A follow up on 969

Wow. Just want to thank Honorshammer at Honor's Code for the link to my post. Didn't think that was going to happen especially when I talked with another Tankadin in my guild who basically said, "Well, duh." when I mentioned this.

Next to address some of the comments on the last post.

Argon, the rotation that you are using has a lag in it. Even with a fully spec'd Judgment giving you an 8 second cooldown on it you will have to wait to use it again (by this time your Shield of Righteousness would be usable however). Since everything is an instant cast (in theory) you look at the GCD of 1.5 seconds per spell. With this in mind you need to cast 6 spells before you can use the same 9 ability (6 * 1.5 = 9) and 4 spells before you can use the same 6 ability (4 * 1.5 = 6). You're only casting 4 spells between your 9s.

Lanashara, I used these two

Nines

/castsequence reset=9
Judgement of Wisdom, Consecration, Holy Shield

Sixes

/castsequence reset=6 Shield of Righteousness, Hammer of the Righteous

Alternate between them and you'll have the 969 rotation. The reset=# is just there so that it'll start from the beginning when you pull the next group.

Kaziel, I haven't tested this recently but if I'm reading what you're saying correctly you'd have each ability on it's own /cast command. Afaik if a macro hits a /cast command it can't cast that triggers the GCD it will stop the macro. I've always used /castsequence though, so I could be wrong about that.

Femtifire's link is exactly like I'm saying and pre-dates mine by quite a bit. (Guess I'm slow to the game) Here's that link again: http://sacredduty.com/?p=5.

And finally with a few days under my belt using the macros as stated above...it doesn't feel right. I knew that I would lose flexibility to react (mostly at the beginning stages since everything *should* be on cooldown when you're doing this right). I noticed a lot of times that I'd do a 9669 on accident starting out because of misfiring of the macro. The next few days I'm going to work on using each ability on it's own keybind till I find something I'm comfortable with. I've already tried the key set I stated in my last post, but switching between Q and E was troublesome for me.

My mind just exploded.

I kid you not. What follows is an epiphany I recently had while reading about 969 rotation for Pally Tanks.

I've not been having as much fun on my Pally tank and much of that has been due to frustration with threat (i.e. making me feel like a horrible tank). I admit that I do not currently use the 969 rotation that many believe is optimal threat in most situations. This is because I couldn't wrap my head around it. It's just too long of a rotation for me to memorize.

Then it happened. I was fishing around for what the 969 rotation was (since I had forgotten it) and finally found it at Raider101. But it wasn't complete. Here's the important part of that page:

# Judge(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Consecrate(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Holy Shield(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Judge(9)

The last Judge loops to the first Judge and you should be able to start the rotation over. But SoR won't be up because you just used it. So you have to switch to HotR instead and continue on. The complete loopable rotation is actually this:

# Judge(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Consecrate(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Holy Shield(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Judge(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Consecrate(9)
# Shield of Righteousness (6)
# Holy Shield(9)
# Hammer of the Righteous(6)
# Judge(9)

Which is the rotation I remember reading about.

Ok, so what?
Here's the epiphany. You can separate the 9 and 6 parts of the rotation. I'm going to assign what I will use as keybinds to the abilities so as to abbreviate.

The 9s
1- Judgement
2- Consecrate
3- Holy Shield

The 6s
Q- Shield of Righteousness
E- Hammer of the Righteous

The above rotation becomes this:
1Q2E3Q1E2Q3E1

Notice how the numbers and the letters have a mini rotation relative to themselves.

Here's a more pronounced version
1-2-3-1-2-3-1
-Q-E-Q-E-Q-E-

Short version - This is a new way of looking at the 969 rotation that may be easier for some people to wrap their heads around. I know personally remembering 1-2-3, Q-E is going to be much easier to remember than the longer sequence.

Corollary - With this in mind two macros could be developed, namely a 9s rotation and a 6s rotation that you would then alternate, simplifying the overall rotation to 1-2-1-2. As with all macros, you will lose flexibility by doing this.

3.2.2 Shaman Changes

First thing first. I'm still with the same guild, but I've been playing my Elemental Shaman more than my Tankadin.

With that out of the way, I was browsing MM0-Champion and noticed the new additions to the 3.2.2 patch changes.

*Flame Shock: The duration of all ranks has been increased by 6 seconds.

*Lava Burst: This ability no longer ever consumes a Flame Shock debuff off of the target.

*Glyph of Flame Shock: Redesigned. This glyph now makes Flame Shock periodic damage able to be critical strikes.

So they're basically making the current Glyph of Flame Shock baseline and changing the glyph to give us our Tier 8 two piece.

What happens to our T8 two piece then? Is it getting changed, or will it be redundant to have T82P and Flame Shock Glyph?

EDIT: Hey look, Wowhead tooltips!