Help me suck lessFollow

I've recently joined a pretty serious raiding guild that is in TK/SSC and had a disturbing revelation. I'm not the chart topping dps'er I used to be in my casual Kara raiding guild. Now, it's not as if I'm being out dps'd by people that vastly outgear me, it's that I'm not where I feel I should be in terms of my gear. My spec and gear are all pretty standard and where they should be, I KNOW that's not the issue. In looking at webstats from our raids I'm often fairly low on the %of time dps'ing. I do find often on trash I'm so busy trying to click on the right target in the mess of the pull that by the time i'm getting a fireball off he's at 80% or so. I use quartz and I spam it so I dont' think that latency is the issue either. I seem to do better on bosses than I do on trash, but my time dps'ing is still kinda low there. Not sure if I have included all the details that would make a reasonable analysis of my crap dps possible but if anybody has any tricks or mods or rules of thumb to help me be more efficient I'd appreciate it.

Wow! I will completely disagree with that! In my old guild we were in SSC and I was in the top 5 or so generally on boss fights where I was able to dps constantly.

For the OP: If you use ctraid you can have the raid leader set the raid tanks, and just attack their target (which is what you ought to be doing anyways). It saves a bunch of time trying to click on which one of the 5 he's currently fighting. We also used to kill trash so fast that I couldn't get off many spells. So I switched to using scorch if it was a lower HP mob.

As always, ensure you are using a good spec and such. If you'll include a link to your armory, we can help you more.

Ever been an arcane mage? Then you would know that you would need a shadow priest in your group for your mana regen.

If you mess up on evocation, you screwed for the rest of the fight. If you dont ride you mana potions, and mana gems you will go oom.

And saying a top the damage meters means nothing. I raided on my brothers warlock, and I was in the top 5 damage meters busting out 800 dps on lurker.

Now my mage is in tier 5 and I bust out 1400 damage a second and that is with a shadow priest. Compared to others in tier 5 my damage per second is still low.

I could go in my brothers guild and raid on my mage and have the most damage done, but that does not me I have great dps relative to my gear. And in all honesty our cc is the only reason's we are brought into raids.

This is proved whenever there is heated discussion between a mage and any other class it always ends with, the only reason your here is to cc.

Dont think we still have mana problems, doing Mount Hyjal this week. The only class that went oom on the waves of trash was the mage and it was every single mage. We aren't even desired for our aoe anymore.

Jeez, there's some seriously bummed mages out there. I don't care what the other classes can do, having 3 fire mages up and ready to blast away when a boss is at 20% is still a beautiful thing. So what if some chain-fearing douchebag lock can out dps me by making a few macros and pounding his head on the keyboard. I can port and make water.

Ct-raid definitely sounds like it's worth a look, as well as the macros to bind my trinkets to the fireball. Thanks for the input folks, much appreciated.

Oh, and as for the gear and the webstats, I assure you, my spec and gear are all what they're supposed to be, basically I have what Anobix has except he's got a few more ssc epics than i do, and I've not switched over from 10/48/3 to 2/47/11 yet. I don't think the guild would like me posting the webstats in a public forum since we keep the links to them in the membership section of our guild page.

Even tho dps on trash is basically meaningless it just pisses me off to see someone that has comparable gear with me doing significantly more damage on trash.



Edited, Jan 18th 2008 7:23am by jibberjabber

Hmm just a thought, was the group setup balanced enough to actually give the mana battery to these mages? Did they actually work on the balance mana / sustained dps or go all out? Did they bring sufficient mana potions. Kind of hard to determine what went wrong if "all mages" went OOM.

There's the crux of your problem. I don't get why people spec for less damage, more mana problems, and heavy reliance on another player, and then ***** about it.


Dps warriors need enchance shammies to remain competitive (ret pallies too, though to say they're competitive is a bit questionable). Spriests are pretty dependent on warlocks, and of course pretty much every DPS class requires a pally.

To the OP, don't worry about trash damage, it's trash. For the most part, it doesn't matter. What you need to look at is just the boss parses and see how you're doing there. Compare your DPS, your total damage, and your average DPS (selectable under the Columns option), and see if that tells you anything. Be sure you're using optimal rotations - fireballs, preferably with haste items, with enough scorches to keep the debuff up, and no fire blasts save during movements. Make the most of your abilities/trinkets, blowing all of them at once if possible but certainly as often as possible, but not during a questionable part of a fight (about to move or whatever).

EDIT to lockontarget: It'd understandable that they were oom during the Hyjal waves, at least as far as my knowledge goes on the subject. Unloading full AoE on mobs with around 180k health tends to drain mana pretty fast.

Edited, Jan 23rd 2008 4:41pm by lsfreak