clavarnway

I've been reading up alot on /stopcasting lately, but I'm still a bit confused on the correct way to utilize it.

Let's say my rotation is Unstable Affliction, Siphon Life, Curse of Agony, Corruption, Immolate.

Would you want /stopcasting after all of them? Or just on the instant ones, so you can get the next spell in there ASAP? I'm annoyed that there is a way to help me out that I don't know about...anybody got some enlightenment on this?

Note: My lag usually isn't that bad, I'm always in the green - will these be worthwhile?

http://sigs.guildlaunch.net/sig.php/1424974uXyta.png

 

Wensleydale

You don't need to use stopcasting macros for instant cast spells. The global cooldown will prevent you from casting another spell within 1.5 seconds anyway.

 

thorin5

The only use for a /stopcasting as a warlock that I can see is a macro set to cast Amp Curse then CoD. And since I know nothing about what +damage does to CoD, maybe throw in a trinket activation or 2 along with the Amp.

Would look something like this, I think. I may be wrong though, I haven't messed around with macroing things a lot since they got rid of the /script stuff.

/cast Amplifty Curse
/stopcasting
/use trinket1name
/stopcasting
/use trinket2name
/stopcasting
/cast Curse of Doom(rank 2)

 

Harem

You want /stopcasting on the spells you cast AFTER non-instant spells. For example, if you want to cut a shadow bolt short by refreshing corruption, you need a /stopcasting on corruption, even if it's instant.

 

sahamet

Stopcast macros I use look something like:

/stopcasting
/cast Spell

Using a castbar with a built-in latency indicator (like the excellent Quartz, from wowace.com) is I'd say mandatory for stopcasting, or at the very least highly useful. Even in fairly light-lag situations I can regain about .2 seconds of casting time on an average cast using stopcasts.

Aside from maximizing DPS, you can get really good results using stopcasts on heals. I healed a heroic ramparts with high latency last night (as a paladin) and I don't think it'd have been possible at all without stopcasting. You can do this with click-casting using something like the following as your macro (I use Clique + Grid):

/stopcasting
/cast [target=mouseover] Holy Light

with similar macros for Flash of Light and Holy Shock. I personally have a PVE and PVP set of bindings for Clique though because in PVP I tend to frantically click and it costs too much to accidentally cancel a heal in progress during PvP (so I don't have stopcasts in my PvP binding set), but I suppose if you became more disciplined it'd work well there in letting you get off the most healing in the shortest amount of time.

 

Ashiya

I'm a little confused, what exactly do you achieve by using /stopcasting?

 

sahamet

You lose cast time on non-instant spells to lag, such that your casting time indicator often doesn't appear until you've started casting a spell. If you've never noticed, you can start moving before you've finished summoning a mount and still actually mount up, or start running near the end of a spellcast and yet have the spell resolve. Stopcasting allows you to manually stop the spell during this period when the spell will still resolve, and begin casting another, effectively allowing you to "cast faster", although really you're just not casting slower because of lag.

 

Northerner

/stopcasting does what you might expect. On execution it does two things really: it sends a message to the server to stop casting whatever you are casting at the time and it releases the client from locking you out from starting a new cast.

In practice this means if your spell is one-times latency away from completion, the server does nothing of interest while the client allows you to begin a new spell. Since even a latency of 250ms is a significant hit while chain-casting (I think of that as nearly a loss of 10% in dps on fireball spam) one can, with good reflexes produce a nice dps boost. Some situations lead to a two-times latency loss as well, which is of course more significant.

The danger and the downside is that if you hit your little macro (/stopcasting /cast Fireball (Rank omg) for example) too early, you'll lose an almost complete cast. On the converse, if you are too conservative then you might even be slower than just spamming without a macro and eating the latency.

In my opinion, it is all bullshit to be honest. There should be a one-spell deep queue and there should have been one since the original beta. I've said as much for that long and even if the queue were only .5 seconds deep many latency related issues for mages would be moot. Oh well though, my crusading days are done.

EDIT: I should note that there is another odd use for it. /stopcasting occurring after an action that doesn't invoke a GCD kludges in the ability to chain things that otherwise cough up errrors. So in trinket macros and the like, inserting /stopcasting between actions allows one to one-press macros in the present system.

On a historical note, Fastcast used to be the preferred method for dealing with predicted latency but the removal of conditional statements in the API killed that off forever. I feel it was a shame really as I always thought the solution was pretty elegant but I do understand why the conditionals needed to go away.

 

Ashiya

So concidering I have 50 ms and I start to cast a Healing Wave and it's at 2.8/3 sec cast, at which point I press the macro, my spell will finish casting quicker? Or does it only work with higher forms of latency? :o

 

Thelyna

1000 ms = 1 second

50 ms = 0.05 of a second.

You don't have too much to worry about.

edit: actually, for you, stopcasting would be bad because it would actually stop your cast (unless you hit it in the last 0.05 seconds of your cast).

 

thorin5

50ms = .05 seconds. So you'd only be able to really utilize /stopcasting about .1 or fewer seconds before the spell finished casting. It can be kinda tricky to use it to chain cast spells because if you hit it too early there's just a chance that you'll really cancel the spell before it finishes and waste that cast completely. If your latency is consistant it'd be pretty easy to get used to using it to kill the cast bar and start a new cast without actually killing the first spellcast.

 

Ashiya

Ah, didn't get it completely, now I do :P. Need more coffee this early in the morning >.>

 

Kegsta

I have a 600ms most days and have been meaning to try this out for a while, I just got Quartz and added the stopcasting to my macro, looks very promising so far, I would estimate 10-20% dps increase on LB spam.

Heres my macro which activates both trinkets when they are ready and spams LB if anyones intrested.

