[GUIDE] Warrior: Skill Intensive Tanking

[Exrage]

It was just that I couldn't spam either one as the GCD was finishing to make it use Heavy Shot or Straight Shot the instant the GCD was up. Had to let the GCD finish before it'd recognize me hitting the button for the next ability.

Ah what I think you're seeing is the time delay with the animation cooldown, the ability is going off on time but it appears there's a split second lag due to the archer's drawback before firing the ability. To this end I've created a lvl 20 archer and sat down with all 3 abilities next to the macros you've posted and have seen a few seconds in DPS favoring your macros so I'm not sure where the error could be.

[Vortok]

Ah what I think you're seeing is the time delay with the animation cooldown, the ability is going off on time but it appears there's a split second lag due to the archer's drawback before firing the ability. To this end I've created a lvl 20 archer and sat down with all 3 abilities next to the macros you've posted and have seen a few seconds in DPS favoring your macros so I'm not sure where the error could be.

I'm staring at the GCD, not the character. I find it unlikely that an ability can 'animation lock' itself (and only when used in a macro) since in my latest test I only used Straight Shot and no other attacks/abilities. There weren't any other animations (sans auto attack, which doesn't matter) to interfere with it.

Put another way, if you watch the GCD tick around and try to press an ability around when it reaches the 10-11 o'clock position, it should still fire when the GCD gets done/to 12.

When using the exact same ability via macro, I have to wait for the GCD to finish/reach 12 before pressing the button - thus losing dps/threat over the fractions of a second that the GCD is done before you hit the button because human reaction times/latency isn't perfect (thus why many MMOs let you hit abilities a tad early), which can add up over the course of a long fight. The ability isn't going off on time, because even though I press the macro at the same time during the GCD as I would a normal ability, the macro simply won't fire because the GCD wasn't done when I pressed it - or rather, the macro does fire but it only checks if I can use an ability that instant, rather than if I can in the very near future and queuing/buffering the ability if that's the case.

If I'm seeing it right, then my guess is that macros execute the ability but don't have the same ability to 'buffer' if pressed a fraction of a second before the GCD finishes that seems to be baked into the abilities you pull out of your spellbook/action and traits menu.

[Exrage]

*snip*

Again, I'm sitting here with both the macros you've posted and their respective abilities on my action bar on test dummies/mobs of my level and the DPS is slightly in favor of the macros as it's queuing Inner Release faster than my fingers can with the exact same rotations. Either your game is playing at less-than 60-120FPS and you have a serious input lag or there's some other factor affecting your game that I can't reproduce or think of because the instant that GCD is up in both cases the weaponskill is fired, although to be fair I start spamming the next key the instant the other ability fires and don't wait until the last .5 second when pressing either.

Worst case is that you're right Vortok, for you the abilities actually don't queue with a macro as fast as they do pressing the buttons manually in which the worst case is not being able to use them and having to design action bars without them.