Intro:
SpellDPS
is a WoW add-on for displaying the damage per second for spells. I
play several spell casters and often wondered what the relative
effectiveness of the different spells was. I'd been thinking about
writing something like this for a while, but it wasn't until I
started parsing the tooltips in ArmorCraft that I figured out a good
way to do it. When SpellDPS detects a tooltip for a spell
that uses mana and causes damage, it parses the tooltip and
calculates the damage per second and damage per mana. Healing spells
work the same way.
Installing:
Just
unzip SpellDPS into your "World of
Warcraft\Interface\AddOns" folder. You can create the
sub-folders if they don't already exist.
Use:
There
are no commands or settings. Just position your cursor over a spell
on your hotbar, in your spellbook or at a trainer and if it a damage
causing spell, the damage per second and damage per mana expended
(dpm) will be added to the bottom of the tooltip. The dpm value is
useful for finding out which spells make the most effective use of
your mana.
Healing spells will display the healing per second
and the healing per mana (hpm).
An optional second line
displaying the total damage or healing can be displayed by setting
the font color for td or th
to something other than black (see Font Colors).
Calculation
details:
In the simplest case, the damage caused is
divided by the time required to cast the spell. Instant cast spells
are given a time of 1.4 seconds as this is the cooldown time for
repeating the spell. The cooldown time fluctuates slightly, but in
testing it was ready about 70% if the time. If a spell has a damage
range, then the average of the low and high values are used.
For
spell that cause damage over time, the casting time is ignored and
the damage time period is used instead. For spells that cause both
immediate damage and damage over time, the two dps values are
calculated seperately and then added together.
For damage per
mana, the total damage done is divided by the mana cost of casting
the spell.
Healing spells use the same formula with healing
replacing damage.
Font
colors:
The color of the text generated can be customized
using the Color Picker. The text to be changed is selected by the
chat window command '/sdps <type>'
, where <type> is one of dps,
dpm, td,
hps, hpm,
th or chat.
Localization:
The
parsing is controlled by the templates in the localization file. New
spells that don't match existing formats can be supported by adding
entries to the SpellDPS_Desc table.
Languages other than English will require a completely different
table designed for the language syntax. For details on how to modify
this table, read Localization.htm
Last update: 9/24/05