World of Warcraft players have long discussed potions as being in a weird spot. While some have an extremely straight-forward use – healing potions heal, movement speed potions make you go faster, etc. – stat-based potions can be a bit more obnoxious.
Much of this comes from the strangeness of cooldowns. Many potions won’t begin their cooldown right when used, as one might expect, but instead begin the cooldown once the user exits combat.
This makes it a much more difficult task to reliably use potions, as rather than having an expected cooldown, one needs to judge the usage based off of how much longer combat may or may not last, as well as adding the cooldown. PvP raises further issues with this specific complication.
To fix the issues with potion cooldowns, Blizzard has altered the way that potions will be working for the upcoming Shadowlands expansion. Discussing the changes in a recent official post on the forums, Blizzard said the following:
“In this next build of the Shadowlands alpha, combat potions, such as primary stat potions and mana potions, now have a 5 minute cooldown. Additionally, they are no longer limited to one use per encounter.”
Blizzard states that the intention of these fixes is to make potions “less of a hassle, less expensive, and more decision-oriented in various situations throughout the game.” In raids, dungeons, and PvP, this change is expected to bring a great addition to quality of life.
Players will still be able to use a potion towards the beginning of a raid encounter as they have. However, players have been needing to use it before combat to make it so that the cooldown begins, which burns away some of the active time for the potion as you wait to start combat.
This makes it so that longer encounters, such as the current multi-phase bosses in Ny’alotha like N’zoth and Vexiona, offer the chance to use some potions twice. A win or wipe will also reset the potion cooldown to cut down waiting.
With PvP, players will be able to predict the cooldown of enemy potions after seeing them utilize a consumable by knowing that the cooldown has begun immediately instead of guessing when the opponent will leave combat. This will make predictive play more effective and reward players with the awareness to pay attention to these sorts of elements.
Finally, dungeons will now emphasize timing and proper utilization. This is especially true for Mythic+ dungeons, where player are fighting against a clock and needing to predict as much as possible when they’ll have the most effective use of their bonuses.
