Raiding Tips/Tricks - How do You Play?

So I thought I’d share, in explicit (probably even pedantic) detail, how it is I play the game, just in case some morsel can be of use to anyone of any class or role. None of it is new information that can’t be found in various guides on the net. This is just what works for me. Most of it is basic, obvious raiding 101 stuff, but often dismissed as subjective or peripheral.

In Risen, we were also a family-oriented guild that raided 2 nights a week. Usually when a new tier of content arrived, the first couple weeks would be spent demolishing normal mode to get to the real content – heroic. DPS was highly competitive, especially our brutally honest and critical Death Knight, Kailee, a notorious theorycrafter bent on pumping out consistently world class top 10 WoL parses. I also had the company of a couple other warlocks capable of the same feats. This crucible kept me sharp and always looking for the edge. Now I prefer to spend a bit less free time scouring for ways to squeeze 10 more DPS out of a fight, but much of what I’ve learned has become second nature.

I get this a lot in LFR and PUGs for world bosses. They always ask about my rotation or stat priority, then claim they’re doing the same thing and are perplexed at where the discrepancy must lie.

It’s easy to find strategy guides about the best single target or AoE rotation, best-in-slot gear, highest-simming specs and stat priorities, but when I’m asked by other warlocks in LFR to make appraisals, armory profiles and combat logs won’t tell the whole story. It’s sometimes taboo to criticize, but how you actually play the game, that is, physically interact with your computer is probably going to be as large, if not the largest, single factor affecting your performance. There’s no such thing as a wrong way to play WoW if you’re just here to have fun, but there are plenty of wrong ways if you care about maximizing your potential, which is what’s most fun for me. I’m often shocked to hear from people who have been playing their main since vanilla and don’t use or are even aware of nameplates or DoT Timers or hotkeys, shrugging them off as irrelevant factors.

I believe success in raiding all comes down to playing the game in a way that maximizes your attention on things that matter while minimizing or removing things that don’t. You have a limited attention budget that each encounter is designed to tax. Every decision you make may be deeply informed by research, class guides and theorycrafting, but if your attention budget is strained by too many stimuli that aren’t crucial to the encounter at hand, your risk of mistakes increases.

The purpose behind each of these suggestions is allocating that attention budget in a way that increases awareness of key events, thus increasing efficiency, while eliminating distractions, thus reducing mistakes.

Hotkey or Die

First, ABSOLUTELY NO CLICKING. I’m sure this is already fundamental for everyone here, but I’ve found that even some great players aren’t always thorough about hotkeying or making the necessary macros for all of their combat abilities. If this doesn’t apply to you, skip the following arguments for why clicking is terrible.

Any ability you might ever have to use in any raid situation, no matter how rarely, must be hot-keyed. If it’s not, you’re losing time, getting distracted and endangering the raid. This goes for special action buttons, too. Just make the macro “/click ExtraActionButton1” and assign it to “that hotkey I use for fight-specific mechanics.”

“But I do fantastic DPS and I’m a clicker. To each his own.”

I don’t believe you, and you’re wrong. No matter how awesome your dps may be, it would be even better if you used hotkeys and the appropriate macros.

“I’ve been playing this way for too long. I’m comfortable with it and trying to learn hotkeys would do more harm than good.”

Lazy, and I guess you don’t really care about min/maxing your output, nor do you respect the time and effort of those who are probably carrying you. In the long run, if you took a weekend to practice with hotkeys, you would look back at your clicking self and wonder what the hell you were thinking.

“I’m an excellent multitasker. I can handle clicking without standing in fire.”

Delusional. Science has shown that multi-tasking is practically impossible in the literal sense, i.e. doing multiple things simultaneously and without error. When we think of ourselves as multitasking, what we’re really doing is quickly shifting our focus between several tasks, but while that focus is briefly on whatever task, the others inevitably suffer in the periphery. It’s a matter of switching back to each channel before something bad happens. You can simply remove a host of distractions from your already taxed attention budget by relegating your interface to the keyboard.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should never use your mouse. By all means, if you have one of those mega mice with 18 buttons, feel free to use them as hotkeys. The problem is when you find yourself having to move the cursor to an icon on your screen to click it. There’s a reason everyone types using a keyboard instead of clicking an on-screen keyboard. It’s drastically more efficient and frees up attention to be spent on other visual tasks.

Most world class raiders and PvPers tend to use their mouse for moving, camera adjustment and (with fancy mice) extra hotkeys, while using the keyboard for the rest of their hotkeys. Movement using the arrow keys or WASD is discouraged as it requires you to turn in order to run in a direction different from the one you’re facing which wastes precious time. For example, if the boss is about to cast a large, deadly AoE spell and you need to clear its radius, turning around then running or turning a quarter-way then strafing will never be as fast as pointing the camera behind you and clicking both mouse buttons.

