. . . I'm horrible at them.
My affliction 'lock just hit 76 the other night. I've leveled almost entirely solo. The only instances I've ever done were either a) being run through by an 80 or two so that I just had to keep up with looting and not die or b) running lowbies through stuff like WC, RFC. I did manage to solo Sunken Temple when I was in the 60's somewhere because there was a 'lock quest on my log driving me nuts.
But a regular, 5-people-at-level instance run . . . horrible.
I keep recount going for my own info and usually just solo-questing around I've been hovering right around 600-615 dps.
I got whispered the other night by a guildy wanting to know if I could dps Gundurak. Had no idea what or where that was. He said he'd summon and that he just ran it and it'd be pretty quick. I said sure, why not.
I felt like I was scrambling to keep up the entire time. Had no idea what was going on. There were just so many bodies in there between the 5 players and all the mobs. I had no idea how to target anything.
click - oh that's a player
click - no that's a pet
click - Aha! a mob
cast haunt 3 . .2 . .oh it's dead
click - mob
cast haunt 3. .2. .1 woohoo! it hit! Coa, Corruption, UA 3. .2. . .oh it's dead
and now that pack is cleared
looting . . .whoa, they have another pack!?
So yeah. Is there some sort of an instancing for dummies article around somewhere?
The thing I find, especially with my affliction 'lock, is that it does really decent damage but it takes time to set up and most of the damage is done in the latter part of the rotation after I have 4 DoTs on and the mob is low on life. A regular 74 mob with ~9000 hp will take 7-8 secs ((while I apply DoTs) to get down to 4000 but then those 4000 will tick off in about 2 secs. Questing around solo this works just fine because mobs are spread enough that I petattack one, apply DoTs, select another mob, petattck > apply DoTs, just rinse and repeat until I have 4-5 corpes to loot.
But in the instance, I can't even seem to locate a mob to start targeting. Or by the time I do it's either half-dead and gone before I get all my DoTs applied, the same mob I already managed to get DoTs on, a player, a pet, etc. There are just so many bodies, everything moves so fast, and everything is clustered together so tightly.
At theend, recount showed the 2 DKs at aorund 1000-1100 dps, warrior (guildy) at 800-something, me at 660, and the shaman at like 4 who was obviously healing/buffing.
I had some 5-6 buffs on me in addition tome regular food/armor/stone buffs and barely did more than my usual questing damage. And I really didn't feel like I was doing much or contributing a whole lot. We did clear through it fine. The warrior and I did die once when we both somehow pulled aggro but that was the only hiccup.
So what am I doing wrong? And how can I do better in these situations?