Madness Question @ Provoke

[Atrocia]

Hey,

I have been watching your Heroic DS videos, and had a question about how you handle Madness (or any other target switching heavy fight). What do you find is the most effective way to switch quickly between things, i.e. from Arm Tentacle to Mutated when it comes out? I noticed that in Sparkuggz video from Method, he seems to prefer targeting a fellow raid member and assisting off of them, but did not see you do that in your vids at all. Simply clicking the targets seems clumsy, especially with so much going on, and I did not see any macros (targeting or mouseover) on your UI. Aside from this, do you have any other Warlock specific tips regarding Heroic Madness, or anything different you do compared to the standard strategy?

Thank you

[Proveko]

Hey there,


Whilst there are benefits to assisting off a friendly target, you have to trust the person you're assisting off. You have to trust they are targeting what you want to target, when you want to target it, and to me I think there is a lot of room for error there. Might seem like a good idea, but at least if it doesn't go to plan, it's your own fault. Besides, the only player I trust fully is myself.
Maybe when it was progress and still difficult there might have been some use in doing the assist target macros and such, but it hasn't been needed to squeeze every last tiny bit of dps on Madness targets since the 2nd time we killed it.
The only fight in Dragonsoul I use targetting macro's is for the burning tendons and amalgamations on spine, since that's the only fight

If you look at my UI, particularly the action bars, you'll see a strange icon on the 4th button in on the bottom bar. That is a mouse over shadowbolt I use to maintain stacks of Shadow Embrace on a different target, and also if I prefer to use a nightfall proc on a target i'm not currently targeting. The only other mouse over macro I use is for Soul Swap, it has a lot of use and recommend it to any warlock.

These macro's are as followed:

Mouse over shadowbolt:
#showtooltip Shadow Bolt
/cast [@mouseover,harm] Shadow Bolt; [harm] Shadow Bolt

Soulswap:
#showtooltip Soul Swap
/cast [@mouseover,harm] Soul Swap; [harm] Soul Swap

Biggest tip I can give you for Heroic Madness in particular is to use Rain of Fire and shadowflame as your only AOE for the bloods, I don't know if you currently do that, but it's the best way. (for the most Spellweave procs)
The rest just comes with being comfortable with the encounter and the timings of your short cd's, and not to panic over the multiple adds up.

Hope this helped and cleared up your questions.
Thanks.

[Atrocia]

Thank you for the quick response. So if I understand you correctly, you just tab or manually click major targets when you switch (going from the arm to the mutated for example)? I have tried tabbing, but that seems to have limited use, as I generally have to run fairly close to the Mutated when it comes out in order for "tab" to actually switch the targets for me. I will give the mouseover macros a try and see how well they go, especially the one for soul swap.

Thanks again!

[Proveko]

You always wanting to be casting or be in a GCD, sometimes tabbing doesn't allow that, whether its that stupid distance requirement or whether to tab target the wrong thing.
So I try to stay away from tab targetting the majority of the time.
The only time I tab target on Madness fight is when I'm putting unstable affliction the bloods on the 1st 4 platforms (IF the mutated corruption dies fast) and also corruptions in the last phase. (if they are mostly bunched together.)
I only tab target unstable affliction, as I always have a soulburn seed of corruption ready for those situations. (In relation to my previous post about being comfortable with the fight and the timings)
Clicking to a different target isn't as bad as you might think, it all depends on how you time it. I personally get the next target during the cast time of a unstable affliction in all situations,
something similar to this;

targetting something > cast corruption > cast UA > target something else, and spam corruption whilst UA is still casting, so that the old target gets UA and the new target gets corruption in the same gcd > cast UA in the next global whilst picking another target > so on and so on.

Try it out on dummies or something.