As a left-hander I find this control scheme a bit challenging and awkward but I still recommend it. I keep my (normal 2-button) mouse on the left side and use hotkeys with my right hand. However, I have enough macros and hotkeys assigned to fill the entire keyboard, so many end up out of reach. I order to reach them all quickly, I find it easier to ditch the mouse entirely, use my right hand to move with arrow keys as well as hitting longer cooldowns and targeting macros assigned to the NumPad and Delete, End, Page Down, etc., while performing my DPS rotation with my left hand on keys 1-6 and QWERTY.

Keyboard-turning is a bit more forgiving to casters as they’re often spread out where strafing will suffice, and they don’t have to worry about chasing mobs to stay in melee range. Any time a fight requires sharp changes in direction of movement, though, I will revert to using the mouse. I also must use the mouse as Destruction to place Rain of Fire. If you’re comfortable using the mouse in one hand and reaching all your hotkeys with the other, that’s probably the best setup.

Efficient and Clear UI

Blizzard has made good strides in folding features from some of the most useful addons into the core experience. Some people go nuts with customization, but I’m a stickler for preserving the game’s aesthetic. The interface is the wrapper of the whole package and where the rubber meets the road in terms of how players receive feedback for actions they take in game. If my interface strays too far from the aesthetic Blizzard created, I feel like I’m playing a different game – one that’s uglier and less fun. If this doesn’t matter to you, don’t worry. What matters most is having the most important information where it can be easily seen and read clearly. For me, this means minimalism. If it’s not absolutely imperative, you don’t want it cluttering your screen and squandering your attention budget.

Information I find to be imperative:

Your Resource

I find it adequate to simply unlock my character frame and move it to the lower center of my screen, where I can see my health, mana, ember/shards/fury. However you get your resource front and center is up to you, but it should be there so you don’t have to glance away from the action before deciding whether to Life Tap or Haunt.

Temporary Buffs – Pots, Procs and Trinkets

I’m using an addon called Weak Auras to track any temporary buffs that increase my DPS. This includes trinkets, Lightweave and weapon enchants, potions, cooldowns like Dark Soul or Berserking, legendary meta gems, and buffs provided by others as well, such as Skull Banner.

I like to use bars and color code them so their effect is obvious even in the periphery. I usually associate yellows with haste, blues with spell power and so forth. Any visual clues you can build in can help save on mental processing time. I try to line them all up and give them a length relative to their up-time so I can clearly see what kind of windows of opportunity I’ll have to capitalize on multiple buffs running in concert. I also give more important/powerful buffs wider bars so I know they take priority.

Here you can see my meta gem and Jade Spirit are about to run out but there are several other buffs rolling as well. This is a prime opportunity to spend a shard refreshing all my DoTs at +80% Haste and lots of spell power, assuming Haunt is already up and the speed at which Corruption and Malefic Grasp are ticking will likely produce more shards. I would probably use my Soulburn/Soul Swap macro again as Wushoolay’s Lightning reaches 10 stacks and Dark Soul is almost gone in order to lengthen my DoTs (via Pandemic) again at massive spell power and haste.

At level 90, the exponential way in which stats on gear are increasing results in enormous variance from one moment to the next as buffs trigger and expire. We’re talking fluctuations in the 10’s of thousands of DPS. It’s more critical than ever to know how to harness them. Setting up a clear presentation of these fluctuations and their timings will allow you to easily react and make the most of them at a glance.

DoT and Cooldown Timers

While DoTs are definitely crucial for warlocks, most classes and specs have some kind of damage or heal over time component at level 90 that is worth tracking, as well as cooldowns that need to be hit as soon as they’re available. There are many decent addons available, but look for one that is capable of displaying the individual ticks. Since it’s best to refresh DoT’s just before the last tick occurs, you need to be able to see what this window looks like so you’re not wasting time or ticks refreshing early. Pandemic makes this less punishing, but it’s still wasted time. I’m using ForteXorcist to track DoT’s and cooldowns.

From this I can see it’s time to cast Unstable Affliction on my current target (which will complete its cast time just before the last tick, adding it to the new one), then switch to the other target to cast another Unstable Affliction (which will be down to its last tick by the time I get there) followed by Haunt (which should refresh just in time considering its cast and travel time).

If my timers weren’t aligned correctly or lacked tick indicators, my attempts to maintain the maximum uptime would be less precise and efficient.

Event Timers

Have a boss mod like Deadly Boss Mods or BigWigs that display timers for important events. Knowing something that requires movement, gives buffs or debuffs, a graphic to watch for, etc. is imminent can allow you to plan accordingly.

