Great article and very true. I'm in a casual guild, but we have a small core group of raiders and are 12/12. All the regular raiders are geared similarly in 359 epics. I manage to top the damage meters in about half the fights and am a close second on the rest. Doing this is very very hard.

Being a casual guild the other raiders are a bit laid-back, don't get me wrong - they're good, just not great. Their gear is not fully optimized, their rotations are a bit off, at the start of the fights I can see them standing there for a few seconds, there is a lot of chit-chat in vent during fights and so on.

By contrast I am totally focused on maximizing my DPS. My gear is meticulously optimized, enchanted and reforged. I know my class, I've been a rogue for years and this is my only raiding toon. I read all the rogue forums, do my homework, and practice my rotation on the dummies. I know the fights, were the adds spawn, where to stand, when to move to maximize my dps. I keep rupture up constantly, I make sure I don't clip envenom, I use my cooldowns when available or appropriate, I am first-in, last-out, I often use cloak so I can stand in fire or poison to get the extra few seconds of DPS in, I throw my ranged weapon to keep up poison stacks when I can't melee, I use every trick I know to maximize my DPS. Even doing all this I am just barely able to top the meters.

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