#showtooltip Lightning Bolt
/stopcasting
/script UIErrorsFrame:UnregisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/use 13
/use 14
/script UIErrorsFrame:RegisterEvent("UI_ERROR_MESSAGE");
/cast Lightning Bolt(Rank 12)

 

◊ manly

I use a totally different approach.

See, I am the proud owner of a G15 keyboard. This keyboard, amongst other things, allows to create macros (ie: unrelated to the wow macro system - you can use both 'macro systems' together). Now, here's the cool part. You can create precisely-timed macros, such as (essentially):

/stopcast
(wait 1.57s)
/cast scorch

And pressing that key will do that exactly at the set interval.

There are 2 major ways I've found that uses this setup that you can do to 'automate' your stopcasts.

1- Make a macro for spell and each interval iteration.
ie: one macro for 1.55s scorch, 1.6s scorch, 1.65s scorch etc. (repeat for every spell)

advantages: -simple to use
disadvantage: -if you get a failed cast, you lose an entire cast (ie: it will not start recasting a new one even if you see it got cancelled)

2- Use 2 set of macros, used concurrently.
The first set of macro takes care of 'pulsing' /stopcast at every interval. Basically, you have a set of macro that just does:

/stopcast
(wait 1.55s)

and you have one for every interval. The other set of macro would be just spamming your cast keys. For example, you would have one that spams scorch, one to spam fireball, etc.

advantage: -automatically starts recasting even after a failed cast
disadvantage: -harder to use, requires to constantly press 2 keys to get your casts right.

I have made quite a bit of testing on the matter since I have never read anywhere where someone suggested the use of g15 and /stopcast macros, but I feel the specifics are somewhat out of place for this thread.

On a more funny note: Even with precisely timed /stopcast at every 1.5s, I never managed to get a successful scorch. If I cast normally by mashing buttons on the keyboard, I get 1.78s cast time on average on scorch (around 400 tested scorch), and the best I could reproduce was 1.57s scorch using those macros. I believe that UI lag is causing some extra unmitigable lag that eats up on cast times. I will have to do further tests to see whether UI adds cast lag. (if anyone have detailed information on the matter, please tell me!)

Disclaimer: if you use your G15 to do unattended gameplay, expect to be banned. You would not be the first.

 

Quixotic

Every single spell in your spellbook that you use should have a /stopcasting macro attached to if your typical ping is above 75 or so. Eventually, you are going to refresh your dots after an unstable affliction or shadowbolt cast, and you need the macro to cut off that particular spell

 

Northerner

Manly, I love and hate you right now. As an aging (ok, old) geek the one thing I've hung onto is my old pile of $10 keyboards that just 'feel' right to me. I have to use the fancy ones at work but at home I get to bang on something that is just about the same as the first terminal I ever touched. I spill something on them, I throw them out. Hell, I've still got an adapter that works fine since god knows when.

Now I'll be anally retentively required to pick up a new-fangled keyboard just to satisfy my min-maxing OCD!

 

Kirion

I recomend to use castbar addons like Quartz or Rapidcast (works with most of custom casting bars if you prefer ecb for example, both on wowace) if you want to try /stopcasting macro

42.

 

◊ Praetorian

The G15 is worth having just for the Vent plugin that displays who's talking on the LCD panel.

 

◊ Kyth

I have heard (in another thread here) that using stopcasting macros with dotimers can confuse the timers. Have you had issues?

 

Vodrin

I regularly get corruption / ua missing on DoTimer.. but usually only one at a time. I can see it ticking on msbt and just use one of the timers for both as they are cast at the same time anyway. It definatly causes issues as the spell complete event never fires. Immolate is usually more problematic but again can be recast after corr/ua.

 

srg

This may sound like a odd question, but what is the point to /stopcasting a trinket macro.

Currently I macro both trinkets to my UA (since that starts my dot rotation and I'll have the trinket up for the whole rotations + a couple shadow bolts) and amp curse to my CoD's and CoA's.

The current trinket macro I use is (not exact context but you get the hint)
/use trinket 1
/use trinket 2
/cast UA

When either trinket is up it uses that (will use trinket 1 first). Matter of fact it actually casts the trinket and UA at the same time and the UA cast benefits from it.

What would be the point of /use trinket /stopcasting /cast ua ?

It seems like the macro I use already is better then having to remash it again.

I am however going to try a /stopcasting on my corruption spell since that comes after UA on my dot rotation.

 

• frmorrison

/stopcasting is great to speed up your casting time. However, since you like using a /use trinket /cast UA macro with one button, maybe don't add /stopcasting to that spell.

I currently only use /stopcasting with Shadow Bolt and Searing Pain (because I sometimes spam the button to start the DoT casts).

 

Machichi

To sum up because sometimes I'm slow and need things repeated for me:

If I'm using Quartz w/ the latency feature and trying /stopcasting macros, I would wait until my casting progress is into the red portion of the Quartz castbar before casting another spell, correct?

I like you peoples...

 

Altima

Old habits die hard. I tried the

/stopcasting
/cast Shadow Bolt

macro a few nights last week, and it takes getting used to. For instance, I unconsciously spam the SB button while a cast is already in progress, and end up cancelling the spellcast that is already in progress and ended up losing DPS. Get used to the macro first, otherwise you'll find yourself mashing your nuke button during the "burn" stage of a fight and realizing you're not casting anything.

 

chase

Yes.

As the previous poster said, it is hard to get used to using a stopcasted macro. So much so, that I actually click on my macro and have the regular version bound to my button. I found that if I have the ability to stare at my casting bar, than I have the ability to click on the /stopcasted version. If the fight is requiring enough of my attention where I need to be dancing around than I just use the regular keybind.