Ready Check is a twice-a-week column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Vault of Archavon or Ulduar, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. Today, we're going to look at a specific tactic for speeding your success through each encounter -- cooldown management.

The proper use of a raid's cooldowns is pretty key to maximizing your damage output. (Cooldown is one word. Yes. it. is.)

One moment, you are a meager Retribution Paladin. You struggle to maintain your place on the DPS chart. Your weak blows are the stuff of ridicule and angsty blog posts. The Death Knight next to you merely smirks at your DPS, his condescending unibrow peering at you from within his dark, dark helmet of angst. Try as you might, you can barely generate a cooling wind as you struggle to perform for your raid leader.

And then you blow wings. Suddenly, your damage is the stuff of legend! With those golden heralds of power and magnificence unfurling from your broad, manly shoulders, there is no enemy who can stand before you! You speak in all exclamation points! Women and men in Leia-costumes hurl themselves at your feet, while you swat away weaksauce Rogues and OP Warlocks with the barest of effort! Ghostcrawler is forced to resign, offering you the ultimate power in World of Warcraft design! You are fantastic!

And then it's over, so very, very much too soon. You are left to wait until your next cooldown is up to once again recapture that former glory, and remember what it was like to be the quarterback.

Okay, I exaggerate. But the idea that cooldown use increase your performance should be obvious. They don't put a spell in your Spellbook because they don't want you to use it. (Well, they rarely do so, anyway.) But cooldown management is a challenge for every raider. While a lot of folks have their cooldown management well under hand, there's still plenty of folks out there who could use some handy tips.

Every class comes equipped with procs and cooldowns. Both of these game dynamics produce a temporary buff to either the player himself or raid members around him. (The rules as to whether such a buff affects only the player, the player's group, or the entire raid are a bit too labyrinthine for a single article, so we'll skip that issue for now.) While there are methods to force an ability to proc, cooldowns are usually consciously activated by the player.

Cooldowns, obviously, aren't limited to player abilities. You can pick up many cooldown abilities from trinkets (and occasional other items). You use the item, and you get the buff for a short time. Since the item is balanced knowing you'll only have that buff for a short time, usually the bonus you receive is fairly significant.

It's relatively to safe to assume that the use of a cooldown will always improve performance. But there's a lot to be said for using that cooldown at the "best" time. Do you want to use the cooldown early in the fight? Or do you want to hold onto it for something special? When will you get the most bang for your buck?

When considering when to use DPS cooldowns, I generally think of fights as falling into the "early and often" method or the "hold onto it" method. If a fight is an "early and often" fight, then you presumably don't have any reason to wait before popping a CD. The fight might even last long enough for you to use it twice, or it might just not matter when you blow your trinket. If you get to use it twice, that's pure bonus. There's is one reason to wait for special timing even for "early and often" fights -- I'll get to that in a bit.

The "hold onto it" method is a little trickier. Many boss fights have "phases" of the fight, during which certain conditions get a lot harsher. As a result, you want to get through the phase as quickly as possible. A good example of this dynamic is Kel'Thuzad. KT Big Bones himself doesn't really hit all that hard, and most of his damaging abilities are easily mitigated in other ways. (Don't stand in the circles, or interrupt his Frostbolt.)

But during Kel'Thuzad's third phase, he has a few helper friends come out. These big bugs need to be off-tanked. And while they don't start off hitting very hard, they stack a buff that will eventually mean they're one-shotting your off-tanks.

Obviously, you want to get through that third phase as fast as possible. In this case, you want to save your cooldowns for the third phase. When KT's helper bugs come out, blow all your tricks -- get through the phase as fast as possible. If you had used your CDs earlier in the fight, then you don't have that extra juice to get through the helper-phase that much faster.

I mentioned earlier that even for "early and often" fights, there's a reason to hold a few seconds for your DPS cooldown. That reason is a cooldown itself -- Heroism. (Or, of course, Bloodlust.) This buff was the subject of much angst, back during the Sunwell Plateau days. The buff was so powerful that you wanted to have many uses of it on tap, causing some weird situations with cycling Shaman players in and out of the raid. Since then, it's been nerfed a few times. Now, significantly, you get the Exhaustion (or Sated) debuff after being affected by Heroism, keeping you from getting it again for ten minutes.

Ultimately, then, you're only going to see Heroism once during most fights. Therefore, try and time your personal cooldowns such that you use them during the effects of this mammajamma buff. Letting your own cooldown ride overtop Heroism will get you some huge results.

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