Legion has been an interesting expansion for me for many reasons, but one of the more subtle, yet intriguing ones has been my shifting attitude towards cooldowns.

Prior to this expansion, I hated cooldowns. In the context of tanking or even just raiding generally, they were okay, but mainly because there was a clear time to use them. About to take a huge hit? Use the tank cooldown. Did someone pop Heroism? Use all the DPS cooldowns.

Outside of raids… when were you supposed to use, say, Avenging Wrath? On the first mob you see? Only when you’ve grouped up several mobs? Only for elites or rare mobs? It shouldn’t actually matter, as WoW’s open world questing is pretty trivial, but it only took getting burned once or twice over the years before I got gun-shy. Plus, on a PvP server, you might actually need those cooldowns to escape a gank. The end result of was years of not using many (if any) cooldowns on any toons.

…except one, actually. I had zero issues popping cooldowns on my rogue, from character creation on. I don’t know if it was because the rogue has so many cooldowns anyway, or if stealth fundamentally changes the cadence of encounters, or what.

Legion, despite gutting streamlining class fantasies, feels like it has more cooldowns. The most important is the Flightmaster’s Whistle, which has a 5 minute cooldown. I have trouble actually pressing 2 minute cooldowns, much less 5 minute ones, so I was quite annoyed at first. But now? Completely fine, obviously. The Skyhorn Kite got a cooldown nerf to 15 minutes – with a 3 minute shared cooldown with Goblin Gliders – but I use them any time it might shave off more than about 10 seconds of running around.

I am, at this point, pretty much completely cured of my cooldown anxiety.

The intriguing question is “why?” While the more straight-forward answer might be simply because I started to have to use them more, I think it might be more because the expected encounter/play-session length has shortened or at least fragmented. The interplay between World Quests and the Flightmaster Whistle ensures that which ones I complete are the ones that can be done in about 5 minutes; I actually skip the ones that can be completed in less than 5 minutes, as I’d be twiddling my thumbs waiting for the cooldown anyway. Given that I’m already spending 5 minutes (or more, depending on the time it takes for the Flight Path to complete) inbetween action, all of my cooldowns will be available at each stop. So… why not use them?

The good news is that I have noticed this “lesson” bleeding over into other games. I loaded up GW2 yesterday (a topic for another post), and while short cooldowns are rather integral to basic DPS already, I noticed myself pressing the longer 1.5 minute ones even when fighting basic enemies. And why not, right? It might only save you ~10 seconds or so questing, but not only does that time add up, it’s the equivalent of adding ~10 seconds to mob grinding each time the cooldown would have refreshed without you using it. So yeah, brain, there is an opportunity cost to pressing the button when you might have needed it later, but there is an equal opportunity cost for not pressing it.

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As an aside, my WoW subscription has technically expired despite having 10 WoW Tokens (the maximum) – I figure there isn’t much of a point of playing more until patch 7.1.5. Yeah, I would be missing on selling Felwort and some lucrative WQs, but would I make ~58k gold in 30 days? Probably not. I might go ahead and spend one if I get in a mood, but we’ll see if GW2 and other games assuage the withdraw.