Posts with tag damage-per-second

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we try to help you accomplish the most important thing any mage can ever do: kill something just a little bit faster.

You're a mage, so right away we know two things about you:

1. You're awesome.
2. You're in the business of damaging things.

We hear jokes about mages being portal-merchants/sheep-bots/cake-vendors, but our real purpose -- the only role we play that really matters -- is that of DPS. We destroy things, and we do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. And if we can't provide that service, our raid will replace us with someone who can.

So if damaging things is our business, it follows that we should always be striving to make sure business is good. We're in competition for DPS slots with literally every single other class in this game. It's in the interests of all mages that we work to improve ourselves at every opportunity. If we don't, it's entirely possible that our raid might take a warlock along instead.

And with God as my witness, I will not allow that to happen.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any rogue questions you would like to see answered.

In the immortal words of our favorite crab, "WoW is a game about upgrading your stuff." While achievements and professions allow for your character to grow, they don't make you any stronger. If you want to increase your power, you need to upgrade your stuff. Gear improvements are often the difference between success and failure on cutting-edge encounters, when your raid needs to meet specific raw damage and healing numbers to pull off a win.

While it sounds easy, it's not always as simple as it seems to upgrade your stuff. While the advent of the ilvl system allows for us to quickly judge the rough quality of an item, it doesn't provide any help when comparing two items from the same dungeon. It also doesn't assist us in our gemming or reforging choices. Making intelligent gear decisions is a part of every rogue's life. In order to make the best choices for our characters, we use what's known as theorycrafting to evaluate the various stats in the game. The end result allows us to make educated gearing strategies and ensure we're doing the most DPS we possibly can. But how do we get from evaluating stats to choosing an actual piece of gear?

Each week, WoW Insider brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, spotlighting the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots, along with info on what mods you're using, to readerui@wow.com.

The end is nigh! The world will break! Flee, cowards, for his fiery reign of death will be upon us soon! The only way to combat this most heinous evil is to gaze upon some pretty neat, reader-submitted user interfaces. Deathwing will have no chance against our smooth bottom panels and the lack of clutter on our screens.

This week, Reader UI of the Week takes a look at Sewell's user interface, which uses some awesome art to give his UI a familiar but more productive look. Reminiscent of the original art or even Warcraft 3 taken in a cool, different direction, Sewell's UI is crisp, clean and full of flavor. If you like art panels, today is for you.

It's time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that used this boring screenshot of a damage meter graph for one reason and one reason only: Arcane Brilliance needs more of your pictures! There are still some languishing in Arcane Brilliance's email folder, for use in future columns, but not nearly enough. The strong initial outpouring of excellent screenshots has now petered out, and Arcane Brilliance would like to humbly request more. Send your pics to arcanebrilliance@wow.com, and see this column for the rules.

The comments section of last week's column on mage mistakes was an absolute treasure trove. It was full of wisdom, good advice, relevant in-game experiences, and the occasional trolling warlock (always welcome... we love it when the fireball-fodder comes to us... speeds the whole process up). But one comment stood out to me, so much so that I felt compelled to write an entire column about its topic. It's far too long to simply reprint here, and so I highly encourage going to the comment itself and reading it. There's actually another by the same commenter later on that is just as awesome. In fact, I will reprint one of the paragraphs from that second comment, because it pretty much encapsulates what I want to discuss this week.

Sarabande wrote:

Please don't remark on low DPS or complaining that DPS is barely above the tank's (esp. if tank is doing pretty high dmg) or constantly spam Recount in group, if everything is dying in a timely manner. This encourages the atmosphere of competition and pressures DPS into concentrating only on the numbers. If there is some kind of timer (such as HoR, VH, etc) which the DPS is not able to meet, that's a whole different thing. In fact if you happen to notice some DPS being considerate by holding back on purpose (even though most likely they want to be blowing stuff up, shooting stuff, stabbing things to death) and it's really helping, you might say something positive. That might encourage that behavior further and let the other know that that's something they might want to do as well.

This week's topic: DPS meters, and why I wish they'd just go away.

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's.

You're level 80 now, you've picked up a few sweet upgrades from five-mans and heroics, and you're ready to try a PuG into Naxx. You've found a group that's looking for members, but you're not quite sure how to answer the raid leader's demand: "What's your DPS?" The best way to figure out what your raid DPS, of course, is to measure it while you're raiding – but if you haven't started raiding yet, you can't really do that, can you?

The first thing you'll need in order to figure out what kind of DPS (damage per second) you're capable of putting out is an add-on that keeps track of your performance. Recount is popular and widely acknowledged as a fairly accurate tool. There are plenty of alternatives on all the major add-on sites. Select and install the DPS meter that appeals to you.

Let's jump right into The Queue today. Lots of questions answered after the break.

Valdorin asked...

"What DPS is expected before you start heroics, 10-mans, 25-mans?"

The biggest frustration in a MMORPG is probably getting ganked at most inopportune moments. The next biggest aggravation has got to be playing with pick-up-groups. Sometimes we get lucky in choosing random players to instance with, but we've all got horror stories of out worst experiences with PUGs.

Ihaveaplan of Altarac Mountains started a thread for players to list 200 things you don't want to hear from your DPS. The original poster's initial complaint was the Warlock who left the group because the tank was fighting multiple mobs. Some other gems from this thread include:

• Bizzerk of Laughing Skull, "Does anyone have damage meters?"
• Zazzi of Kirin Tor, "Do any of you have another weapon? My sword broke."
• Groxikor of Daggerspine, "I'm pretty good with bandages, can I heal?"
• Misada of Dark Iron, "Hey guys, can someone resummon me, had to hearth to repair my gear."
• Ovelita of Ner'zhul, "We don't need a healer. We have a shadow priest."

Since there is a shortage of tanks, it's probably easiest for tank classes to find a group. That also means it's hardest if you are not a tank to find someone to play that role. The next most difficult is a healer. There's usually plenty of DPS to go around. It can take some time to make a group, but since dungeons provide excellent loot and good experience it's usually worthwhile to stick with it.