These days there is no cooldown (which is good, I know) but it can still only be applied to 1 target. Switch to a second target and you have no way of knowing when Devouring Plague needs to be reapplied.

ForteXorcist excels at tracking DoTs across multiple mobs regardless of your current target. So I decided to give it a go.

Introducing ForteXorcist

TMI: ForteXorcist straight "out of the box"

All I wanted to do was track Devouring Plague, right? ForteXorcist is a cooldown reminding, spell tracking, DoT timer beast.

The first thing I did after installation was head down to some Target Dummies in Stormwind and open up the Configuration. 5 minutes later I realised that if my brain was going to make sense of all this information, I needed to scale things right back.

I logged out and switched off all the class modules except the “Priest” class module which got rid of the Warlock purple boxes. I disabled the buff tracking section (all the blue bars: Inner Fire, Shadow Weaving, Illustration, NitT) because I have another Addon that tracks and displays that very neatly.

Then I got stuck into the Spell Timer configuration options.

Monitoring Devouring Plague, and just DP

I beat ForteXorcist into shape. I disabled all kinds of tracking and plugged “Devouring Plauge” into my Customise list and gave it a pink colour and told it to show up.

Placed to the right of Debuff Filter, and above my Quartz Cast Bar, it displays the progress of Devouring Plague regardless of my target. It can also show little markers on the progress bar to indicate the damage ticks, too, which I thought was neat.

ForteXorcist setup to display Devouring Plague only (right)

Ok, so that screencapture is a pretty bad example. The icon with the number 12 on it (on the left) is being displayed by Debuff Filter because my target has Devouring Plague applied to it.

The bar with 2 shiny white blips on the right is ForteXorcist. The big blip is the progress indication, the little blip is when the next damage tick occurs. If I had another target selected this bar would fade to 50% but still be visible but the left icon from Debuff Filter would just disappear.

More Spell Timers Please!

Before making up my mind about ForteXorcist I thought I’d better give it a go at doing all my DoT tracking. This is how I organised things to monitor DoTs on multi mobs. With this setup I could completely remove Debuff Filter and use ForteXorcist to tell me when I should refresh Shadow Word: Pain and when Vampiric Touch is about to expire.

This is how ForteXorcist is intended to be used.

Multi-dotting 2 targets with ForteXorcist

The 2 boxes on the left of my cast bar are ForteXorcist – each box representing 1 mob. I’ve coloured each of my spells separately (to match their icons: blue, yellow and purple) but I couldn’t remove the icons altogether or that incredibly annoying drop shadow border.

I also couldn’t figure out how to simplify the timers the way I could using Debuff Filter/OmniCC. With tenth-of-a-second countdowns I couldn’t help but feel rushed by ForteXorcist. Having 10.2 seconds left on Shadow Word: Pain is not something I need to know. 2 seconds left on Vampiric Touch? I’m interested.

The worst part of playing with ForteXorcist is that there is nothing to connect the actual target mob to its corresponding box of progress bars. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps it would be better to play with the default combat-text, damage-done yellow numbers which appear over the mob’s head. If I’m in a room full of tentacles that I’ve dotted up it’s going to be very easy to lose track of exactly which Corrupter is about to lose Shadow Word: Pain – even though I’m watching it happen with ForteXorcist. Perhaps it’s time I turned off Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text.

ForteXorcist has the ability to display raid symbols (skull, cross etc) on your targets, too. I think this might help bridge the progress bar => mob disconnect.

Something else to note is that I have kept my ForteXorcist progress bars very narrow (about 120 wide, I think) but you can draw them out as wide as you like. I’ve seen many interfaces where Shadow Priests play with ForteXorcist extended to match the width of their Cast Bar. Personally I don’t like seeing 10 progress bars whizzing past so I’ve kept my bars short to reduce the amount of on-screen animation.

Monitoring Cooldowns

When I switched on and played with ForteXorcist’s Cooldown module I recognised it immediately from many different strategy videos I’ve watched over the last 6 months. I’ve seen it used by Hunters. I’ve seen it used by a holy Paladin. And I was impressed.

