[Ele Shaman] When to use On-use Trinkets

When should I use my on-use trinkets, especially when they have different cooldown lengths?

Do I macro them in with Flame Shock so that they're nearly always on cooldown, or do I macro them together with Elemental Mastery so that they're active during my %Damage buff? (I'm assuming I should be casting my %Damage buff during Heroism, when possible, right?)

For reference, my character is at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/hyjal/kaezoku/advanced. One of my trinkets has a 2 minute cooldown, the other has a 1.5 minute cooldown, and Elemental Mastery has (I believe) a 3 minute cooldown, but is lowered by my compulsive lightning bolt casting.

I find that my short-cooldown trinket (which has a flat +Spellpower effect) is rarely on cooldown, which means that I don't use it often enough. I can't seem to use it AND the longer CD one (since they both add spellpower, I assume) at the same time, so I'm looking at a way to make sure it's not just wasted stats (despite looking good on paper). While I feel like it's suboptimal not to guarantee that I'm stacking them with Elemental Mastery, macro'ing the trinkets to my Flame Shock would come pretty close to approximating the on-equip trinkets' uptime and therefore I think it ought to give me better returns.

I'm lazy and I just macro my trinkets into my "spam" abilities to get maximum uptime. I know this isn't the best way to do it but I'm not uber enough to keep track of everything.

It does seem that your Elemental Mastery would work well with the 1.5 min cooldown trinket. (2x trinket, 1x Elemental Mastery) If you can track your trinkets decently, it shouldn't be too hard to combine it with your Elemental Mastery.

However, until you get a better answer, you're right in that keeping them on cooldown will serve you better than not using them at all.

Why not just use them on cooldown? Watching the cooldowns of use trinkets is not particularly hard, I think even with the default UI, putting them on a bar will show their cooldown remaining. Hotkey the buttons for them and hit them when they're up or at opportune moments in the fight.

fafhrd wrote:Why not just use them on cooldown? Watching the cooldowns of use trinkets is not particularly hard, I think even with the default UI, putting them on a bar will show their cooldown remaining. Hotkey the buttons for them and hit them when they're up or at opportune moments in the fight.

I am pretty much out of easily accessible hotkeys for them, and don't have conveniently located spaces to watch them yet that aren't already filled with seemingly More Important stuff. Stuff that I don't often need, but if I want to cast a clutch earth elemental, or earthbind, I need it someplace I can easily reach it.

In case it helps, here's what I did: I installed TrinketMenu which puts up a movable little bindable/clickable/resizable frame showing your 2 trinkets. It's handy for quickly switching which ones you have equipped, can autoswitch them for you as they get used, and I bound them to shift+f1 and shift+f2.

I'd think your trinket cooldowns qualify as pretty important things . You'd likely get better dps from 2 worse passive trinkets than 2 good active trinkets you don't use very often.

The idea is to use them as much as possible with the only caveat being during burn phases with your Fire Elemental where you want to have your trinkets procced as well as any other temp buffs (Power Torrent/DMC:Volcano/Volcanic Pot) to get as much dps from it as you can. I have my Synapse Springs macro'd into every single one of my abilities so that no matter what I'm casting I'm maximizing uptime. I personally cannot stand on use trinkets as that's just one more stupid thing I have to pay attention to during a fight.