The Environment

Everything that’s behind your UI is the environment. You want to see as much of it as possible at all times. Use “/console cameradistancemaxfactor 4” to double the distance you can zoom out your camera. Keep it zoomed out as far as possible and tilted at an angle that gives the best view of the area. I prefer about 45°. Don’t play with it up your character’s ass or on the floor.

Nameplates

Go ahead and press V, then never press it again. Nameplates are nice for many reasons. They generally cluster in the middle of the screen where they’re easily seen. They tend to appear right at the range your spells can reach them. If you don’t see a nameplate, it’s out of range. If you do, it’s a valid target. They make managing multi-target rotations a cinch. Having visual indicators of how fast all the mobs are dying allows you to re-prioritize your abilities on the fly.

If I see a target dying extremely fast, I know it would be a waste to throw DoT’s at it and might just switch over to tag it with a Drain Soul refreshing my shards to full. Many classes have Execute-style abilities that are only available below certain thresholds like 35% or 20% health. It’s important to have your target’s health displayed as a percentage for this reason. You will come to instinctively know what a health bar at 20% looks like so you can switch to it and abuse your highest DPS abilities.

Here is an example of nameplates visible in an AoE situation. As Destruction I’m burning them down with Rain of Fire and Fire and Brimstone empowered Immolates, Conflagrates and Incinerates, but Shadowburn is my highest DPS spell, so I want to look for opportunities to use it as often as possible.

With a macro that allows me to Shadowburn simply by mousing over targets, I can start spamming it at this point. Thanks to nameplates I can see all the other targets have entered Shadowburn range. I can mouse over anywhere in that cluster of nameplates and be sure to hit them. I can even toss Havoc on my main target so it also gets hit with 3 extra Shadowburns. If others were AoEing, they would be dying very quickly, so the opportunity to Shadowburn will be small. Tabbing through them to Shadowburn would be far too awkward and slow, losing time on targets that either die right when you get to them or haven’t reached execute range yet.

Understand Your DPCT Priority

You only get to make use of your standard rotation for short periods during most fights. Your spell priority should constantly be changing as procs occur, cooldowns complete, new targets and fight mechanics enter/leave the picture. More important than memorizing a rotation is understand how your spells behave under different conditions.

Your DPCT (Damage per Cast Time) or sometimes DPET (Execute Time) is the most important metric you need to learn. It’s a measurement of how much damage an ability is worth given an equal length of time, i.e. one global cooldown.

Here’s a DPET chart for Destruction Warlocks at heroic tier 15 item level. What do these numbers mean? Doesn’t Chaos Bolt hit harder than Shadowburn? Yes, but it has a ~2½ second cast time and Shadowburn is instant cast. If you cut a GCD-size chunk out of a properly Dark Soul’ed Chaos Bolt, it would probably equal the amount of damage you see on this chart.

I like to visualize my complete damage performance on an encounter as if it were a song, with every GCD a beat in that song. Every beat that goes by I want to fill with whatever note will account for the most damage.

This is why DoT’s like Immolate and Agony have such high priority. In the space of a second, you’re locking in what will eventually amount to lots of damage. It’s as if Immolate were an instant cast spell that hit for ~328k but had no DoT component. Grimoire of Service has such a high DPET because it’s a 2 minute cooldown. The time spent to add it to your song is one beat, but it lives to rack up a large amount of damage. Again, just imagine it as an instant cast spell that hits for 588k as long as it will last its full duration.

Given this chart, if I were in a room of infinite training dummies that were spread out and could never drop below 99% health what would be my optimum dps rotation? Well, it would be to use Service on cooldown and do nothing else but Tab through targets casting Immolate. That sounds like it would be terrible, but if you understand your DPET priority in that scenario, it will result in the most DPS.

Always be on the lookout for opportunities to cast your highest DPET spells and tailor your UI and macros to make capitalizing on them as convenient as possible (i.e. the mouseover Shadowburn macro I mentioned earlier). As Destruction I want to cast Shadowburn as much as possible. Havoc allows me to duplicate it 3 times to another target, doubling its already obscene DPET. That’s 6 Shadowburns in the space of 3 beats. That’s such an enormous DPET, it even becomes worth it to delay important cooldowns like Dark Soul and trinkets to use in concert with Havoc and Shadowburn, or splitting DPS between targets that might only survive 1 SB, so you can have multiple viable targets ready for cleaving.

Of course, this kind of abuse should never encroach on the needs of the raid. Cleaving Chaos Bolts to a secondary head on Megaera may be monster DPS, but it’s a waste of precious embers that should be saved for the target that matters.

Never Stop Casting

Now that Blizzard has implemented spell queueing, there is no possibility of lost time between beats. Every cast snaps end to end like Legos. You should be doing something to fill every single beat seamlessly from Entering Combat to Leaving Combat. Every second of down time is essentially averaging zeros into your sustained DPS which KILLS it hard.

