Water Jet activation

[Jepkas]

Came back from a break in the summer and decided to level a mage http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/m ... kas/simple. I really liked the class and started to raid with him alot. I want to start a discussion (if there is any) as to the optimal usage of Water Jet and absorb your opinions The way I look at it, there are 3 ways to use Water Jet:

1) Turn on autocast for Water Jet on your Water Elemental.
2) Manually activate Water Jet every time you want it cast.
3) Macro it onto your Frostbolt.

I have tried all three methods and I finally settled for the third method.

The largest drawback on the first method is that it can activate at any time, so also at very inconvenient times. For example when your FoF procs are maxed out and you want to get rid of some before generating new stacks. Or it activates right after you cast a frozen orb into a stacked pack of adds and you throw away a lot of FoF procs. Largest advantage is that you don't have to think about the ability or even track it's cooldown.

In theory, the second option is the best. As we seasoned frost mages know, without the 4set you can only get 1 stack of FoF if you cast it at the same time with a Frostbolt at max range. Therefore, we want to time the activation of Water Jet a moment after your Frostbolt launches so you optimally benefit from the FoF stack generation. However, I'm not a Korean an this is very micro-intensive for me. In chaotic fights (such as current mythic content) I can imagine that a lot of people will get overwhelmed by the extra micromanagement this results in. Moreover, you have an extra cooldown to track. If you fail to activate Water Jet on cooldown at your earliest convienent opportunity, you lose FoF stacks. This stacks during a fight, making you miss many FoF stack generations per encounter.

Therefore, I settled for the third method. It's a compromise of no-braining (method 1) and casting Water Jet when it's convenient (method 2). The thought behind this is that you only cast Frostbolt when you want to generate an FoF stack and thus are not capped (not necessarily true with class trinket). When you cast Frostbolt and Water Jet is off cd, you cast it. It's not necessary to track Water Jet's cooldown, but I still do so to time my other abilities correctly as well (for example, don't want to cast Frostbolt + Water Jet with 2 stacks of Ice Nova up or if you have the Mark of Doom proc and Comet Storm is off cd).

I hope this has been somewhat informative for my first post. I'd like to hear your thoughts and critiques on my thought process.

[nickseng]

It seems like a very faulty reasoning to me though.

For instance, if you macro your WJ, you'd probably get only 1 FoF out of it. So in a 5 minute fight, you'd get 12 out of it, as opposed to 24 if you manually cast it. Even if you miss or delay it a bit, you'd still come out far ahead.

This is assuming you don't have T18 4p.

[Curnivore]

In the real game patchwerk is very rare or non existent. Macroing it would not account for most cases. It wouldn't even be optimal on patchwerk really.

However, I'm not a Korean

Frankly the real problem you might be having is you need better binds. Some spells are not hard to use sometimes. They're just bound to very obnoxious to use keys.


This is especially true for retina spells like Blizzard since they must both be comfortable and not block the simultaneous use of the mouse in an easy way.

[Jepkas]

It seems like a very faulty reasoning to me though.

For instance, if you macro your WJ, you'd probably get only 1 FoF out of it. So in a 5 minute fight, you'd get 12 out of it, as opposed to 24 if you manually cast it. Even if you miss or delay it a bit, you'd still come out far ahead.

This is assuming you don't have T18 4p.

Back when I did not have the 4p-bonus I just stood a bit closer to the boss (around 30 yards) and the second Frostbolt would arrive in time. But you're right, it's a workaround because I found it too hard to manually cast Water Jet while tracking it.

[Komma]

I haven't bothered personally since I always do it manual, but I've always wondered if macroing Frostbolt to enable autocast, maybe with a ctrl modifier, and thenmacroing Ice Lance to disable autocast, would work. Wouldn't play very well with heavily managed shatterlance (Tome of Shifting Words) play though.

[Mageski]

I use the following:

#showtooltip Frostbolt
/cast [mod:alt] Water jet;
/cast Frostbolt

This makes it very easy to time the water jet since you can keep spamming the same button and merely hit the alt key part way through the cast to activate the jet. It's manual, but it makes the manual nature very easy to deal with.

[Curnivore]

Since there is also a pet:Freeze spell, I prefer to give it its own key with a modifier.

[Reaper]

I chose to do the manual activation of my pets (WJ). I cast my FB and then 1/4 thru cast activate WJ macro and cast another FB forcing 2 procs of IL and FOF of course does it magic. I do this mainly to keep my icicles up longer. however I don't have 4 set or class trinket yet and cant wait to get them.

[Laodi]

...I do this mainly to keep my icicles up longer. ...

What?

[Zrellim]

think he meant Icy Veins