No, Sonny, Stopcasting doesn’t get rid of the Global Cooldown

Funny forum post, one player asked for a macro because he had seen another warlock “cast all DoTs instantly”, to which a reply was that the guy was certainly using /stopcasting

Doesn’t work that way. Of course, it begs the question, what is /stopcasting and why use it in your macros?

/stopcasting interrupts whatever spell is currently being cast. The normal usage was, initially, to allow you to abort a long cast in a macro in order to replace it by a short cast if needed, for instance a mage could have (fictional example)

#showtooltip
/cast Pyroblast
/stopcasting [modifier:shift]
/cast Polymorph [modifier:shift]

This would start charging up a 6-seconds Pyro but if something happens, hit the macro again wile holding the shift key and you cast a 1.5s poly instead. Or blink, or whatever.

Another common use is to insert it between instant actions / spells which do not trigger the global cooldown, like eg

/use trinket1
/stopcasting
/use trinket2
/stopcasting
/cast Pyroblast

Now take note that the need for stopcasting in this scenario will be removed in patch 2.3

More or less around when TBC got released, certain then-popular castingbar add-ons started adding an estimate of the amount of latency to the spell casting time. But in the big add-on breakage and reshuffling that happened at that time, nobody caught on another usage to /stopcasting.

Enter Quartz, a newer Casting Bar Addon which had a lot of additional Bells and Whistles, and really emphasized that casting latency. At some point this Spring, people started realizing that when the latency is big enough, commands you send to the WoW client will reach the server with a sufficient delay that you can start overlap certain things.

Thus a third usage was found for /stopcasting. Casters would now prepend all their important spells like this:

#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/cast Shadow Bolt

Now if you hit that macro while your current spell is casting, you’ll simply interrupt your cast, that’s the first example above. But here’s the trick, if your latency is big enough while you are casting, if you hit the macro near the end of your own cast, it will stop whatever you were casting on your client while, get this, the spell finishes casting on the server before the interruption of /stopcasting gets sent back. With a bit of practice (and caution), experienced raiders are now able to generate more DPS or more HPS over a long fight simply because they are chaining spells end-to-end while bypassing some of the network latency.

It’s a risky deal for MT healers to a point, which is if the Quartz estimate is too pessimistic (displaying a big latency at the beginning of the cast) and you hit your macro too early, you will effectively have cancelled a heal which could mean a wipe. For DPS it’s less risky… as long as you keep controlling your aggro.

But no, despite all the advantages, /stopcasting does not, under any circumstances, actually remove the global cooldown.

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