This is a great topic.
For me, my breakthrough moment was on Thok, way back when. It was the end of the expansion and we’d been running heroic on farm for a long time. I was a hunter and, one time, I noticed that my cooldowns lined up with the mechanics. “Well, look at that, it is there when I need it”. I noticed it more and more after that, maybe my barrage could be off of cooldown when the adds arrived. To see that the raid and dungeon encounters were designed around our offensive and defensive cooldowns changed the way I play.
Even the layout of the rooms supports the predictable stuff, you can see the designs drawn on the floor and notice that it is how we are setting up, say, our stack points.
It is more obvious in our current playstyle because the game has been flattened, we don’t have so much power that we skip phases and then skip major mechanics. Our defensives cooldowns should arrive right on time, and it should be satisfying.
To add just a little, I miss the class bloggers who would take all of the above to a higher level and write about how our own certain class spells might negate mechanics; maybe feign death just makes the mechanic go away.
Great topic, thanks!
oddly enough, i do much better on my hunter (which i just started playing at the end of s2) than i do on my priest (which i’ve mained basically since Cata). i’m not perfect by any means on the hunter but i use turtle when i can and often it works well.
on the other hand, i can count on both hands the number of times i’ve even thought to use desperate prayer on this character this entire expansion.
Best time to use a damage reduction cooldown is when you’re at full health and you use it before say, a channeled AoE ability. I’ll pop desperate prayer on my holy priest then or dark pact right before to get the most value out of it.
f2, 3, shift+1, 5, B.
5 defensives, and I’m necro with marileth. They are my ‘bible keybinds,’ and I use them faithfully.
My rotation may be off sometimes, dps a little lower, and I may not put that totem down when needed…but one one has ever said ‘he died again.’ No sir!
Working on it, but definitely not as good as I could be. Not surprisingly I’ll harp on blizz’s lack of telegraphs here. Unless you’re laser focused on the boss’ cast bar it can be easy to miss when they are about to do some things.
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Not well enough, but I’m also balanced around using my defensive to do DPS because some of their class design is very dumb.
Yes, I don’t think it’s hard to know when to use defensives. Boss fights are so repetitive you either have healer CDs or your defensives or both.
Yes. I have Barkskin bound to 1 and Survival Instincts bound to shift-1.
I generally plan ahead when I’m going to use them. Sections of the fight where healers would be strained are the most common targets. If I do need one as a panic button because I’m about to flub a mechanic, it’s usually Survival Instincts since I’m very liberal with Barkskin and 20% DR is usually not enough to cover mechanic flubbing anyway.
The only time I use the elusive Barkskin/SI combo is when I’m doing something dumb on purpose. There are very occasionally times where I want to fail a mechanic on purpose in order to accomplish some other goal and I usually double defensive on that.
The defensive I’m less good at using is Bear Form since it’s harder to use. The extra armor is only good against physical damage. I used it a lot against Sludgefist though where I combo’d it with Barkskin to mitigate the pillar hits.
Sometimes , depending on the boss or mob, I like to use my defensive cooldowns on my monk and paladin in a dps way. I’m talking about touch of karma and shield of vengeance.
When i play my arcane mage, yes i use everything i can as often as i can.
Especially when it comes too tanking mechanics like tgird boss of sanguine depths where you have to collect orbs, an arcane mage can invis then shield and get 70% dmg reduction along with an extra 20% for all magic.
Theres alot that quite a few dps could doo too negate extra dmg. Even just on bosses like xy,exa in dos.
Im pretty sure every class has a way too either slowfall or immediately get to the ground wirhout eating the fall dmg, but nope dps just eat it and expect the healer to deal with it.
Utilizing my defensive is usually the hardest and last thing I manage to optimize when learning an alt.
Some of that is the one thing feral is real good at is staying alive with a lot of defensives and self healing and trying to translate those tools into other specs is difficult.
But in general it’s a very important part of raiding and M+, you got to help the healer on some abilities.
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I tend to forget some of my defensive CDs depending on which character I’m playing, but I’m almost always one of the last ones alive in raid and M+ unless I just get unlucky. I hardly ever remember to use Bark Skin when I’m on my druid, but I don’t stand in bad, so during heavy damage phases I can concentrate on everyone’s health.
I could probably do better with Breath Strike, but it is hard when you don’t want to interrupt your Breath of Sindragosa window. Other than that, I feel like I use IBF, AMZ/AMS, and LB pretty well.
I’m great. You can’t do any dps if you’re dead.
Bear increases stamina though, so it still helps with magic soaks. I’ll often roar to get into bear and help the party or raid collapse into the soak if it’s up, barkskin the soak, and then swiftshift back out to heal. It was god-mode on the KT soaks because the shift back out cleared my own snare.
On my mage I learned her defensives early on. A mage who doesn’t use defensives spends too much time as a pancake. 
Timing Iceblocks can be hard though, since it’s both an immune and a last-ditch defensive and I’ve teleported myself INTO a mechanic with Alter Time.
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That’s true and that’s the part I’m less good at using. One of those things where I know in theory that it’s a good idea but it’s a skill I struggle to put into practice. The aspect of it that I struggle with most is that it costs 2 GCDs to use, one to transform and one to transform back.
I can see where that would work for Balance but it doesn’t work for Feral since if I Roar in Cat Form then I stay in Cat Form. I only auto-shift to Bear if I’m in caster or Moonkin form.
The only abilities that swift-shifts me back to cat are Tiger’s Fury and Berserk, both of which are cooldown abilities. Tiger’s Fury is especially bad for that purpose since that’s a very easy way to overcap my energy.
The game does a horrible job at telegraphing what mechanics are unavoidable damage and what is avoidable. At lower levels, you can ignore several of these in a dungeon and it be a very successful run.
Let’s discuss a dungeon example, spires:
The first trash pull of 3 mobs has a healer in it (forsworn doctrine) and a melee mob that cleaves. That cleave is avoidable. The next group is 3 casters that cast infernal stoke in a target that can be kicked or dispelled. Then the Goliath that does the heavy aoe attack, twice, before he recharges. The only ability in this pull (which in higher keys is all 3 packs) that dps are concerned with is the Goliath. The game doesn’t announce or forecast the cleave at all, and you see people wilt to it all the time.
The lieutenant mobs further in that give a 75% damage reduction aura to other mobs, they also have a cleave after they do the dive attack, and it’s avoidable. Problem is the game doesn’t forecast it. Also, if someone is tunneling a mob, they aren’t interrupting key spells like forsworn doctrine in that pull just before 2nd boss.
The skip is always botched here. If you don’t realize that mind soothe or imprison is what let’s you jump up the side, you’ll pull the 3 mobs at the top of the stairs before 3rd boss in other groups.
These are just a few examples off the top of my head that can drastically impact the difficulty of some of these pulls. The game needs to do a better job at telegraphing some mechanics so people can learn harder content without relying on a 3rd party program or website.
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I feel as if i use my defensives correctly 50% or so of the time. Many times i use them it either wasnt impactful or wasnt going to save me either way.
I’ve actually long been an advocate that if the trash is intended to be complicated and a significant source of challenge in M+, it should be added to the Dungeon Journal like bosses are.
You’re right, low dungeons don’t teach you the mechanics because most of the time it’s not even obvious that you’ve even failed a mechanic in the first place. You only learn there was a mechanic to fail when it one-shots you 10 plus levels later.