Mists of Pandaria: Situational Tips and Tricks
 

Please try to keep the discussion limited to raid encounters where possible.

Note: Avoid mentioning blatantly obvious things which can be classified as simply "using common sense".

This thread will be a consolidated resource to present, review and discuss Situational or Encounter-Specific Tips, Tricks and Optimization techniques.

This topic operates independently of spec. All manner of items are up for discussion: Spells, Specs, Talents, Glyphs, Professions, Racials, Creative uses for Trinkets and Consumables, esoteric ways to handle Encounter specific Mechanics - and so on. In WOTLK, we would have noted things like: Invisibility can be used to Avoid Tear Gas on Putricide, Frost Warding talent (now obsolete) could be used for huge mana returns on Sindragosa, Incanter's Absorption could be abused in several creative ways. Nowadays, some of our fun tools include Alter Time, Presence of Mind, and the various level 90 DPS-boosting talents.

Other EJ Class Forums have seen several threads like this over the years, for discussion on topics such as Situational uses for Vanish, Demonic Portal, Amplify Magic etc. They present a great opportunity to quickly pick up a few simple - yet effective - tips to improve performance. These types of discussion points often easily get drowned out and spread across multiple mega-threads, making them difficult to track.

This discussion is reserved for Cataclysm. Hat tip and a thank-you to Tyrian, whose thread I cannibalized in starting this one.

As per request of moving posts:

On Feng the Accursed, you can Ice Block off "Arcane Resonance".
You can Blink through the flanking Mogu statues, on the Spirit Kings. You can also blink out of Pinned Arrow.
On Elegon, you can stand just at the edge of the dome and when you get the stacking "Overcharged" debuff, you can just jump with an instant cast or when refreshing your Mage Bomb instead of moving back and forth, to reset your stacks.
You can also blink through the Pillar walls on Elegon, which appear if you failed to kill all the Arcane Sparks.

If you use this technique and play with rune of power, be careful. Depending on how you place your rune, you could not get the buff neither on the dome, nor outside the dome.

Place your rune wether on the dome or outside, but not in between.

Stone Guards Heroic :
You can use Alter Time to keep Energized Tiles buff just before the boss turns the lights off (75% and 40% life) stacking up to 300+ stack at the end of the fight.

Yes that is correct, on our first kill I used Invocation as I never had the RoP Buff.

This is less encounter specific but has to do with Combustion and Pyroblast! procs.

If you have a heating up proc active before casting combustion, you can cast combustion, resetting your fire blast CD, and quickly cast fire blast before combustion hits, sneaking an extra pyroblast! proc into your rotation. In order to make this work, you must be far enough away that combustion will not hit the target in the margin it takes to cast fire blast. Someone with better knowledge of spell travel times can help me out on this one but i've found its somewhere around the 15 yard range.

This doesn't work anymore. It's possible I failed 3 times of course, but I was increasingly cautious about it the 2nd and 3rd time I tried it, and still wasn't able to get it to work.

Alter time can be used to break cobalt mines on Stone Guards. Whenever your procs align for you to use alter time, after you activate it step on a mine. Once you deactive alter time or it falls off after 6 seconds you'll return to full health (assuming you were at full health when you used alter time).

It works...sort of. You will return to however many stacks you had previously to the power down, but as soon as a new tile is placed you will go down to 1.

Actually from my experience, Combustion is not on global cooldown, so you can just make a macro for it, with the second cast instantly after casting combustion. That would be something like:

That should make it work!

I know this used to be an issue in Cata, but Combustion used to take a sec before registering on the target. If you tried to Impact it too soon, it wouldn't spread. I wouldn't suggest using this if you are trying to cleave combustion. Single target, it'll be a nice boost.

EDIT: I tried it in raid and LFR, Combustion cleaved fine when using this trick (I didn't use the macro).

In the HM Gara'jal encounter if you are using RoP along with the evo glyph when you go down to the spirit realm if you stand in a rune the healing from the run will constantly renew the duration of the buff, making it so you always leave the spirit realm with 30 seconds with how ever many stacks you were able to get from your healers

Also of note on Gara'jal, you can not use Alter Time to extend the duration of the bonus damage buff.

You can Blink out of the Amber Prisons on Wind Lord Mel'jarak, saving a fellow raid member from having to release you and getting the debuff.

You can Ice Block off the healing debuff on Amber-Shaper, best saved until P3 when the group will be stacked and you cant be in with the debuff.