Imp force-cast macros

This is something I haven't touched on previously, but there's been a lot of talk about it for some time on Elitist Jerks, and it's spilled over to the class forums lately, so you've probably heard about it.

Supposedly, it's a DPS gain for destro to macro /cast firebolt onto all of your other spells, thusly:

/cast incinerate
/cast firebolt

/cast immolate
/cast firebolt

And et cetera. So, what's this all about? Is it really that good? Read on in the break.

Ok, first of all, notice no "Myths" tag. This one's true. It's talking 0.5% gains in DPS, but so is min/maxing between glyph of imp and immolate. Realistically, and I don't exaggerate, these macros can mean more DPS gains than switching out those crit gems I keep seeing you people using for more appropriate selections.

So, why do these spells work? To see exactly how your spells work differently than your pet's on autocast, go to a target dummy and just spam incinerate or shadowbolt. Hammer the button like it owes you money.

You'll notice that as you hit the incinerate key while it's already casting, it will highlight near the end of the cast, this means the spell is "queued" and will start casting server side immediately when your current spell finishes. This is a recent addition to the WoW core UI, in the past addons faked the effect, but the core UI would only let you start casting when the client and server agreed that the previous cast was done - which is delayed by ping time. No matter how amazing your connection, there's always latency.

Now, start your imp auto-casting firebolt and watch his button. His doesn't light up like yours does. Autocast works on similar rules to the "old" WoW core UI.

Now, hammer on his firebolt button like it's your incinerate button and watch what happens. The pet bar supports spell queuing the same way your spells do, autocast just doesn't do it.

So, tacking /cast firebolt onto every spell in destro's rotation means that every time you hammer your buttons to get casts queued, you're doing the same for your imp, removing the latency delay on every cast he makes. Thus he fires more firebolts, and triggers more empowered imp procs, meaning more DPS for you as well. Small gains, but like I said - most DPS discussion is about getting small gains, there's only a few big things you can do that account for 90% of your DPS. The last 10% comes from a lot of little things that do add up.

Now, that's all well and good, but why doesn't affliction and demonology benefit from this?

The way the UI handles this queuing, you can't chain cooldowns, only casts. So you can go from a shadowbolt to another shadowobolt, from an incinerate to a conflag, but not from a curse to a shadowbolt.

Only the imp has a spell that can take advantage of queuing. Cleave, lash of pain, and shadow bite are all instants with cooldowns. White damage also isn't effected by latency, but imps have no white damage, only firebolt.

If you're serious about maximizing your DPS, these macros are easy to set up and are just one thing you can do to help. They only take a few minutes, and they're specifically designed to make the process painless - they work on something you're already doing for your own casts. You might occasionally miss an imp firebolt if it comes mid incinerate cast, but you'll hit a lot of them with no additional effort required.

Glyph of imp's days are numbered - immolate's already taken it's throne back in many cases, but even strong imp spec will be giving up on glyph of imp in 3.3.3 with immolate periodic damage gaining crit. However, in the mean time, min/maxing between glyph of imp and glyph of immolate does mean using these macros. The latency effect built into imp autocast means that imps naturally underperform simcraft unless you're forcing firebolt to queue. Even where glyph of imp is better it's not by much in simcraft. If you go that route, you can't afford latency turning your carefully calculated gain into a loss.