If you expect movement, plan accordingly and save instant cast spells for that period, while saving large cooldowns for periods without movement. Be already positioned and facing the direction you want to move. Most spells that require you to face the target will still work up to a perpendicular 90° angle. If you expect to have to run away, you can turn to the side ahead of time and continue casting. When it’s time to flee, just strafe and continue casting.

Kiljaeden’s Cunning has finally trivialized movement for warlocks, but the snare does come into play and some fights call for other level 90 talents, so it’s not always available. Life Tapping proactively or refreshing DoTs is a great example of maximizing beats on the move.

Also, switching targets never needs to result in lost time. A cast on one target followed by a cast on the next should be as seamless as if you were unloading on a single target. Using /targetlasttarget and focus macros mid-cast should get you where you want to be instantly. With 3 or 4 targets, position yourself so they fall into your Tabbing cone. Tab seems to have the following priority when cycling through targets - Near Front -> Far Front -> Near Side/Behind. By now everyone should have an instinct for what Tab will choose next and be able to move in ways that facilitate it always picking the one you want.

As you become familiar with the pacing of an encounter you will find more and more opportunities to tighten up your rotation and minimize movement or downtime by being in the right place at the right time. Which brings me to…

Know the Fight

It takes all of 10 minutes to watch a video guide and hit Shift+J to peruse boss abilities. This will give you a leg up in knowing what to expect and which mechanics your role is most concerned with. It’s easily equivalent to a couple practice pulls of experience. Showing up to a fight with no knowledge is disrespectful to the time and effort of the 9-24 other folks in the raid. LFR is a fantastic practice tool. You get familiar with the pacing, orientation and visual signals of the mechanics without worrying about dangerously tuned math.

As mentioned before, have a boss mod with timers for key events that will affect your rotation, but be sure to go through the list of alerts and remove any that aren’t important to your role so they don’t distract you or clutter the environment. I personally don’t care about the boss’s next application of a tank debuff, but his healer probably should. I do care, however, when he will enter an immune phase so I don’t blow a big DPS cooldown 3 seconds beforehand.

Know your Class

This is so obvious it should go without saying, but you can tell the difference between someone who has been playing a class since vanilla and someone with “alt-itis” who switches mains every couple of tiers. By now, each class has so many layers of complexity folded in from old talents, glyphs, or buffs made into passives or tacked onto other abilities. The application of many of these idiosyncratic inheritances can be lost on novice or intermediate initiates to a class. It takes time and practice to get to the point where you can instinctively feel all of these moving parts working under the hood and how they influence your performance.

Look through World of Logs parses to see how others of your class are handling things. There are probably ways to abuse some feature of your class on each encounter. Learn what those are. For instance, Demonology warlocks with the Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen trinket will abuse the proc to apply Doom to all 4 Council of the Elders targets at 100% crit. With all these Dooms guaranteed to crit, you generate insane numbers of Wild Imps. Opportunities to abuse synergies like this will always trump what any sim results or optimization app tells you to do with your character, because…

Sims are Not Real Scenarios

Most simulations are based on a “Patchwerk” model. There is only one Patchwerk in the game, and unless you plan on raiding him only, don’t take these sims as gospel or even relevant when applied to most fights in the game. Blizzard has even announced that the community’s sims do not match their sims. This is because the community will never have all of the proprietary data necessary to make perfect calculations. They can only make an educated guess at formulas and coefficients in the code based on in-game testing and data-mining, followed by flawed action lists that try to construct almost impossibly optimum conditions using best-in-slot everything, specific situational trinket synergies and inhumanly precise timing.

“Hmm, looks like the Demonology bar is longer than the Affliction bar by 2k DPS, guess I’ll go demo this tier. Hrm Mastery>Haste>Crit, guess I’ll reforge/gem for Mastery.” If this is the only criteria by which you decide on a spec, build or stat allocation for a raid, you’re making poor decisions.

Every fight is different in its mechanics and will inevitably play toward the strengths of specific specs, talents and synergies. Exploiting these strengths will always outstrip any amount of variance shown in sims or reforge plots. For instance, Destruction is strong on Horridon because it provides so many opportunities to abuse that spec's most powerful feature – Havoc’ed Shadowburns and Chaos Bolts. Many guides suggest favoring Crit and Haste due to the ember generation it produces in simulations, but if you’re only using Destruction in situations where you can abuse Havoc’ed Chaos Bolts and Shadowburns, you should really favor Mastery heavily.

Know what kind of situations each spec, talent, glyph, or stat shines in and base your choices on how many of those situations are present in the content you’re raiding.