The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cooldowns

Every week Matthew Rossi slaves in his kitchen over a hot stove, primarily because he needs something to nosh on while composing The Care and Feeding of Warriors, WoW.com's column about warriors. Also, he's chained to the stove. No no, don't ask, it's a long story.

Cooldowns. Those abilities that provide a sizable benefit to a character when used, but cannot simply be used over and over again due to a time-based limitation on their use. As far as I know, every class has a few. For warriors, being a two role hybrid, cooldowns can be further broken up into tanking and DPS related, with some overlap (the famous and oft-neglected Retaliation comes to mind as a cooldown that can be used in either role to some extent).and it's often the most basic and yet most easily overlooked aspect of warrior gameplay.

While for a DPS, cooldowns are useful and even can be said to be required for top performance, for a tanking warrior's cooldowns only grow in importance the more cutting edge the content becomes. Wrath of the Lich King stands out, a year or so into its development cycle, as having shifted tanking away from a process of gearing to either survive or completely avoid big spiky damage in the form of critical hits/crushing blows to a process of gearing to survive big spiky damage through stamina and, more often, cooldown usage. Whether it be Gormok the Impaler's Impale, Onyxia's combination of Wing Buffet, Cleave and Fire Breath, or Mimiron's Plasma Blast, you as a tank will often be called to do anything in your power to make healing you through massive amounts of damage easier. Sometimes, it won't be enough.

So let's talk about cooldowns.

The first (and some will say most obvious) rule for proper use of cooldowns is knowing that yes, you should be ready to use them. A friend of mine recently came to me with an issue he was having with a warrior tank in his raids (I was still DPS but was preparing to move back to tanking myself) - the problem as he laid it out to me was, this warrior tank was easily the most difficult to heal of any of their raid's tanks. The DK and druid tanks were fine, but the warrior was an absolute pain to keep alive. So I agreed to go over their logs of the fights and after a few minutes I noticed some irregularities. On Auriaya, a fight which has not only the boss but four adds that each hit harder if they're in proximity to each other, I saw something... or rather, I failed to see it.

On the entire fight, the warrior didn't use Shield Block once. Didn't use Last Stand once. Didn't use Shield Wall. I went and armoried his tanking gear and saw a Heart of Iron equipped: it never got used. In short, he didn't use either of the two big cooldowns, he didn't even use the mini-cooldown of Shield Block or his trinket. A cursory scan of other fights revealed the same kind of problem: rarely would he use Shield Block, almost never did he use Last Stand, and Shield Wall got use once in an entire night of raiding Ulduar. And it wasn't even on Mimiron, it was on a trash pull before him.

Whether you're tanking or DPS, the first thing you need to do as a warrior is learn what your cooldowns are, how often they're up, how long they take to be usable again once popped, and when the best time to use them is. You do not want to be popping Bladestorm when there's one mob left in a trash pull, especially when there's another trash pull coming it would provide better AoE DPS for. You don't want to hit Death Wish while you're offtanking a mob who does a lot of incoming damage. (This is even more true for Recklessness.) This also means moving past the mindset (which older warriors often feel more than ones who have just taken up the class) that you should save your big three linked cooldowns. I feel your pain, guys, but those times are gone. Recklessness, Retaliation and Shield Wall aren't linked anymore. They're not on 30 minute cooldowns that are mutually exclusive, so if you pop Shield Wall for this one boss you won't have all three for 30 minutes. Those days are gone, and we need to leave them dead and buried. Cooldowns are meant to be used.

The second (almost as obvious to some, but still bears stating) rule is, don't take what I just said to mean you should pop Shield Wall immediately as soon as it comes off cooldown. It's okay if you tank an entire heroic and never use Shield Wall once if it never once needed to be used. If the healers are already complaining that you're not taking enough damage to be worth healing, it's fine to focus your attention elsewhere and not worry about popping Last Stand as soon as you can. This is especially true if you know or suspect that harder content is coming. Furthermore, it's useful (especially in the era of tanking we find ourselves inhabiting where cooldowns are as short as every two minutes because they often need to be used that often) to learn exactly when to use a cooldown and how often to do so. On a fight like heroic Twin Val'kyr, you may end up having to use a cooldown to eat a vortex rather than switching colors depending on your overall strategy, and if this is the case, you may have to eat two vortex back to back because the RNG is a hideous gap-toothed maw that chortles and giggles as you try and escape the onrushing truck that is bearing down upon you. It drools, too. So it's okay to not use all of your possible cooldowns at once: you probably don't need Shield Wall and Last Stand at the same time. Space them out.

As DPS, you're less interested in using your cooldowns to keep from dying and more interested in using them to make other things die. Still, it's probably the case that you don't need to pop Recklessness and Death Wish at the exact same moment. This is less crucial depending on an overall DPS strategy: it might in fact reward you to use them both at once, especially if you'll have the rage to really take advantage of reck with a solid BT/Whirlwind/Slam combo or a nice Sweeping Strikes while Overpower and Execute are lighting up, followed by a timely Bladestorm into a lot of mobs faces.

Also, please don't forget about trinkets with on use abilities. These are effectively bonus cooldowns. By using my Heart of Iron and Satrina's Impeding Scarab at the same time, I basically have a third cooldown period I can use after Shield Wall and Last Stand. With the glyphs I have for each ability, using these two trinkets in this manner usually gives me enough leeway that one of my other two major cooldowns will have come up at the very least. Shield Block, although only really awesome if you have 4 piece T8, is still up every forty seconds as well to help act as a mini cooldown so don't forget you have it. (The problem with using Shield Block in this way however is that, frankly, it's a better threat move at this point than a damage reduction, at least on bosses who often don't even hit that hard or often physically but who do a devastating move that can't be blocked. On trash, Shield Block can help Damage Shield as well as keep you from taking a lot of damage.)

Also, if you're tanking an AoE pack, it can really be useful to throw a Retaliation up just as you charge into them. The initial counterattack provides just an added extra bit of aggro, and every little bit helps when your DPS consists of a ret pally who hits Divine Storm the second you look at a mob and a DK who thinks the Death and Decay button has an 'I win' sticker on it.

Again, these guidelines may seem simple, but like many simple things, they're often lost on us, so especially if you're new to DPS or tanking on a warrior try and keep your cooldowns in mind.