Are you a robot?
I read a post on WowInsider about the difficulties of playing a Ret Paladin. Someone commented that while DPSing as a ret paladin was pretty simple, there are very few who know how to use other abilites to prevent deaths, wipes, or other things that make raids go wrong.
This touches on a few things, namely situational awareness, but it also concerns how well you know your class, its specs and capabilities.
I’ve known a few people who play hybrid classes as DPS specs. But they played like their toon was a pure DPS class. Even more so, it seemed as if they wouldn’t press a button if it didn’t cause damage. I liked to call them DPS robots, since really, a bot could do what they do. To a certain point this is OK, but to really be good at your class and affect how your raid performs, you have to use all of your available abilities when they’re needed. Of course, this doesn’t just apply to ret paladins, but I’ll use this particular example.
I raided with a ret paladin who lived up to what I described above. He never did anything except press one of his three dps buttons (pre 3.1). He barely even wanted to cast blessings, but he at least cast Blessing of Might on himself because it boosted DPS. During raids, you would never see a self-cleanse, a blessing of protection on someone who had aggro, a hand of salvation. This same person usually died to void zones or fire as well.
Point is, there are a lot of abilities that every class has, that most people never use. The best players will learn how, when, and where to use them. Rogues can blind or vanish/cheap shot a mob. Mages can polymorph, frost nova, decurse, spell steal, etc. DKs can save a healer by using chains of ice, or death gripping and using chains. A feral or balance druid can barkskin/tranquility to save a raid. I don’t play every class, but I’m sure every class has these tricks that can save a fellow raid member, save him or herself, and even just make the raid go more smoothly. It’s up to the player to know these things however, and to use them without needing the raid leader to ask you, or to have it done before the raid leader asks you.
Even though you may be a hybrid class, it doesn’t mean that you should limit yourself to what your tree offers. Pure dps classes shouldn’t think that since they can’t heal or tank, that their class has no utility.
An ounce of prevention..
..is worth a pound of cure. The old saying still applies in some aspects of this game. Learn to dispel, it will save you and your other healing buddies a lot of headache, healing, and mana in the long run.
Consider the average poison or curse that affects one person. If it’s a dot, it would probably deal anywhere from 12,000-15,000 damage. Ok that’s easily taken care of with one nuke heal, or two quick heals, maybe a stack of dots. Estimate anywhere from 800-1000 mana spent to make up for that. But if you dispel it as soon as you can, you spent 1 global cooldown, less than 300 mana, and your raid member is cured of any other possible negative effect from that poison or curse.
When there are raid bosses that cast poison volleys or area of effect curses, this becomes even more important, and every dispel after the first one saves that much more time and mana.
This isn’t just for healing classes either. Any class that can remove a negative on itself or other should do so. The momentary lapse in dps is trivial. Even as a paladin tank, I try to replace a GCD with a self-cleanse if it doesn’t affect my overall threat or survival. Everything counts, and dead raid members don’t contribute anything.
Rules of dragon slaying.
When facing a dragon, remember these few tips to help you stay alive, especially if you haven’t done the research or if it’s your first time experiencing an encounter. Most of these apply to every dragon encounter in the game. Remember, each of them still has quirks. But when in doubt, remember the basics.
Don’t stand in front of it.
Simple enough right? Fire breath, cleaves, parries, painful death. Unless you’re the Main Tank or Off Tank soaking cleaves (if necessary), don’t stand in front of it. This is important for tanks to know as well. Pulling a dragon is probably the most important part of an encounter. Tanks get the fun job of doing the initial pull, positioning the thing, then spitting out threat on it. It’s important when moving a dragon around to never let it face your raid. At the same time, for a DPS or healer, it’s a good idea to not be doing high threat actions, since the tank’s threat generation most likely won’t be at 100%.
Don’t stand behind it.
If you’ve ever been whipped by anything, then you know what this is like. A dragon’s tail is more than just damage. It usually includes another effect, either a knockback, a dot, stun, snare, or some other terrible thing. Ranged dps tends to get caught in this more than melee. Which leads to:
The softest part of a dragon is its ribs.
Amazingly enough, with all of its flailing appendages, its wings don’t happen to beat down on people standing under them. So this is where anyone who isn’t a tank should be standing – at its sides. There is a caveat for melee however. Parry range is 180 degrees in front, so to avoid being parried, you need to be standing at the side of its hind legs, but still out of the cone for a tail bitch slap. Ranged and healers are generally safe anywhere else.
You can stand visibly far away from a dragon and still hurt it.
This is for melee. Dragons have huge hitboxes. You don’t have to stand close enough to see your sword or axe swings touch the dragon’s legs. You don’t have to stand in it either. this is an important point because dragon encounters usually have environmental quirks (bombs, aoe, waves of lava…), and being that far away from the dragon means less distance to run away from it, and possibly your life being spared. If you want to know just how far away you can get, watch a melee pet attack the dragon. For being as dumb as they are, they somehow know the maximum attackable distance from a mob. So yes, swing at the air, and continue to dish pain.
Dragons like to fear.
No surprise. Most of them do Bellowing Roar. Deal with it, it’s not gamebreaking. What is gamebreaking is people not returning to their original/optimum positions after a fear. Tanks usually get feared along with the raid, so the dragon’s position will shift. Not adapting to this can get you killed.
Dragons usually have adds.
Another given. Again, not gamebreaking. But they also can’t be ignored. As a general rule, ranged dps should focus on the adds, as they usually move the shortest distance from where they are to be able to reach them, plus ranged classes tend to have more aoe. It’s more dps efficient for the melee to focus on the big one. A special case would be dpsing warriors. A smart and aware dps warrior can pull away quickly (Intervene) to save a healer, and then quickly return to dpsing (Intercept).
That’s basically it. Of course, this should have been written 4 years ago, and I was sure any of these points are a no-brainer, but I was surprised to see how badly people do in pugs. Sometimes it takes the fundamentals to improve raid performance.