uzemaki wrote:
cancerous wrote:
I dun do that for a reason... there are times when some cooldowns are not up in the middle of the fight. Combust+IV+Icon and a streak of spellstrike procs / trinket procs (Nexus horn for example) can pull aggro and kill you. Dead mage deals 0 dps. I seperate out combustion also because its CD only starts after it goes out (ie. 3 crits), the first burst of surge in dps will definately be the full combo. Depending on how lucky you are, you might get the CDs 1min behind each other (IV and Combust). If raid dps is good, by the time you get to use the full combo again the boss is on his last slithers of health. I would prefer that I can reliably use IV+trinket and keep combustion in my pocket for <20% burn.
If you were to save a cooldown for the <20%, wouldnt you want to save IV to get more casts off during that time then a couple more crits at the end?
Theorycrafting time.
Assuming that you use Icon (2 min 30s CD).
For our discussion the certainty is that IV and trinket will be up again in 3mins.
Lurker fight.
Now this is a full on burn fight which also tests your cooldown management since Mages can go all out without caring too much about anything. My first activation of my "dps noz" is the moment 5 scorches are up. The issue with Lurker is that due to some movement required you will have to stop casting for around 5s depending how well you time your dipping into water and getting out of water. If you "noz" up at a time when he is about to spout then you would waste the IV buff. You can also get lucky and have 3 crits off real quick which puts the CD of combustion around 15-20s behind the CD of IV. So for me, if IV and trinket comes up before conbustion comes back and it is a full 30s behind then I will just hit the "noz" again when conditions are good (he just finished emerge->spout for example) which gives me a good window to really light him up good.
Like Poldy said, knowing how the fight works and how it affects you cooldown management is essential to the smart part of playing the effective mage. I got placed in a terribad group for Lurker and had to be content with being 2nd on the meter after leading it for almost the entire fight. I went OOM for a good 3 mins.... nothing short of terrible. Reason? I was burning CDs like mad.
compare Lurker to Leo the blind.
This guy is unique where its a dps fight but you will have to stop at a lot of times due to transition. Poor transition can mean holding dps back when you should have been burning him. The time where you can really hurt Leo is when he is in demon form as he stays still long enough for you to pummel him. So you will be saving your CDs for that time and not use em when he is in human form, since he will be WWing around in 20s and you will have to run around for a good 10s till he gets back to the tank again. So the fight goes "hard, hard, floor the pedal, hard again" getting everyone to "floor the pedal" at the same time is how we are trying to get him down (hope its the right way).