Addons: Speedy Actions/SnowfallKeyPress

It’s the third addon post in a row. The addon-hattrick. No, I’m not talking about the addon HatTrick, but the third consecutive addon post (and don’t forget guys, real men/women score hattricks in one half time).

The Addons, SnowfallKeyPress as well as Speedy Actions are relatively new addons, both were release some weeks ago. They do one simple thing: They make action buttons fire the abilities on “Button Down” instead of “Button Up”. I guess you have already noticed the default behavior: If push or click the button of an ability, the ability goes off only as soon as you release mouse or keyboard button, not when you actually press the button down. The idea behind those addons is obvious now: gain a little advantage of speed and get abilities to trigger just a little bit sooner.

Both Addons work right out of the box, Speedy Actions offers additional blacklisting for certain Addons/Keys (e.g. active for Grid but inactive for Dominos) through a configuration menu. Any configuration you would want to do with SnowfallKeyPress or adding additional Addons to its whitelist, you would have to do through editing .lua. SnowfallKeyPress was released before Speedy Actions, so I think the author, Dayn, deserves the credit for the idea.

Both addons support the default actionbars as well as most popular actionbar addons. Speedy Action supports Clique as well, which makes it interesting for me as a Grid+Clique Healer.

So, should you install those addons? Maybe. Dayn, author of SnowfallKeyPress nicely sums it up:

“Dude, this addon is going to increase my DPS by so much!” No, it’s not. DPS rotations (or even priority systems) are not to any great extent affected by latency. Because they’re predictable, good players can anticipate what’s coming next and compensate for latency. In fact, if you’re a good player who is already compensating for the press-to-release latency, you may actually find that your DPS goes down when you first use this addon until you learn to readjust to the reduced latency. Find a target dummy and practice your rotation until you’re comfortable with the changed timing.

Dayn also points out, why his addon could be a good idea:

This allows you to activate your abilities faster than you could otherwise. This can really make a difference for situations where you need to react quickly, like when casting heals, when interrupting spells, or in PvP. In these situations, the addon can have an effect similar to reducing your network latency by 100ms. Of course, the exact impact depends entirely upon how much time you personally spend between key press and release.

That’s why I’ll leave this addon in my addons folder for now. Both addons won’t really changer your dps rotations, they won’t really help you in a situation where you cast one chainheal after the other. But maybe, they’ll make a difference when I cast a Riptide, throw a LHW at someone dropping low or Taunt with a tank.

Today I raided with the addon Speedy Action activated. Honestly, it’s really hard to say if it’s helping or not. After all, there is no way to tell if I just saved someone with a heal that would have landed too late without the addon. But I like the idea of the addon and even if in reality it doesn’t really make a huge difference, it might at least have some degree of Placebo effect.

Comments are welcome. I guess I might update this post after having done some raids with Speedy Action.