I wonder if this is just me, or if others have felt like this sometimes. You're on a raid, and you're in a situation where there are going to be (a) multiple fights back-to-back, (b) very long fights, or (c) very long fights back-to-back. Raid leader calls for DPS to burn something down, so you do what an Assassin does best. Raid leader keeps calling for DPS, and more DPS, and more DPS, and all you're staring at is a face full of reuse timers: 10 minutes for Decapitate and 2 for Killing Blade (after 26 AA), and even those 30-60 second timers on the other skills seem to last an eternity when it's down to the last 1 - 2 minutes of a win-or-wipe fight. And that's when I feel like going all Scotty: Och! I canna give her any more! I know what the solutions are for the raid force as a whole. And the raid leader's a good guy -- knows his stuff -- who's trying to achieve a lot with very little. (We have good players, and we have plenty of them, but you don't get to hand-pick class combinations the same way on Test as you do on a larger server, at least not every week.) I'm just curious if there's anything I can do on an individual level, other than intuit when my raid leader really actually for real this time wants the DPS spike he's asking for, because I know I won't be able to give it to him again for a couple of minutes. Thoughts?
Answer is... Just do the best you can do. Generally, when the raid leader has called for a full burn, i've already expended my Decap/Killing Blade. So the only solution is to throw everything you have available. If you're running Mental Breach poison, you generally have enough power to sustain yourself for a while. Switch it off for some Caustic to try for that 10% poison proc. Not much you can do.
I definitely know what you mean. I often decide for myself when my ABSOLUTE MAX DPS is going to be needed. If I know that a huge named baddie is coming up, I'll save up my Decap/Killing/Evisc so that I know I'll have them when they're needed. When full burn is called on Mr. Big, I deaggro, defuff, and Concealment the crap out of him. In the situations you talked about, though, with DPS be ing *constantly* called for, let it all out ASAP. The sooner you use those CAs, the sooner their reuse timers will come up, so you'll do more total DPS over the course of the raid.
Personally, I think the tank is refering to the mages of the raid. Wizards and Warlocks with Freehand sorcery AA line are crazy damage, but they have to really hold back to not pull agro. So, when the tank says burn hard, i suddenly see the 14k Ice Nova, and the 30k Fusion go off. The Devistation and Rift crits aren't as noticable but 2k very second and a 9k rift crit aren't that bad.
Slow your CAs just a little bit. You can time it so that your auto-attack is queued up and fires off inbetween the CAs. This will reduce short term dps but increase long-term dps.