The only cooldown that I really like to be reminded of mid-combat is Mind Blast. I’m not fussed about Inner Focus (which I have macro’ed anyway) and I have plenty of time to consider using Shadowfiend or Dispersion, so I turned everything off and coloured it up pink to match the Mind Blast spell icon.

The Cooldown module setup to track Mind Blast

The great thing about ForteXorcist’s cooldown reminder is that when the spell comes up off cooldown and reaches the end of the progress bar it animates (enlarges and fades) that pops out visually to remind you it’s time to press that button!

The good/bad thing is that the progress bar isn’t evenly distributed over time. You can see in the screen capture above the progress markers in seconds. The bar spans 6 seconds (0 at the left end, 6 at the right) but the center point of the bar indicates the 1 second mark.

This means that the spell cooldown you’re tracking travels faster and faster down to 0. I found this actually made it more difficult to judge when to hit Mind Blast and found myself trying to anticipate the ForteXorcist cooldown bar and getting “spell not ready yet” complaints from Cassandri instead.

Final Result

I am undecided about ForteXorcist. It’s an incredibly powerful Addon that gives you a lot of control through customisation.

If I was a fan of progress bar DoT tracking I would love it. If I was new to Shadow Priesting (or any class that DoTs) I would love it.

I guess I’ve played for so long now keeping track mentally of what mob has what, and when it’s time to switch over and recast that I feel ForteXorcist makes me doubt my timing and watch the bars instead.

But overall I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by everything that’s being displayed all at once and, as I mentioned above, feeling more disconnected from the actual game play video streaming onto my monitor.

I’m looking forward to giving ForteXorcist a whirl in a raid with Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text turned off and we’ll see how I adjust.

What I really want is an option in the WoW Interface that lets me scale up the size of my DoTs on my target to about 200%. Unfortunately this option doesn’t exist. Hiding everything else except my own DoTs would also have been a nice option.

DoTs = Debuffs

A critical lesson. As a Shadow Priest your damage over time spells are considered debuffs on the target. During combat these spells all count as debuffs on your target:

• Shadow Word: Pain (applied by casting Shadow Word: Pain)
• Devouring Plague (applied by casting Devouring Plague)
• Vampiric Touch (applied by casting Vampiric Touch)
• Vampiric Embrace (applied by casting Vampiric Embrace)
  and
• Misery (passively applied when you cast other shadow spells)
• Mind Flay (applied during a channeled Mind Flay)
• Mind Trauma (passively applied when you cast talented Mind Blast)

The only spell that I cast regularly that doesn’t leave a debuff on my target is Mind Blast.

Of the list above, I only need to watch the progress of my Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, Vampiric Touch and Vampiric Embrace. These are the DoTs that need to be reapplied immediately when they wear off.

Quartz Buff/Debuffs

I tried a couple of different options. Most Addons that monitor your DoTs (a) format them into bars that animate down as they wear off and (b) show all your debuffs, not just the ones you want.

I tried very hard to like the module in Quartz Cast Bar that shows debuffs. But I really disliked the horizontal progress bars, not to mention the self-sorting by duration default setting, and I was quite distracted by Mind Flay which popped up each time I cast it.

Quartz Buff and Debuff monitoring might work for mages, but I didn't like it for 20 second duration DoT monitoring (displayed as progress bars).

Introducing Debuff Filter

Debuff Filter lets you watch just the Debuffs/DoTs that you’re interested in. You are also given the option for each debuff to only show the debuff if you were the player to apply it (thank you! I’m not interested in anyone else’s Shadow Word: Pain).

Final Result

Debuff Filter positioned above Quartz cast bar

My Configuration

Debuff Filter Configuration Options

I added the first four debuffs listed above (SW:P, DP, VT, VE) to my “watch list” in Debuff Filter and for each spell ticked the Self Applied Only option. I removed all the boomkin stuff that was set up when I installed it too.

I placed the debuffs so that they appeared directly above my Quartz cast bar. I can look at my DoTs and then decide what to cast next while I watch my cast bar to decide when to cast. I love it.

I also chose to display timers on my debuffs (not shown in the capture above). This required me to download and install OmniCC. So I did, and it worked with no additional setup. Not sure I actually like the timers yet. I might turn them off.

What’s next?

View/read all the articles in this series.