Pre-Potting and the Long Jump

A problem often arises in track and field's long jump. It's the foot fault. An athlete wants to maximize the distance they jump from the white board out into to the sand pit. Usually they have well-measured strides and know exactly where to start off from. But performance jitters, adrenaline, and changes in speed can throw that off. What results is a bad jump.

In World of Warcraft, Pre-Potting, the consuming of a potion just before combat begins, is a useful skill to get a tiny boost before battle and to not trigger potion sickness. It has plenty of challenges. First, many encounters have a boss dialog with you in combat that is longer than 15 seconds. On the bosses where there is not this dialog you can effectively pre-pot. The challenge is to not foot fault on the non-combat/combat line and end up with that being your one and only potion against that boss.

The classic advice for the super-star long jumper who is foot-faulting is this: Jump a full foot early - that way if you are off a little you're fine. This is especially true in decathlons. So my wow pre-potting advice is this: Pre-pot a good two seconds early ("one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two") - that way lag in vent will not cause you to have potion sickness.