Mmmm spamilicious.

[Fellcaller]

I've been doing lots of reading into my new affliction spec, I have spent hours at the dummy and in raids trying to maximise my Output and I have one question that I have been unable to answer either through my own random thrashings or from forum research.
How spammy should spam be?
When I'm dotted up and shadowbolting how much care should I take with timing the filler bolts? I know that any time not spent casting is bad, but is there a loss from pressing the key too early, when you get the 'i can't cast that yet' message? Does it cause a delay or can I just hammer blindly at my shadowbolt key?

[Rellekk]

download Quartz

itll show you when you can start precasting

/thread

[Cracka_Bob]

I've been doing lots of reading into my new affliction spec, I have spent hours at the dummy and in raids trying to maximise my Output and I have one question that I have been unable to answer either through my own random thrashings or from forum research.
How spammy should spam be?
When I'm dotted up and shadowbolting how much care should I take with timing the filler bolts? I know that any time not spent casting is bad, but is there a loss from pressing the key too early, when you get the 'i can't cast that yet' message? Does it cause a delay or can I just hammer blindly at my shadowbolt key?

hammer away good sir... unless you have a slow connection

but i would also suggest getting an addon called Quartz... its a casting bar addon that makes your casts VERY easy to see, you can choose to put numbers for the cast time, and there is a little red area telling you when its safe to start "spamming" the next spell

[davesmack]

When I'm dotted up and shadowbolting how much care should I take with timing the filler bolts? I know that any time not spent casting is bad, but is there a loss from pressing the key too early, when you get the 'i can't cast that yet' message? Does it cause a delay or can I just hammer blindly at my shadowbolt key?

The only penalty is the .00001 seconds it takes to lift your finger up and press down the key again. There's no game mechanic that stops you from being able to queue a spell if you press to early, only if you press too late.

Quartz helps because it lets you to see exactly when you're able to queue your next cast. Basically, with quartz you don't have to spam the key.

I personally feel super awesome when I spam and I try to use as few addons as possible so I don't run quartz. It's a personal preference thing though

[harky]

It's not .00001 seconds. It's much, much more than that. Simple comparison: How fast do you type? Let's take a very advanced typist at 120 words per minute. 'Words' are considered as a standard 5 inputs. So 600 characters per minute, 10 characters per second, 1 character every .1 seconds. Okay, now how about baseline to be a professional typist? That's 75 words per minute, 375 characters per minute, 6.25 characters per second, or .16 seconds per character. In both cases you'll find that how fast you can mash a button is similar, but almost always slower than typing normally. This is due to muscle memory and other factor such as having to draw a finger back before repressing a button, while in normal type double letters occur much less frequently. Still, if you take .1-.16 as a guideline for button mashing you would be inducing an average delay of .09-.15 seconds to all casts.

However, due to WoW's structure this is not actually the case as this frequency surpasses the buffer allowed to spells. So, whenever spell queuing takes place mashing doesn't induce any penalty. In any case where spell queues are not in place this becomes much more problematic and you will be delaying spells quite often. This mostly comes up with spells that are beneath the GCD, which will completely disable spell queuing, or bad latency combined with instant cast abilities causing the buffer time to become very hard to take into account.

[Fellcaller]

Thank you all for the swift and helpful reply to my first post on these forums. I have tried quartz before and found it didn't help as much as I'd hoped, but perhaps I was relying on its suggestions to heavily.
Perhaps careful, calculated button mashing, using quartz as a guide, will yield better results.

[Baaadum]

I've personally never seen the point of quartz. I usually just press my keybound spell when its' in the last .5 second. Re-queues just fine. In normal conditions, I have never noticed any delay, and I run with about 200 MS.