Spellsurge or 81 Healing? It’s a common question that many healers have asked themselves.
Why not use both?
Here’s a description about CasterWeaponSwapper from Curse:
This AddOn swaps weapons based on your current amount of mana, to maximize mana efficiency. With this mod, you can start fights with a high intellect staff equipped, then switch to a +damage/healing weapon for most of the fight, and then switch to a spirit-heavy staff when your mana is low.
This AddOn is unique because is does all this automatically, and without interrupting you with a weapon-swap cooldown. Normally when you equip weapons in combat, you get a 1.5-second global cooldown. CasterWeaponSwapper gets around this by swapping weapons only when you start to cast a spell. This means the cooldowns overlap and you don’t experience any interruption. When out of combat, there is an option to swap weapons whenever necessary, since there is no swap cooldown.
The AddOn supports 1- and 2-handed weapons, off hand items, and wands/librams/idols/totems. You can set up weapon sets for high mana, casting, low mana, and sets for Druid forms. The casting set will only be used when in combat. The Druid sets will be used while you are shapeshifted into a bear or cat. There is also an option to use the low-mana set while you have spirit boosting buffs (Spirit Tap, Evocation, Innervate, and Aura of the Blue Dragon), and an option to swap between a secondary casting set to proc the Spellsurge enchant each time it is available.
Using CWS
Once you’ve downloaded and unzipped CWS to your Addons folder, you can start using it right away. Make sure you’ve enabled it.
To bring up the main CWS window, type in /cws
Weapon Categories
You’ll notice each set has 3 slots. From left to right, it’s your main hand, off hand, and ranged slot (Wand, Libram, Totem, Relic).
High Mana Set
Weapon you have equipped coming into an encounter of some sort. If you want to seriously push yourself and excel, this is a kind of weapon which has a ton of intellect on it. Higher intellect means larger initial mana pool.
Casting Set
This is reserved for a weapon that you will use most of the time while casting in combat. Most of the time, it will have high MP5.
Low Mana Set
When you get low on mana, CWS will automatically equip this. Now, there’s 2 ways you go about it here. You can equip a high Spirit weapon and sit still for a few seconds while your slowly regen your mana or equip another high MP5 weapon so you can continue to cast while having low mana. I’d say 9 times out of 10, if you’re running low on mana during a raid, it’s at a critical point where you have to keep pumping out heals and you can’t remain idle for too long.
Spellsurge Set
This is reserved for your weapon that has Spellsurge on it. The addon keeps track of Spellsurge’s internal cooldown and swaps accordingly when it’s up.
Sliders
You can use the sliders below to change the threshold to swap weapons. These are the default settings. For example, when my mana reaches 80%, it will switch from my High Mana set to my Casting set. When I get to 25% mana, it will switch from my Casting set to my Low Mana set. Use the sliders to control when you want that to happen.
Checkboxes
Enable swaps: Self explanatory. Either turns on or disables the entire swap mechanic.
Print swaps: It notifies you in your chatbox whether or not it’s switching weapons.
Post-fight reports: Here’s an example:
It tells me a few important things like how many times Spellsurge procced and the amount of time I was in the 5SR.
Swap Whenever Needed…: Also self explanatory. It can handle swapping operations outside of combat. My guess is that it defaults to high mana or low mana depending on your current mana pool.
Conclusions and Observations
It’s a top notch addon and one that I’d heartily recommend to any healer who wants to excel at their game and ensure they have the mana they need to heal their tanks. It allows me to focus on healing instead of manually switching to my Spellsurge staff to activate it and back again.
Don’t think so?
I can tell you I’m not the only blogger who feels this way (Speaking of which, it’s been a week and a half, where have you been?).
Argh, I sold my Seer’s Cane 2 days ago thinking I wouldn’t need it again 🙁 Would have been an ideal for the High Mana Set.
I actually stopped using a High Mana Set- for one thing, it was kind of strange with how it handled the swaps. When I swapped the high mana set in or out, it sometimes caused me to trigger the condition on the way back, so I would waffle between the int and healing set, which was bad (For example, if I cast a spell that put me below my Int threshhold, i would swap in my healing staff, lowering my total mana pool, and suddenly I’d have a mana % high enough to trigger the swap back to my int set).
I 100% love CWS though. I’m trying to get all of my other raid healers to pick it up too.
Elyxaar: Don’t worry about it too much. You’ll get another weapon sooner or later to use with it.
Bendyr: That’s… actually really weird. I’ve never seen it do that. Then again, I’m only using two weapons. All I’m using is my Spellsurge staff procs and the Solarian Staff for all other conditions.
This sounds like a really useful addon. I will give it a try next time I am on.
Yeah the problem will only occur if there is a big int difference between the High Mana and Healing set.
I love it for the Spirit and Spellsurge sets though. I’m trying to get all my other raid healers to switch to it. Nothing is sexier then 4 or 5 spellsurges ticking on you at once.
Bendyr: I don’t think I’ve ever experienced 5 spellsurge ticks simultaneously :(. But I imagine it must be awesome!
Where have I been? Physics II and Calculus III.
*faceplant*
Hopefully, as my friends have told me, the teachers are intentionally making the beginning of these classes hell so that people will drop them early so more dedicated people can get in their spots.
Thanks for the link, btw. =D