Tilo

Hello guildies! This post will be about effective cooldown. Since we as rets all our abilites are cooldown based we need a metric to measure our performance besides the DPS we generate to bosses.

The effective cooldown is two fold, one is the real world effective cooldown (which is affected by computer lag and hand/eye response time), and the theorical one which is calculated with a spreadsheet. Basically we want to be as close as possible to our theorical effective cooldown.

First we need to obtain our effective cooldown, so grab a long static fight from WoL (the best for this purpose is Festergut but only if you didn't had to move because of a spore), go to damage done and click on your name and there you will see the amount of hits, crits, blocked and missed attacks, so sum all of your main abilities (Judge, CS, DS, Cons, Exo, HoW) and divide the active time by the amount of ability uses and that's the effective cooldown.

If in a fight you have 270 seconds of activity time and the sum of all the hits, crits, misses, etc of CS is 30 then you do 270/30 and that's the effective cooldown of CS for that fight. The effective cooldown of Cons and HoW is calculated a bit more complex. For Cons you take the total ticks and divide it by 10 (or 8 if you have dared to not have the glyph of Consecration) and that number is the times you used Cons. With HoW i don't know how to calculate how much time a boss spends with less than 20% HP so that is tricky, i use as active time for HoW the total active time * 0.2 but that's extremely innacurate.

So once you have your effective cooldowns then you pass to the spreadsheet, the best is Redcape's spreadsheet. Fill the spreadsheet with your stats, go to the main page and input the fight length to the same as the WoL parse and in the lag combo select 0 (you'll need to activate macros for the spreadsheet to work), let it compute and in the effective cooldown cells are your theorical effective cooldown for all the main abilities.

Then you can compare both values and see how far you are from the simulation, a good way to do it is by dividing the theorical effective cooldown by the real effective cooldown and that multiply it by 100 and you'll see the percentage of aproximation you have versus the simulation.

With this exercise you'll see how effectively use the FCFS and hopefully will help to improve your performance.

Short and sweet post, nice!