Question to BM Hunter mains

[FrostyButt]

Save cooldowns (Crows/TT/BW/Wild) to use them all together? Or just use them when they come off cooldown? Lets say BW is off cooldown, but there is still say 15 seconds from Crows/TT being back up. Is it better to wait to BW when Crows/TT are ready, or just use BW right as it comes off cooldown?

I guess a better question would be what is the optimal way to utilize my cooldowns?

[Vellithe]

That really depends on what you're trying to achieve, but iirc the cooldowns are short enough that you should avoid holding them off for too long, unless there's some hard priority targets that just need to die ASAP or something like that.

You can use simulation craft and play around with the rules to have it hold off on buttons to use them all together, but I'm pretty sure that'll be a huge hit to your DPS because you're probably going to cast them less often. The one exception being Aspect of the Wild, but that one does have a longer cooldown so delaying it a bit will probably not cause you to cast it one less time in a fight.

[jaimelannister]

BW is up often enough that it’s rarely an issue, but basically you just don’t want to delay anything longer than a few seconds at most. None of our CDs are so powerful that delaying them is good in the long run. And for TT, the key is to line it up with good dire beast uptime (need to get the dire beasts out before you cast it), as opposed to delaying it significantly to line it up with BW.

[Khallid]

There's a few details that can matter.

It's not as common anymore, but if you're still wearing Tier 19 like me, you should never cast Titan's Thunder outside of Bestial Wrath, ever, because the tier bonus affects Dire Beasts's Titan Thunder.

The other big detail is knowing your own average time between Bestial Wraths, which varies wildly with how much crit and haste you have. So, for example, if you have over 50% Bestial Wrath uptime that tells you that on average you spend less than 15 consecutive seconds outside of Bestial Wrath, which makes waiting more worthwhile, since 15 seconds is 25% of Crows' cooldown, but you get about 40% damage from Bestial Wrath, assuming Tier 20 2-piece and OWTP. In this case, you always want to wait for Bestial Wrath. If you have low crit, you probably have a much lower uptime of Bestial Wrath. If your Bestial Wrath uptime is around 33% or so, you should not wait if Crows is ready right after Bestial Wrath ends.

As for Aspect of the Wild, you should always wait for Bestial Wrath, especially if you're talented to Killer Cobra. It's a waste of focus otherwise.

[Nythiz]

Most of the above responses are about right.

In general it's all about whether or not you will lose a cooldown over the course of a fight.
Abilities synergize in such a way that combining them is (nearly) always going to be better, but the question is often if the tradeoff is big enough if it results in losing an extra use of that cooldown during a fight.

Say you're in a 3 minute fight. You can use crows 3 times during that fight (on pull, at 1:00 and at 2:00). But there is quite a bit of leeway in how you shift your cooldown as well. You could easily wait for BW and get all 3 crows with BW. Let's say that you're extremely unlucky and have to wait 15 seconds every time until BW comes up to combine with crows, you're looking at crows at pull, at 1:15 and at 2:30. Still 3 sets of crows.
However if above fight would have lasted only 2 minutes and 15 seconds instead of 3 minutes, that would have made you lose 1 entire cooldown worth of crows because you stalled.

Basically whether you should wait for cooldowns to use them together or use them as they come up depends on fight length and the cooldown length.
BW should never be held back (unless it's like 2 seconds or something) because with a cooldown as short as it is, you're much more likely to lose BW uptime.
CotW has a somewhat longer cooldown and can be held back a bit to combine with BW, it's an extremely strong combo (with killer cobra especially) and you're much less likely to lose potential uses.
Crows and TT are harder to judge, because they're sort of short enough that you're likely to lose uptime if you hold on too long. Yet long enough and synergize well enough with BW that you'll almost always want to combine them. This is generally when experience and player judgement comes in.