The Pot Cooldowns
As of 6.1, there are four cooldowns.
Cooldown One: The Non-Alchemist, Health/Shield CD
Shared by:
- Health tonic
- The Engineer shield
- The warlock healthstone/candy/crack
The warlock crack is not used in raids because it’s the weakest, and crack is whack, crack is cheap, and we are not cheap.
It’s a toss-up between the engineer shield and the health tonic. Use the shield if your health is near full and all the healers are dead and there’s about to be a damage spike.
This CD lasts the duration of the fight, so once you use it, you don’t get another one until the fight is over. Watch your own healthbar for incoming heals–if you’re low and there isn’t one and there’s incoming damage… pop one.
Cooldown Two: The Alchemist CD
All the alchemists potions share a cooldown. These include…
- The Draenic rejuvenation potion (health and mana)
- The mana pot (just mana, but more than the rejuvenation potion)
- The agility pot
- The bonus armor pot
- The intel pot…
And so on.
Except for the rejuvenation pot, the others boost a stat for 25 seconds.
The alchemist CD lasts the entire fight, just like the health CD. Once you’ve used it, you can’t use another alchemist pot until the fight is over. This is the combat-long, alchemist’s cooldown.
Note that you have a Hobb’s choice between a second health potion (the rejuvenation pot) and any of the other boosters. The rejuvenation potion is probably the better option until you’re hitting enrage timers.
Note that this combat-long CD doesn’t apply if you burn a pot BEFORE the pull starts, which means if you hit the pot button just before the pull, you’ll get a little under 25 seconds worth of pot-boosted mania to burn the boss.
Which brings me to…
Cooldown 2.5: The Alchemist Pre-pot CD
Just seconds before the pull, ALL DPS will use their respective damage pot. This triggers a sixty second CD, and is SEPARATE from the combat-long alchemist’s CD. This means a minute into the fight, you’re free to use another alchemist pot–typically your damage pot, but in case you’re near death, far better to burn it on the rejuvenation potion.
There’s still a 60 second CD when using pots out of combat, so you won’t be able to use your second alchemist’s pot for at least a minute into the fight.
Why you strictly observe the DBM pull timer and don’t face-pull the boss before it hits zero
THIS IS WHY PULLING AS THE DBM TIMER HITS ZERO IS SO IMPORTANT. If you pull at “3”, everyone will either A) miss the pre-pot entirely or B) use their pot just after the pull, causing them to miss the pre-pot AND use it at a non-ideal time.
Which is why we don’t pull at three.
If you pull at three, you nerf the entire raid by 10-20%.
Cooldown Three: The Bandage
Bandages are interrupted if you take damage–but there are moments in fights, even for tanks (e.g. when the boss is in a special phase and causing mayhem elsewhere, like chasing your healers down and murdering what’s left of them) when you can use a bandage. So put the damn thing on your castbar somewhere.
Summary
This means that you effectively can heal yourself THREE TIMES during the fight. There are many episodes of raid-wide damage–if the healers announce that they are running low on cooldowns, heal thyself!
I have all three buttons right in a row to click-click-click when the healers are dead/line-of-sighted/oom/whatever.
This means every fight is expensive–you have two alchemist’s pots, your stat food, your rune, and your health pot (bandages basically cost nothing).
Although Hot Mess doesn’t expect you to grind for BOE’s we do expect you to pony up for raid consumables. If that sounds tedious, send your mats to the raid leads and they’ll make something for you.
H.O.T. Mess 