At the moment, I am attempting to learn Shadow Priest after toying around a bit with the class’s healing specializations. Always handy to off-spec a damage spec if someone else wants to come heal. As a result, I spend some time at the Sanctum target dummies every day.
I’ve come to realize that maybe the practice aspect could be improved somewhat, to allow people to attempt to simulate environments where they can use consumables and have raid buffs.
A special room better cordoned off from the area which acts as the dummy environment. If you enter this, you get versions of raid buffs such as Arcane Intellect, Battle Shout, and Power Word: Fortitude automatically. Leaving will immediately remove the buff.
A switch/lever/time warp machine that resets all cooldowns above 2-3 minutes, only usable outside of combat.
A better way to slip out of combat from a target dummy you had engaged.
Perhaps a zone where if you pop consumables, your stock will not deplete.
I have always preferred target dummies over simulating damage, because the former is more indicative of your own skill with the spec. Maybe a setup like this would tilt more people towards dummies?
Not a bad set of ideas.
They could rehash/reuse the proving grounds room for it. In that room you’d get all raid buffs and have bloodlust and a ‘instant mob death’-ability as the zone abilities so you can toggle it when wanted.
I think the target dummy is great for testing, but not so much for practice.
The ideas would be nice though. Especially for testing stuff like trinkets, talents etc. Resetting cooldowns alone would save so much time there.
For actual practice I would recommend to just play the actual content. Even more advanced training dummies, like the Proving Grounds for example, don’t really replicate actual dungeons and/or bosses too well in my opinion.
But sims are a lot more reliable. There is a reason why the raidbots site sims your dps thousands of times before giving you a result. Some lucky crits or procs can boost your dps significantly, while not having those could destroy it in the short term.
Hitting the dummy for hours just to do the same as a sim would do in 10s, is not really efficient.
Simulations are best for comparing gear, and for a quick look at the maximum you can achieve. But that’s all it is though - a digital simulation done by a machine. You can’t simulate your own practical skill. Besides, my suggestions could also work equally for everyone - for people very new to a specialization, who are prone to mistakes and botch the rotation they have been told to do.