Improved TellMeWhen Icons

A week or so ago I wrote an article about using TellMeWhen to make being a Fire Mage easier. The aim of the article was to make five buttons that acted as signals as to when certain spells would be cast. The first button signaled an Inferno Blast cast by lighting up when Heating Up was active and Inferno Blast was off cooldown. The second button signaled a potential Pyroblast! buff by lighting up when Heating Up was active (regardless of whether Inferno Blast was off cooldown). The third button signaled a Pyroblast spell cast by lighting up when the Pyroblast! buff was active.  The fourth button signaled casting your bomb of choice by lighting up when its debuff was not on the target.  The fifth button signaled a good time to cast combustion by lighting up after a Pyroblast crit.

Over the past week after a little bit of tinkering I’ve made slight modifications to these buttons and I think they’ll work even better.

Button 1 was a pretty good one, but one thing that happened was that Inferno Blast would come off cooldown in the middle of a cast and I wouldn’t be able to switch because I didn’t have enough advance warning. I changed the button to light up when Heating Up was active and Inferno Blast’s cooldown had less than half a second to go, figuring that between server latency, reporting lag and my own reaction time I would be extremely unlikely to switch to an Inferno Blast and have that actually be cast before it came off of cooldown.

This is how I did it: Type “/tmw” to enter the configuration mode.  Right click on the existing button.  Click on the Conditions tag at the bottom.  Up at the top there is an “Operator” drop down menu; change that to “<=”.  Then, using the slider, change the value to 0:00.5.

If you have particularly fast reactions and good server latency, half a second may be too high.  But I expect that this will allow me to cast more Inferno Blasts as they come off cooldown than I otherwise would be able to. Ideally I’d like this figure to be equal to the time left on my current spell cast, but I don’t think I can do that with TellMeWhen yet.

For button 2 I made a slight modification. The problem with the second button was that it was lit regardless of whether the first button was lit also. I modified it to light up only when Inferno Blast was on cooldown so as to present a clearer signal as to what the button represented.  I’m not sure this is necessary, but I prefer it.

This is how I did it: Type “/tmw” to enter the configuration mode.  Right click on the existing button.  Click on the Conditions tag at the bottom.  Click on the green + button to add a condition. In the Type dropdown box, select Spells/Items and then Spell Cooldown.  In the text box, type Inferno Blast and select spell 108853 from the right.  In the Operator drop down tab, select “>”, and then move the slider below that to set the value to 0:00.5. (This corresponds to the value given for button 1; it will then turn off when the cooldown for Inferno Blast is less than half a second.)

Button 3 I didn’t change at all, although I have pondered moving it to be in front of Button 1 because when Pyroblast! and Heating Up are both active for whatever reason, I’d want to cast Pyroblast.

I changed Button 4 after learning some interesting information from Icy Veins. For Jana, Living Bomb consists of five ticks of damage every 2.55 seconds or so, with an explosion after 12.77 seconds or so. (Exact values change based on how much haste she has, which changes during combat.)  Pre-MoP, if you cast Living Bomb again before the end of this time, you would overwrite the debuff and lose the value of the explosion.  In MoP, however, if you cast a Living Bomb before the explosion of the prior Living Bomb but after its last periodic tick, the first Living Bomb would still explode, and you would have the benefit of a continuous Living Bomb debuff on the target. Since whatever bomb you choose is, to my knowledge, the highest dps value spell outside of Combustion and Pyroblast with the Pyroblast! buff, you want to cast it as often as possible and casting it early like this will undoubtedly lead to higher dps. The trick is to get TellMeWhen to signal that.

Here’s how I did it: Type “/tmw” to enter the configuration mode and then right click on the existing fourth button. On the first tab, change the slider under “Failed Conditions”/”Opacity when failed” to 100%. Next, select the Conditions tab on the bottom left.  Click the green + to add a condition.  In the Type drop down box, select “Buffs/Debuffs” and then “Debuff - Duration”.  In the Unit box, select “target”.  For the Operator, select “>”.  Use the slider below that box to set the value to 0:02.5.  Finally, in the text box to the left, type Living Bomb and select 44457 from the suggestions on the right.

This will cause the button to light up when Living Bomb has less than 2.5 seconds left on the target, which would be after the last periodic tick for Jana.  Depending on your haste you may want to make this value higher or lower; during Time Warp or with other significant haste buffs you would want to wait longer.

As a couple side notes, if you refresh Living Bomb in this manner, Combustion Helper will yell at you for refreshing Living Bomb too early. Also, if you are in a spec that does not use Living Bomb, this change will not affect the button at all.

I’m not entirely satisfied with the fifth button, but there’s so much strategy as to when to use Combustion that I’m not sure any one button would work.  I use it as a signal to look at Combustion Helper.