Thursday, February 7, 2008

The Spell Caster's Trinket Macro




I promised you last week that I'd post my nuke macro and explain it. Then RL happend, and I got busy. But I'm ready to share it now.

All Elemental Shaman have a DPS buff called Elemental Mastery. It's a talent that when used, guarantees your next spell will be a crit. The cooldown on this talent is three mins.

As an Orc Shaman, we also have the Orc Racial Blood Fury, which gives you a temporary boost to your Spell Damage based on your level. At my current level, it adds around 120ish.

Then there are the caster trinkets. These became notorious back before TBC, as mages used them in conjunction with talents to produce insane burst damage, creating the Three Minute Mage. An Elemental Shaman can do the same, and it just so happens that there are TWO caster trinkets that are easily accessible in early TBC questlines. The Ancient Crystal Talisman, which grants 104 spell damage, and the Vengeance of the Illidari which grants 120 spell damage.

Caster trinkets used to be stackable "back in the day", but this simply became way too overpowered. So now when you use a caster trinket, it causes any other trinket to start a small cooldown, keeping you from stacking them.

So lets review what we've got available to us.

Blood Fury 120 Spell Damage 2min cooldown
VotI 120 Spell Damage 2min cooldown
ACT 104 Spell Damage 2min cooldown
EM Guaranteed Crit 3min cooldown

At the time of this post, Thunduh (my main) is at 338+ Spell Damage.

Now that we have the numbers, lets talk about how much win this is. Blizzard will let us make a macro that will cast a different spell each time we hit the button. (using /castsequence) But we only need to do this IF the spell/item causes the global cooldown (GCD) to cycle. Buff trinkets don't. Either does Blood Fury or Elemental Mastery... you following me?

So I made this very simple macro:


/cast Elemental Mastery
/cast Blood Fury
/use Vengeance of the Illidari
/use Ancient Crystal Talisman
/cast Chain Lightning


Now remember, the two trinkets can't be used at the same time, so what this macro does, is trigger off whatever it can, then immediately cast Chain Lightning. All in ONE key press.



KACHOW!

So assuming all cooldowns are up, the math goes like this:



338 Spell damage base

+ 120 from Blood Fury

+ 120 from VotI

+ Guarantee Crit

= 578+ Spell Damage, 2280+ Crit Chain Lightning.

Oh.... TIMES FIVE SHAMAN. ^.^

Joy of joys.


I setup a row of oversized buttons on my screen with all 4 of my damage boosters, so at any time I can see what's available. It couldn't be easier, and it couldnt' be more fun.

So if you're a caster, get those trinkets asap, and get your macro setup. You'll love every moment. Did I mention how cool it looks too when it tries to cram in all the different buff animations from Blood Fury and the trinket? /evilgrin



Boom

2 comments:

Mandrake said...

You know, after reading this post I am seriously debating changing my mind about running 5 tauren shaman and making 5 orc shaman. I thought having a rotating castsequence of war stomp might be pretty handy - but more DPS is always welcome, I'd think

David Cumps said...

Thanks for this post! It confirms my thoughts, I'm doing the same now, in a "buff" macro, just before I do whatever DPS spell I like boosted to the max :)

(Don't like it to happen on some random CL, rather have control over the moment it happens)