Does your DPS character have an IWIN! button?
Does your healer have an Oh Shit! Button?
Mine do.
If you are wondering where to buy one of these buttons, you are flat out of luck.
You can make one, but you won’t find one on the shelves of your Dalaran vendor.
It is only a macro.
A powerful macro for sure, but ultimately, just a collection of text commands.
It’s called an IWIN!/OhShit! Button because, if used at the right moment, you will get all your activatable cooldowns boosting you to insane levels, allowing you to burn down your opponent, or heal the pants off your mates.
They are awesome. Rather than wasting precious seconds hunting for and pressing buttons in the correct order, you press one button and you are supercharged and ready for action.
For years I ignored the power of the IWIN! button. Finally one day I took the time to write the macro, then cried with joy the first time I pressed the button, because…. IWON!
There is a dark side.
There are times when you don’t want everything to pop at once, there are times when popping your cooldowns sequentially is better than blowing your load in one shot.
For example, trash… why waste 3-4 cooldowns on one pack of trash, wheny ou could use them over 4 packs of trash?
If you cleared your toolbar of the clutter of individual powers included in your IWIN! Macro, you will be struggling with your spell book looking for an ability you needed 3 seconds ago.
The other problem is
Waiting for the IWIN!/OhShit! Moment.
It’s not too hard as a DPS to pick your moment. If you know the fight is going to last more than 3 minutes you can pop it as an opening move, and again as a finishing move.
You certainly want to take advantage of that last 35% of a bosses health and burst out the DPS.
Of course you might be dead by then and maybe the extra damage early will reduce the chances of deaths later.
Popping all your cooldowns on the trash leading to the boss will definitely pad out your numbers on the meters, but if you do it just before the boss kill may not provide the damage where it’s needed.
As a healer it’s more difficult.
Do you pop your instant cast uber +spellpower OhShit! Macro the 1st time someone takes damage, the 2nd, 3rd… When?
Maybe you can heal through all the damage at a normal pace, with your regular spellpower.
Maybe you will be left mid-cast when the tank cops a whopper and you now have to shift into panic mode.
Maybe the OhShit! moment has 4 other healers covering it meaning rather than topping the healing meters you are topping the overhealing meters.
Maybe you will pop it for 15 seconds of uberness, heal everyone in 5 seconds then watch the bonuses expire only to see a burst of damage 1 second after they all expire.
The common thought is use it early and often. An unused IWIN! button is shameful.
I struggle though to use mine, there always seems to be a better opportunity, never the need, or a great enough need to use it.
Cobwebs
What is worse is I now realize that my reluctance to use my IWIN! button at the wrong time has become a reluctance to use it at any time.
No worse… I have forgotten it exists.
An example.
I healed the off-tank through a wipe in VoA25 last night (yes I healed him through… we wiped, but we were the last 2 standing.
I didn’t use my cooldowns.
One of the dps asked to swap to heals because their heals were stronger (1.2k dps v. 3.5k hps).
I swapped to Elemental and pew pewed Toravon down. My dps wasn’t the best, wasn’t the worst, but it could have been better.
It would have been better if I had used my IWIN! button… I could have used it twice!
But the cobwebs have grown so thick I didn’t remember I had one, until after. In fact the 1st thing I saw as the boss dropped was my IWIN! button.
The use of that button probably would have pushed me into top ten on the meters… but that’s my problem… I need to start using it for the hell of it, until it becomes 2nd nature.
Gnomer Gnows
I don’t have this problem on Gnomeaggedon, well forgetting it on bosses at least, it’s an established part of my rotation.
On trash I never use it, although I think I probably would if they were separate keys. One button per trash pull.
Love of DPS.
I have been loving healing on Squidly, so much so that I often wonder why Resto is my secondary spec. It just doesn’t seem right.
Last night in VoA I was reminded why Elemental is my primary spec… because I love dealing damage.
Toravon didn’t give me enough of a rush, so I found myself off killing mobs for brackets later purely because I could.
One big difference between Mage DPS and Elemental DPS is downtime.
When I hunt mobs on Gnomeaggedon I pew pew until I have to heal or regain mana.
On Squidly I pew pew… and pew pew… and pew pew…
Last night I went and ground out those Love is in the Air mobs on Squidly. I found a little hill in the middle of the mobs and just blasted away. Occasionally I would heal myself up from my 66% health… One spell, yet my mana is still sitting at 96%
The mobs drop – Squidly stays up.
Gnomeaggedon only ground there once, but as he was never out of combat, his health and mana just kept going down. I even changed to my PvP spec just so I could get a healing evocate.
I’m Not alone…
I knocked over this draft and decided to take a look through my feedreader… less that 40 unread Mage posts now…
One of the posts I read was by Zanderfin at Zanderfin’s Wow “Casual” Raiding, titled:
Old Habits Die Hard – The Cooldown Edition
You will never guess what that post is about…
My IWIN!
Just in case you are interested in my IWIN!/OhShit! Macros, here they are.
OhShit!
#showtooltip Nature’s Swiftness
/stopcasting
/use 13
/use 14
/cast Nature’s Swiftness
/Cast Tidal Force
OhWhatever!
#showtooltip Nature’s Swiftness
/stopmacro [nocombat,noharm]
/cast Elemental Mastery
/cast Nature’s Swiftness
/cast Spiritist’s Focus
/cast Tidal Force
Gnomer and Out, Squidly and Stout!
IWIN! IWIN! IWIN!
#showtooltip Combustion
/cast Combustion
/cast Mana Sapphire
/cast Icy Veins
/use 13
/use 14
/cast Mirror Image
/cast Frostfire Bolt
Gnomer and Out, Squidly and Stout!
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http://gnomeaggedon.net/2010/02/17/the-problem-with-iwinoh-shit-buttons
Lumping lots of abilities into a single macro can cause some nasty red text to tell you that some of them aren’t currently available, and there’s even an error sound for it. You can, of course, disable this stuff in the options, but I prefer to leave them on and selectively disable them in my macros.
Check out my Blood Strike macro below:
#showtooltip Blood Strike
/run SetCVar(“Sound_EnableSFX”, “0″)
/cast 10
/cast !Rune Strike
/run SetCVar(“Sound_EnableSFX”, “1″)
/run UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Blood Strike
All of my self-buffs, trinkets, gloves, etc all get thrown into the middle part (between the SetCVar lines). That’s so that if one of them isn’t available, we don’t get any error sounds. Then right before the actual ability, we clear out any red text (or quest objective completions, sadly) that might have appeared in the meantime.
I have definitely had this problem on my shaman. Healing on my druid is easy, if someone needs a huge heal that’s when I use nature’s swiftness combined with healing touch. Tranquility has minimal use in raids, but if your whole group is dying and in range, it is pretty obvious to use it then. As a shaman using tidal force is very complicated because it isn’t a quick big heal or something that is going to crit RIGHT NOW, to save someone’s life. So I simply macroed it into my lesser healing wave, so that it is up as much as possible. I can’t help it, I had to do this or else it was completely useless. Nature’s grasp can easily be macroed to healing wave and chain heal, so that you can save a tank or a melee group who might be going down fast.