AeroWow

I’m going to lay out some slightly more advanced techniques to really maximize your damage output. At this point in the game, it’s about absolutely maximizing performance in any way possible.

Pre-potting
What is it?

Also known as “double-potting”, this is a trick to maximize your potion usage. With the changes to potions since Wrath’s release to eliminate chain-potting, we can only use one potion per fight – or that’s the intent, anyways. This functionality can, however, be skirted somewhat.
Explain

The mechanic works like so: Once you use a potion, the game checks to see if you’re in combat or not. If you’re out of combat, then the one minute global potion cooldown starts working its way to usable again immediately. If you’re in combat, then it will hold off initiating the minute-long cooldown until after you drop combat. As soon as you drop combat, the cooldown starts ticking down as expected. Most importantly, once the cooldown starts, it will not get stopped for any reason – even if you enter combat once the cooldown has started.
How do I use it?

We can use this knowledge to our advantage. Because of the long duration of the Indestructible Potion, we can “pre-pot” just before combat starts, and get nearly two full minutes of potion upfront. For our typical 6-minute-long fight, we have now boosted our 97.2 AP potion from a 1/3 uptime (2 minutes of the 6 minute fight) to a 2/3 uptime. Or, we can mix and match: use an Indestructible upfront, and use a Wild Magic/Speed during a burn phase on a Val’kyr shield.
Anything else?

You always want to pre-pot an Indestructible, because any other potion simply lasts too short. Even if you can get 13 or more seconds out of your 15 second Potion of Speed or Potion of Wild Magic, it’s at an inopportune time – debuffs are still being applied, and if you’re Arms, you’re not yet solidly into your rotation quite yet. Because of this limitation of duration, there should really only be a few types of players using this trick. This would include any tank (Prot Warriors, Prot Pallies, Feral Druids, and any Tanking DK), any DPS Warrior, and any DPS DK with the Bladed Armor talent.

The only potential downside to this is accidentally potting too close to the pull, to the point that you’re “pre-potting” after you’re already in combat. Get used to the pull mechanics of all of the fights as quickly as possible, so that you can maximize your pre-potting without accidentally locking yourself out of a later (and slightly more beneficial) normal in-combat potion.
Trinket Swapping
What is it?

This is a trick to maximize the effect of your Proccing (as opposed to on-use) trinkets by manually controlling when they can proc. While proccing trinkets seem rather straight-forward, understanding exactly how they function can allow us to manipulate the mechanics, and potentially maximize the benefit we receive from the proc part of the trinket.
Explain

There are two types of trinkets, “On-Use” (those that you click to activate), and “Proccing” (those that are activated passively on a certain event). For those on-use trinkets, there is some sort of cooldown attached, typically two minutes, sometimes a minute and a half. This is on the tooltip, and is shown on the trinket itself, and is referred to an external cooldown (because you can see it). For the proccing trinkets, there is a similar hidden cooldown called an internal cooldown (ICD). This ICD is what keeps a trinket from chain-proccing. The typical length on a proccing trinket’s ICD is 45 seconds.

When a trinket procs, the ICD starts ticking down immediately, so that it has a chance to proc again exactly 45 seconds later. However, that’s not the only action that activates a trinket’s ICD. The other way is to equip a trinket. That’s right – the simple act of equipping a trinket triggers the internal cooldown. We now have enough information to capitalize on the mechanic.
How do I use it?

We know equipping a trinket will trigger the ICD. We also know that the ICD has a 45 second duration. We can now control the time of our trinket’s initial proc. The potential benefit is that we can push the proc back about 15 seconds after the target has been engaged, so as to give time for all debuffs to applied, and for us to get our personal rotation up and going, before our trinkets proc. All we have to do is now switch the position of our two trinkets a certain time before we enter combat. 45 seconds (ICD) – 15 seconds (time we want left on ICD when combat starts) = 30 seconds. So, if you sort-of guesstimate about 30 seconds out from the pull, simple swap your trinkets in their slots, and engage as you would otherwise.

The amount of time you want to push it back varies from pull to pull. A typical 10-15s might be perfect for a straight single-target fight. For Anub’arak, however, you want to delay your trinkets until the first wave of adds come, so your increased AP/Haste/whatever is applied to AoE damage as opposed to a single target. The benefit (and potential detriment) comes down to knowledge of the fight and of all potentially related mechanics; if you trinket swap too close to the pull, you’re potentially losing total trinket proc uptime, which is a bad thing.

UPDATE! Another good use for this technique is to offset trinkets. For example, say you have the Grim Toll and the Mjolnir Runestone available. If they both proc at the same time, one of the procs is effectively wasted, due to overcapping your ArP by a significant margin. Using this technique, though, we can offset the proc timers, by switching just one of the trinkets out with a trinket you do not plan on using, and then re-equipping it 10-15s before engaging. Given the hassle of managing both procs, I would not recommend a MR/GT setup, but it is totally doable, as long as you are consciously controlling them. (Be aware, though, that any type of fight with significant downtime will start to push the two procs together, which is a bad thing. Again, I don’t recommend using a MR/GT combo!)
Anything Else?

I’d just like to throw this out there before I get any angry hate mail: This is a highly advanced technique that I would not recommend unless you are extremely comfortable with your play and are looking to absolutely eke out every last bit of DPS juice.

This works with any DPS class/spec that is currently using a proccing trinket.

This only applies to effects that have an internal cooldown. For example, you cannot force a delay on Berserking, because Berserking does not have any ICD to activate.

There is a rather glaring drawback to this technique – you can’t always know how far out the pull is going to be. This comes down to skill and experience with your raid. You need to be really attuned to your raid and the tank that is actually pulling you into combat. You can watch for certain “tells” of the raid and watch the tank’s movements to anticipate how imminent the pull is, but there has to be some sort of consistency to allow this technique to really shine.

I am currently using an addon called Procodile to show the status of my trinkets’ ICDs. However, this currently does not show the activation of a trinket’s ICD based on equipping a trinket.

Be aware that using or switching an on-use trinket will activate a 15 second cooldown across all on-use trinkets, so don’t be surprised when you’re looking to use a trinket early on and see a cooldown where you don’t expect one.

I’ve considered creating a macro to “powerswitch” your trinkets, but because of the limitations (no conditionals on what trinket exists where, and the fact that you would have to manually update the macro based on which trinkets you’re currently using) I’ve decided that manually swapping the trinkets through the character panel works perfectly fine in the cases you’d want to do this.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 4:14 pm. 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.
3 Responses to “Tips and Tricks”

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joshconesjr-jubei’thos Says:
October 4th, 2009 at 2:53 pm

dang it

sunder and demo along with rend and minor rage guesstimating

now ive got to think about swapping trinkets
Reply
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BWarner Says:
October 6th, 2009 at 10:41 am

Like I said, this is a control technique, and is very advanced. It’s absolutely not expected raid behavior, but is going far above and beyond typical play.
Reply
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rubenvincenten Says:
October 12th, 2009 at 4:52 am

Nice tactics. I knew that both were possible, but never thought about abusing them like this

Excellent write-up as well. Explained very thoroughly and clear.