Usually on a raid boss encounter everybody in your group thinks about the same stuff, generally speaking.. However more often than not, you will find people that focus on the wrong stuff, and bring down the quality of your attempts significantly. Here’s a small guide with basic information we should all aim to do on a progression raid!
1. Survivability.
a) Timers: Always keep an eye on timers. Make sure you are ahead of whatever is going to happen so you can react quick and adapt to improve your raid’s performance. Is Valiona about to cast Black Out? Keep an eye on the timer! If you are the target and react instantly, you can even prevent your raid group from stacking by using a cooldown. There is always something you can improve on by merely being ahead of the timers.
b) Positioning: Are you standing on the right spot? More often than not being on the wrong spot will make you more vulnerable to unnecessary damage. By standing on the wrong spot you also increase the damage your group takes. Always try to have a plan of your current position, as well as where you will need to move next based on the timers!
c) Mechanics: It sounds pretty basic. But once you further analyze boss mechanics, there is always a very unique way to deal with them in order to increase your survival. Be on the lookout and keep the first two points in mind.
d) Class Cooldowns: More often than not people die, even when they stand on the right place, react properly, because they didn’t use a survival cooldown. Pretty much every single class on the game has something that greatly increases their survival. Druids can Barkskin, rogues can Feint and Cloak of Shadows, mages can Iceblock, the list goes on, yet we still see people die to crackles on Nefarian, or any other number of deaths that could have easily been avoided by using 1 button. Recommendation? Bind that very specific cooldown of yours and never forget about it! Watch the timers, your position and boss mechanics and don’t hesitate to use that button if you ever feel you’re about to die.
e) External Assistance: Raiding is all about teamwork. And if you ever do a mistake, or get in a situation where you just can’t do on your own, you should not hesitate to ask other raiders for help. Be vocal about it! There are a large number of things people can do to keep you alive, but they unless you let them know, nothing is going to happen. I really can’t stress this enough, be vocal and communicate with your raid! Eventually this will further develop synergy among your team to greater levels.
2. Utility.
a) Observe: As previously mentioned, raiding is all about team work. And most classes have something that can very easily improve your raids performance. Always be in the lookout for situations where you can help other people! This doesn’t apply to just healers. Keep an eye on your raid frames! Are your healers nearly out of mana? Perhaps you should innervate if you can, or heal yourself if you can. There’s so many things you can do to help your raid, always be in the lookout!
b) Gimmick Encounters: Every so often there’s a specific fight where your class stands above others due to a specific mechanic. Make sure you are ready to exploit this as much as you can! Sometimes this might mean doing lower DPS at the expense of some awesome utility. Other times it might mean doing double the DPS every else does.
3. Output:
a) Maximize: You want to do all the previously stated roles while maximizing your output as much as you possibly can. More often than not this means analyzing your position, encounter mechanics, being ahead of the timers, and so much more. Being in the right position as a ranged DPS means you won’t have to move as much when the next phase begins, thus increasing your uptime.
b) DPS the right target: High numbers don’t mean you are a good raider. A lot of encounters require target switching, and this will reduce your numbers a lot. Being quick to swap targets and making sure you do as much as you can will increase your overall raid DPS in the long run. Otherwise you can end up being the lonely top DPSer by a lot, but your raid DPS will end up being a lot less, simply because the adds were alive a lot longer and the uptime the rest of the raid had on the boss was a lot less.
c) Button Mashing: WoW is a game about pressing buttons. The more buttons you press, the better your output will be! Be careful however, this doesn’t mean to blindly mash your keyboard. Of course you’ll need to follow your class rotation. But the more often you hit an ability, the better. For example a raider that waits for an ability to be cast to begin doing the next, will have their latency give them on average a 0.2 seconds loss everytime you cast an ability. This means that if you cast 100 abilities on any given fight, you will lose (0.2 seconds * 100 abilities) 20 seconds. Thats a lot of time doing nothing, which is why you want to spam as hard as you can without breaking your keyboard or fingers! There’s a really good guide on youtube by Kripparian on how to maximize your DPS, make sure to check that out!
d) Don’t go out of your way to help other people: Despite everything I said here, you should never go out of your way to help others. One thing is working as a team and increasing performance, another is carrying other raiders so hard that you do practically nothing else. Of course there are times when you should completely ignore this advice, but these are very unique situations.
Remember to balance things out! Maximizing your performance does not mean being a beast on the DPS meter. It means being a solid DPSer while working as a team. What makes a good player is the ability to become a beast on the DPS meters while also doing the very best you can to help the raid out.
Before we start, the Disclaimer!