Has anyone here made or dissected a totally reliable Thaddius "arrows" mod? I'm looking for pseudocode for a function that identifies your charge after a Shift with enough reliability to use in practice.

What I've been using:

1) Trigger on "Now you feel pain."
2) Monitor debuffs until I find something called "Positive Charge" or "Negative Charge" with duration > 0:55.
3) After a set amount of time (I've been using 0.5 seconds), check debuff and report.

It usually works. But sometimes, it falls prey to the effect described here:
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=8230 (post 9).

Even 1-2 errors in a night is enough for me to want to just scrap it. Before I do, I thought I'd ask what other people did, and how well it worked.

Any advice is appreciated.

BigWigs with Thaddius Arrow addon - works perfect for my guild.

Just make everyone do it without mods. Problem solved. -50 dkp to anyone failing to move :)

Like I said, barring an easy solution, what we're going to do.

Do you know whether you have anyone who has the "timer updates before icon" problem? If so, does it work fine for them?

Its been said before, but I find reminding people on Vent (every time) to check their debuff right before it lands helps a lot. This is especially true for healers, who have a tendency to get lost in their raid bars from time to time.

Well, we do have several people that die every single time, but i beleive this has nothing to do with this, same people had consistant movement difficulties in other enctounters.
Except those few all other deaths are attributed to not having mod or not turning it on. However i should note that we use Circular strat and somebody moving wrong isn't a catastrophic failure.

In my opinion it's not good to rely on an addon to that extent. It's so easy to just watch what buff you get and there really is no excuse to miss it (it's not like his cast animation is very subtle).

It's just like on C'Thun. Before killing him we had many people relying on a mod telling when the red beam was pointed in their direction and not bothering looking at the eye. Needless to say this caused a lot of pointless wipes.

How so?

With circular, if someone lags or whatnot, they don't move at all, and cause no damage to either camp.

We use an inhouse mod that hasn't had a failure since our server saw hardware upgrades. I believe it uses a 1 second lag from shift-cast to debuff check.

I shouldn't think there would be a difference between the run through and circular strategy when moving wrong, the end result is the same?

Edit: Odd, first picture in a signature I've seen on this forum. I hope it doesn't catch on, takes up so much space.

Right, but he said, "moving wrong," so I was just wondering.

And actually, since we'ce just started learning the fight, people are still pretty slow. Someone not oving at all generally causes trouble.

Here is a video of some one using bigwigs on the 4 point rotation, this video makes it very clear what you should be doing. For my guild we marked up 4 hunter pets and placed them at 4 corners so we know where the four points were. (as the pets are not affected by the polarity shift it works well, you could also use elune stones or whatever you have that wont move with you.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hen_d6cb-Y

Ignore the timers?

Check debuff textures, once, 1 second after the YELL event?

Monitors the cast message for shift and gives a "get ready" on "begins to cast", then on cast schedules an N second delay (we're using 1 second and haven't had issues, although Aussie players on laggy servers might need to give it a little more time to operate) and throws an event to check buffs. It also monitors the AURA_CHANGED event and uses that event to determine a direction, so players moving (in our scheme) left due to charge change move out a little earlier than players moving right due to same charge.

Basically:

On shift cast, schedule a 1 second delay to throw a "check buffs" event.
If the aura change event is caught, check the charge, throw the appropriate direction message, unschedule the "check buffs" event.
When "check buffs" is thrown, check charge, throw appropriate direction message.

There's a combatlog message which says "Thaddius begins to cast Polarity Shift" and "Thaddius casts Polarity Shift". I forget what event type it is (pick up MessageEvent and use that to determine it, great little mod, tells you what event threw a particular message into your chatframes).

Well, yeah - you probably right. I just remembered that we had 3 deaths last kill and it barely affected the raid.

There was a link making the rounds a couple months ago of some guild's DKP page showing people with zeroed DKP totals with the comment "Thaddius - wipe. l2p". Does anyone remember which guild that was?

Nihilum if i remember correctly

As a person who has only ever screwed up once I'd rather not have to use a mod either, but the fact of the matter is it cuts down on the mistakes by a huge amount in an encounter where more than one or two mistakes is devestating. Before we developed an in-house mod telling people which direction they should go, I honestly thought we would never ever kill the guy and our guild would fall apart. People continued to go the wrong way each and every attempt, but it was always someone different. It was retarded. Since we developed our own Thaddius arrow mod we kill him in three attempts or less every time, usually one-shotting it.

Now, can anyone develop a mod that makes the jump off the platform for people? :P

Every time someone falls there I tell them to run to near the edge (so like on the rim) stop, wait for any fps slowdown / lag to clear, then do the jump. Haven't seen anyone who then did this miss the jump.