Quartz Addon

If I could only choose one addon, Quartz would be the one I would pick. On the surface, it’s a timer addon. But once you set it up, I can give you a wealth of information. For a hunter, it’s possibly the best performance enhancer you can find.

You get it at WowAce.

First off, it’s a cast bar. In addition to the normal cast bar, it also includes a Auto Shot/Auto Attack (for the lesser classes) cast bar. For a hunter and their shot rotation, these two combined can be a great asset in developing and maintaining a shot rotation. I’ve spent quite a bit of time visiting Dr. Boom and literally staring at the combined cast bars timing my shots and ensuring that I’m not clipping, maximizing my DPS, etc. When I first switched to a Survival spec, this addon is what led me find out that using Arcane and Multi as soon as they were up was actually hurting my DPS, because I was able to watch both my Steady and Auto Shot timers and compare them. Basically the global cooldown was pushing the third Steady in my Auto-Steady-Multi-Auto-Steady-Arcane-Auto-Steady rotation back far enough that it was clipping the next Auto. Without Quartz, I probably would have never known. But enough about that, even though it is a big deal to hunters, the lesser classes are probably getting bored so we can talk shop later. :D

The next thing that Quartz does is what sets it into my list of MUST HAVE addons, is the debuff timers. Not only will they track your debuffs (and only yours, so you don’t have to look through a huge list to find yours) on your target, but it also does the same for your focus target (am I the only one thinking about chain trapping?) With Quartz, and a single glance, I can tell how long my hunters mark, scorpid sting have left on my main target, but also how long my focus is going to remain an ice cube. As a BM hunter this info is a great help in determining what your next move is while chain trapping. And for any class that can be called upon to do CC, or for that matter any class that will be responsible for keeping a debuff up, this can help out.

And just so you know, type “/quartz” to get to the configure menu.