As BRK says: MQOSDPS (massive quantities of sustained dps)
If that's your role you owe it to your party to be as good as you possibly can be. What happens though if you lag ? Get interrupted ? Dual-wield ?
It can be tough to really keep up with all the small details that can be thrown your way as melee DPS. Swing Timers are popular because they take a lot of the guesswork out of DPS'ing. A Swing Timer can be the difference between being #5 and being #1 DPS for a raid.
Let's take a look at what to look for in a good Swing Timer. A good Swing Timer should be easy to read, be accurate, be able to account for lag (high latency), and be easy to use.
LD50_aBar was the first Swinger I tried. It supports dual-wielding or 2hander. When something resets the swing timer it shows with text what reset it. You can also adjust the refresh rate to help if you have low FPS (frame rate). LD50 can fade out when OOC (out of combat). And lastly LD50 shows each weapon's speed on the left and time remaining til next swing on the right. All in all a good Swing Timer.
The next Swinger I tried out was Attack Bar Timer . Attack Bar Timer does the basics and takes a lot less memory. My only issues with this addOn is it can be a bit buggy and spams LUA errors when fighting multiple mobs with similar names (trash, etc.). I disabled LUA errors (in Interface options) and didn't really notice any actually problems with the bars, but just be warned. The cool thing about Attack Bar Timer is it will also track your target. You can disable this for pvp if you like in the options.
Last but not least, and also the first time an addOn makes a reappearance, is Quartz. Now I know we reviewed Quartz for cast bars, so if you're using Quartz already or want to replace both, your cast bar and get a swing timer, Quartz may be for you! For this test I removed all modules for Quartz except what's required for the swing timer to work but, there was not much change in the addOn memory usage, so feel free to use as many of the modules as you can to maximize bang for buck.
I hope you have to chance to swing this week, yea baby!
AddOns tested:
AttackBar Timer (51k)
LD50_aBar (1.17m)
Quartz (1.2m with only Quartz,Quartz_Player,Quartz_Swing,Quartz_GCD)
