Flux

Some items in the game are remarkable in that they are either insanely useful or very powerful. Let’s take a look at one.

Drums of Battle

Profile: You and everyone in your group does damage faster.
Where: Pattern can be bought from Almaador if you are honored with The Sha’tar.
How: Crafted and only usable by leather workers with 365 skill.  Requires 6 Heavy Knothide Leather and 4 Thick Clefthoof Leather.
Loot: Drums of Battle

There are several patterns for leatherworkers to make various types of drums which do everything from healing, increase run speed, or even fear your enemies.  But the drums that give you the most boom are the battle drums.  They are most useful for raiding and give the group an extra 80 haste rating, which is roughly 5% faster attacks and casting.  This is so useful that some players specifically level up leather working to be able to use them in end game raids. Note that they do not work in arena and you have to be a leatherworker to use them.

The buff doesn’t stack, so it’s handy to have a macro like the one below to warn other players so they don’t waste theirs. Note that this macro uses the /in command which is not a standard command. For it to work you must already have a mod installed which enables this, like Prat or Cosmos.

#showtooltip Drums of Battle
/cast Drums of Battle
/p Used Drums of Battle: 30s left.
/in 25 /p Drums of Battle: 5s left.
/in 30 /p Drums of Battle: Done

Also since the cooldown is only 2 mins, with four drummers in the same group it’s possible to keep the buff up constantly. This will significantly increase your group’s damage. The trick is to coordinate when to use them. You can either have everyone use the macro above and have a rotation order setup. Or you can use a mod like DrummerBoy or RBM_DrumWatch.

Whether your party turns into a drummer corp or you bang out your own beat, this item is worth having when you need some extra damage to bring down a boss.

Tags: leatherworking, macro, musthave
Author: aos

This entry was posted by aos on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Games, WoW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.