I do have one to show when the target doesn't have Faerie Fire, though I need to update it to deal with the fact that there's stacks of it now.

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