Stopcasting and 2.3

In case you’ve been living under a rock while playing WoW, you probably know that WoW 2.3 is already being downloaded to your computer via the background downloader.  It started late last week, so I’m guessing that the patch will be next Tuesday.  Regardless of when exactly, it will most likely be soon.

Quite awhile ago, I showcased the Quartz macro and /stopcasting macro combination that will help casters improve the downtime due to the way your computer communicates with the WoW servers.  Coming at it from a different angle… With vanilla WoW, you had button mashers: people that would hit a spell many times when the previous spell was about to finish casting so they could get the spell off as soon as possible.  With /stopcasting, it now had to be precision.  If you button mashed, you’d just be interrupting your spells all over the place.  GirlMeetsWow spoke about 2.3 that it was the return of button mashing, while Altitis has said it’s more like the precision needed for /stopcasting.

I say that we’re actually somewhere in the middle now.  In 2.3, casting a new spell while you’re currently casting one will trigger the Global Cooldown (GC). But if your latency is decent, the GC will reset, not having to use the full time.  So, it’s not button mashing, but it doesn’t penalize you the full GC either.  So, what does a caster do when 2.3 comes out?  First off, get rid of most of your /stopcasting macros.  Quartz will still be extremely useful, as it will let you know when to cast your next spell.  Cast your spell like you would have when using the /stopcasting.  If you’ve been using this already, then it will be like nothing has happened.  You just won’t interrupt your spells if you cast it too early.  If you haven’t been using it, what were you waiting for?

Keep in mind that the /stopcasting command itself is still very useful.  A perfect example would be that of Counterspell:
/stopcasting
/cast counterspell

This allows you to stop casting that pyroblast (or any spell) to the face and interrupt the paladin’s heal.