Fat fingures McGee

To paraphrase Twigg (@TwiggyKT) Cooldowns are the difference between steady damage and topping the DPS charts. Cooldowns for those of you that don't know are abilities or on use trinkets that enhance your character or group in such a beneficial way that they can only be used periodically, once every thirty seconds. That's just an example, these abilities can have cooldown periods that range from twenty seconds to upwards of ten minutes. Typically the amount of time between usage is proportionate to it's overall value. for example; Safeguard (Warriors) 20% all damage reduction has a six second duration with a thirty second cooldown. At the other end of the spectrum is Bloodlust (Shaman) Increases melee, ranged, and spell haste by 30% for all party and raid members. Has a forty second duration with a five minute cooldown and players can only be effected once every ten minutes. (essentially making for a ten minute cooldown). If a player manages their cooldowns properly they can seriously increase their overall damage output and utility to their group.

This however is not a post about how to do that, I'm simply not that well informed or proficient in all eleven classes/ thirty four specs. This is a post about how do avoid hurting your overall DPS and utility to your group. The best way to avoid underperforming in this context is to avoid using these abilities at inopportune times (using raid wide cooldowns while fighting trash). This is a simple enough problem to avoid.  Their is however the issue of accidental button pushing (henceforth referred to as sneezelust). to avoid this problem make sure that you key bind your cooldown abilities far away from the abilities that you use regularly. Another smart idea is to keybind your cooldowns with a modifier key for example instead of simply binding Bloodlust to "1" you might want to bind it to "shift +1" That way the odds of you using it on accident are practically zero. However if you do make a mistake and use your cooldowns at a bad time when in a group just make sure to apologize, some players will be jerks about it but honestly we've all done it, so don't sweat it, learn from your mistakes and make sure that you take your hands away from the keys before sneezing.

I want to give a special thanks to Nightwill ( @oathblade ) for providing me with the screenshots for this blog post. 
And remember we're all noobs, some of us just fly the flag a little higher.
-Morison