Mage cooldown usage (at least for raiding)Follow

After talking with a guildmate this week who was complaining about how bad his dps was and started for forsake his standard FFB build to be bad I noticed that even on the trivial parts of fights (sartharion at the beginning of Sarth3d) he was popping cooldowns. When I went to inquire why he stated that he had combustion and icy veins and trinkets bound to FFB.

*Aha!* I said to myself, that explains why (or at least part of why) he is consistently lower on dps than other mages and other players. He isn't waiting to pop cooldowns.

Apparently a little known fact among DPSers, cooldowns have BEST time to be used. This is normally during heroism/bloodlust or similar super-buff times. The point is to maximize the time that you are getting your benefit when you have other benefits. If you can time your haste and other cooldowns with your on-proc trinkets that is great too, but probably not worth saving your cooldowns for them. It is also important to know that your mana gem is now an important cooldown (at least when you have 2pc t7 - which most any raider by now would have anyway).

Here's what I do, and it works for pretty much all specs (although cooldown time and such can be a bit different).

As arcane:
I start off with my normal rotation [AB3 Abar or Mbar] (or a burn rotation [AB3+ Mbar] depending on fight length or if I'm feeling saucy). I use an addon called UnderHood that will put an icon on my screen when I have used 4900 or more mana, which means it is the best time to use my mana gem.

I immediately (or normally) hit my single macro that does:
/cast icy veins
/cast arcane power
/use 13
/use 14 (13 and 14 are trinket slots -- I don't usable trinkets in there but you may)
/use mana sapphire

Once that is used I will normally wait the 2:24 to use arcane power so that I can use it again in conjunction with Icy Veins (of course depending on fight length I may pop it earlier when it is up at 1:48 - or I may use it at 1:48 and save icy veins to be used with my mana gem at 3min or save all of them to be used with third AP if the timers are all up and the boss is still alive).

With evocation I try to blow through all of my mana (or around 80% of it) and then pop it, if I can get my mana low enough during icy veins I will use the last hasted tick of it (1 second left) on evocation to get it a bit faster. Same goes for bloodlust.

For FFB it is quite similar, just replace arcane power with combustion.


I hope this helps. The best way to high dps is to use smart dps and timers. If you know when you will be getting a bloodlust make sure that your cooldowns are up for that timer. You can also throw on potion of speed or potion of wild magic if you are crazy enough as well (and don't have any mana issues).