Improving your DPS

Hi there!
Now, I just logged out from playing my lvl 70 elemental shaman, and as I did I noticed the Recount from the Nexus normal run I had done. I had not been straining to hit any records and I'm rather lazy with cooldowns (and also I suck at DPSing; healing FTW) but I had clocked 900 DPS in questing greens.

I am fairly sure this means any level 80 doing a similar amount of DPS in a heroic or a raid is doing something extremely wrong. So rather than take someone aside in a condescending manner and have them feel insulted by some attempt to tutor them, I will simply lay out some good ground rules to Do Moar Pew Pew. If you check Recount in a heroic and find yourself at the bottom...take a look at these.

Whenever I see a person doing a low amount of damage, the first thing and most obvious thing to check is their gear. This is because it takes roughly three seconds to do. And the number of times I've seen people in heroics wearing gear that just... makes you wonder what they were thinking. While you grind those quests and dungeons out from 70 to 80 there are a great many items to choose from, and even if it is the very first heroic at 80 (and fair enough, we all stepped into UK heroic for the first time once) you should be wearing a certain level of gear. For example, if I see an epic it had better damn well be either a lvl 80 epic or a Sunwell drop, because the level 78-79 greens are better than 70 epics, hands down. No, I don't care how hard it was to kill Illidan, put the goddamn warglaives down, they suck.

It also helps to know what stats you should be choosing. "Do I want +12 agi from this piece, or +10 stam and +5 str from this one?" Not always easy to answer that, but as a general rule for a DPS class, avoid stamina like the plague (that's the tanks stat) and go for Hit Rating. Hit Rating is your personal Jesus. I don't care if you have 40 billion attack power, if you aren't hit capped, you bloody well better have a good reason for it, like "I'm an idiot, help me." If you are Hit Capped (and if you don't know what number that is you're aiming for, check the posts on these forums about hit capping) then start stacking other stats. With gems and enchants, usually its wisest to pick Base Stats (Str, Agi) over others (AP, Crit) unless the set bonus is very good since the paladin Blessing of Kings will enhance your choice by 10%. If you are a caster, ignore that entire sentence and stack spellpower until you are blue in the face.

TLDR (Ever wonder what this stands for? "Too long, don't read". Took me ages to find that out.)
Hit > All
Base Stats / Spellpower > AP, Crit, Haste, etc.

If a person's gear seems okay but they still don't pull their weight, my next suspicion is their rotation. Blizzard have built each class to have a whole set of moves that each complement each other while DPSing. Rogues use sinister strike to build combo points, but the 5-point move should not always just be Eviscerate. Arcane Mages should use the +dmg buff from Arcane Blast to boost the damage of another spell (usually Barrage), and not miss Missile Barrage procs. Frostfire Mages should ensure Living Bomb is always up, then stack Scorch, then FFB until IC-Pyro procs and repeat. Repeatedly pressing a single button simply will not do, for any class or spec.

The next suspect is their talent tree. Some talents look insane because they are (anything that boosts Hit for example) some look good but turn out to be awful (shaman Elemental Weapons for a non-enhance) and some are just laughably bad (hunter Endurance Training). If you're not sure, ask! Plenty of the Officers know a startling amount about class mechanics.

And how do I know all this?
Because I looked it up. It's really not hard at all. Wowhead Forums has a class section where mechanics are kept in stickies at the top and updated for every patch. Elitistjerks.com may be hard to read at times (they love to prove every point with a small textbook of writing) but they are simply never wrong. I didn't learn how to druid-heal by wiping, I learnt by browsing EJ and the Druid forums until I knew exactly how much mana Rejuvenation costs without looking, and the range of the spread of Wild Growth and global cooldown of Lifebloom (with Gift of the Earthmother) off by heart. It made me a better healer, and I probably fail less because I know without having to think which heal to use in which situation. And again, the emphasis is, I'm nothing special, I just looked it up.

In a raid, we will all be counting on you to do your part, whoever you are. And if the tank was lazy or didn't know how to AoE aggro, if your healer didn't know which spell to use and let you die, you would be annoyed that they had not taken to time to L2P (couldn't resist, sorry!). Why should it be any less true of a DPS? In the old days, DPSers were just carried through raids by tanks/healers that got all the loot priority. Now, with almost every boss needing targeted nuking and having a berserk timer, DPS have to sit up and take notice. We're counting on you too.

And trust me, I bloody well do notice when a person joins the guild and makes an effort to crank up their contribution. 2.5k DPS and I'll certainly put you on those next-tier invites.

Wall of Text crits you for 100,000.
Your equipped items suffer a 10% durability loss.
You dai.