You're going to want to save the special stuff for the right moment. That's the instinct. That's my instinct anyway. Limited use items in D&D, special consumables in Final Fantasy X, and long-cooldown abilities in World of Warcraft--whatever it is, I want to hold on to it, to wait until I really need it. It was probably the wrong strategy in D&D and JRPGs and it's definitely wrong in WoW, where one of the best tips for improving your performance is A.B.C. Always Be Casting. But also, always be using your abilities on cooldown.
At this point your probably either nodding along and going, yeah, of course, but also no shit, or wondering what weird well of jargon you've fallen into.
So, quick explanation. World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online video game where you play a fantasy character. There are lots of kinds to choose from, and you choose both the kind of creature you play, say a troll or a little fox guy or a human, and the kind of powers and abilities you're going to have. The creature type (called "race") is mostly aesthetic, whereas the kind of powers your character has (called "class") is core to how you play the game. You're going to be playing quite differently if you're a mage or a warrior. But no matter if you're an ugly human mage or a cute lil' fox guy mage, your experience of playing the game, of getting shit done as your character, is going to be pretty similar.
No matter what class you play, you're going to have a bunch of attacks and abilities that you can basically use all the time, and a few that you can only use at set intervals, say every 30 seconds, or 3 minutes, or even 10 minutes. When you're waiting for your abilities to be available again, they're said to be on cooldown, as if your spell casting finger or sword got overheated and has to cool down a bit before you can use it again. Due to the wonders of metonymy, the term "cooldown" has come to mean not only the time you're waiting for your powerful ability to be available again, but also the powerful ability itself.
Unlearning hoarding over and over again #
I play a healer in World of Warcraft, a troll druid to be precise. Yep, that's me in the header image, or maybe more accurately the troll character I play. Somehow that feels less true than saying it's me.
As a healer, I have to keep the other characters alive. When we fight a monster together (aka, raid), I want to save my powerful healing spells, the cooldowns, for when they'll be most needed. I want to hold on to them just in case. Really what you want to do is learn the rhythm of the encounter (they are predictable to a large degree) and plan when you're going to use the cooldowns. But when I don't know the encounter well enough to do that, I hoard my cooldowns, which is actually not ideal.
I know it's not ideal because most raid groups that take their fun seriously, and mine is such a one, log the entire raid. Then you can look at how much healing or damage you did compared to other people in your raid, and to other people who play your class and specialization across the world. So when I look at the logs and see that I'm at say, at the 50th or 20th or 4th[1] percentile of all players at my level for that encounter, I could be doing a lot better.
Part time moonkin #
When I'm not a troll that heals people, my druid switches specializations to a kind of spell casting giant owlbeast called a moonkin. If I could be better as a healer, it's fair to say I'm generally pretty bad as a moonkin. Recently, WoW introduced a new kind of single-player dungeon called a "delve." Each time you complete a delve, you have the chance to do the next one at a higher difficulty level in exchange for better rewards.
Druids shapeshift depending on what job they're doing. This is also me. Well, "me."
The selector thingy for choosing a delve's difficulty tells you the expected gear level you should have to deal with the enemies in the delve. And I found I was having a pretty hard time with delve difficulties that should have been fine for me. What gives?[2]
As one does, I looked up a reference guide.[3] The most important thing I learned was that I needed to be using my cooldowns whenever they came up. Once I changed that, delves went much better. I'd been holding the powerful attacks just in case something bad happened and I needed to quickly kill some enemies to get out of a pickle. Except that if I just used the cooldowns aggressively and consistently, I wouldn't get into any pickles.
Back to the raid, already in progress #
I tried a similar approach in the next raid, where I always play a healer. Powerful ability comes off cooldown? I use it. It worked. Well it mostly worked except for the times I died early and did almost no healing. So fine, OK. Step 1 is Always Be Casting. But step 0 is don't die.
When I'm in the single digits, it pretty much always means my character died in the encounter. Dying in a raid is almost always the dead player's fault. Death isn't permanent. But when you're lying on the ground waiting to get revived at the end of the encounter, it's rather hard to Always Be Casting. The number one hint for being an effective raider, even more than A.B.C. is don't die. ↩︎
Don't say moonkins are bad at delves, spec is broken for solo content blah blah blah. You go to the delve with the moonkin you you have not the moonkin you wish you had. Anyway, just blaming the class balance for your own inability to skill up is a petulant whiner's move. ↩︎
The Wowhead balance druid guide, of course. ↩︎