DPS for success
So you are dishing out damage like a cluster bomb and still not getting aggro. But your raid is wiping. People are dying and the healers are out of mana. What more can you do?
Bad dps is easy but good dps is hard. What makes for good dps? The obvious and typical answer is to top the damage meters and not get aggro. But less well know and just as important is helping your healers keep you alive. Dead people can’t dps.
The typical mistakes bad dpsers make are getting out of range or line of sight of their healer, running away from their healer when trying to avoid damage, and not putting on stamina when it’s needed. Let’s look at some ways for dps to stay alive.
Focus Target
If you aren’t using /focus for your crowd control target you should be using it for your healer. This is especially important in large raids and encounters where everyone is moving around.
For a healer to keep you alive they have to be in range and in line of sight. Usually a healer will position themselves to make this easy for you, but in spread out encounters or where there is moving around this can be a problem. Often players don’t know where or even who their healer is and wind up out of range or fleeing in the wrong direction.
You should know who your healer is and where they are. An easy way to do this is to set your focus to your healer and enabling focus target. This lets you see if they are in range, what they are casting, who they are casting at, and much mana they have. At a glance you can see if it’s likely you are going to be healed, if you need to reposition, or possibly heal yourself.
To focus your healer select them and type /focus. You can type /clearfocus to reset it. If you are using the default unit frame you will need to go to your interface settings and enable range checking. The focus frame will fade out when they are out of range. You can also enable showing your focus’ target. This lets you see who you healer is targeting. And if it’s not you, then you might want to break out the bandages.
Two Foods and Stamina Gear
Some fights need some extra dps and some you just need to stay alive. Carry around two types of food. One to increase your dps and another to increase your stamina for when you need to stay alive. If a twenty five player raid use thirty point stamina food, that’s 7500 more health to work with. And that’s more than some squishy characters have total.
This is also true for gear. Carry around some gear that you can swap in and out to increase your stamina. PvP gear often makes a great choice for this.
Bandages, Stones, and Pots
The single most important thing you can do to help your healers is for you to know when to back off or heal yourself. If you are taking damage, glance at how the healing is going. Don’t assume you will be healed when the healers are having trouble. If it looks bad or they are low on mana, back off, reposition, or heal thyself. Bandages, healthstones, and health potions are essential. Your first aid skill should be maxed. If there is more than one warlock you should have two healthstones of different ranks. And a make sure you have a stack of potions. This isn’t always possible and sometimes you just have to trust that your healers have you covered especially on dps intensive fights. But don’t let dps tunnel vision kill you when all you need is to use a bandage.
Some of this can get quite expensive, so don’t be afraid to use cheaper potions or food. Slightly weaker health potions or stamina food still makes a difference. By helping your healers keep you alive, you help everyone stay alive.
Remember ghosts can’t dps!
I never can understand how the DPS in my raid can just stand there at 25% health and *not* do something about it (besides waiting for me to heal them).
Hopefully they are looking in their inventory for bandages and wishing it was on their hotbar. But bad dps is probably just confused why the health bar is low.
Updated, the default unit frame now has range checking.