Dead DPS = No DPS

This is perhaps rule zero when it comes to things one can do to improve their DPS. Everyone knows at this point that standing in the fire is generally bad. Not everyone knows about situational awareness, and I hope with this post to offer some tips I've learned to improve your own survivability, and indirectly, your damage.

1. Don't position yourself somewhere that guaranteed damage is going to happen. The biggest example are dragons. You know the dragon is going to have some sort of breath attack, so you make sure that you're not standing in front of it. Let's take it a step further. If a mob has a giant two handed meat cleaver, he's probably going to whirlwind/cleave. If you know that an ogre is going to jump around and land on a person damaging him, and everyone else around them (Stonecore), then you want to be as spread out as possible so you only take damage when Mr. Ogre lands on you, and not from when he lands on Mr Tank or Mr Healer.

2. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of your healers. A lot of little tips can go in here, like if your healer is a shaman, position yourself to get jumps from their Chain Heal and stay within range of Healing Rain. Everyone knows about Lightwell. One of the paladin AoE healing spells only works on the people in a cone in front of them. Also understand that your healers may not be as mobile as you may be. While a druid may be capable of running around in circles to chase you down to save your butt and keep a couple hots up on the tank, a shaman or priest is not. Avoid running out of range or line of sight of your healers.

3. Use your survival abilities. Almost everyone has something that will extend their life. Shield Wall, Icebound Fortitude, Barkskin, Mana Shield, Recuperate, Drain Life, Feign Death/Deterrence, Divine Shield, and Shamanistic Rage are examples of abilities that add seconds to your life if you're a DPSer.

4. Consumables. Make them, buy them, get them conjured. You might not always be able to use a potion since you're limited to one a fight, but you can still use a Healthstone. And bandages, you can always use a bandage, and right now, it's actually one of the strongest heals in the game for the amount of life you can get back from one. And you can use more than one in a fight.

5. Prevent the damage from coming out in the first place. Almost everyone has some ability that will hinder a mob whether it's CC, stuns, or interrupts. Heck, some classes are given bonuses for using their interrupt if they spec into it (warriors/mages). I'll use an extreme example. Hand of Gul'dan (demo warlock ability) has the potential to stun mobs for 3 seconds out of every 12. That's 25% of the time, the mob is doing no damage.

6. PVP or Tank. I'm not telling you to go get 2200 in an Arena team, but in a PvP scenario, you will always find yourself trying to find ways to avoid incoming damage. And since it's PvP, the competition is always evolving and will always be a decent way to test your own survivability. And when you tank, your job is not only to keep yourself alive, but everyone else out of harms way as well. You will quickly learn the importance of your cooldowns, and learn the environmental hazards that some mobs lurking in dungeons have that you can carry with you when you dps later.

7. Move your camera. So many issues can be resolved by simply maximizing the range of your camera or moving it to an overhead view. Those tornados you're forced to deal with on the second boss in Heroic Vortex Pinnacle can be a pain to judge the edges of if you keep your camera behind your back. If you move it over head, those tornados become circles which you can easily step around with the benefit of making it easier to see the direction of the wind. It also becomes a boon on bosses like the third boss in Grim Batol where when you hear the boss call out "Incinerate them minions!" one can quickly spin their camera around and look for where the fire elemental will spawn and move away.

All right, hopefully this post was a useful one. Don't be surprised if I update it in the future with more... specific tricks I have in my arsenal.

Great post Dythok!

During ICC when I was on my hunter more frequently I found that maximizing camera distance helped improve my awareness of what was going on tremendously. It's a simple /script you can run in-game to increase your camera distance

/script SetCVar("cameraDistanceMax",30)

Try it out and see if it helps improve your situational awareness and help prevent wipes.

threat threat threat!!!!!!!!! i'm still struggling with this myself, but if it isn't on the tank, you're gonna die!

Yeah, watch the threat and you'll find yourself living alot longer!

I love the post, great tips!

I heard a saying a while back,
If the tank dies, its the healers fault.
If the healer dies, its the tanks fault.
If the DPS dies, its the DPS's failt.

Good Post.

You forgot to mention another thing about dragons. Their tail. It hurts. Dont stand behind a dragons ass.

Another thing worth mentioning. When you target an enemy, under it a red circle emerges. That is the targets hit box. If you are fighting a boss that requires you to hide from its aoe, (stonecore dragon and sindragosa come to mind. ) Anything within that red circle will NOT provide protection.

For melee, this hit box red circle of salvation indicates how close you have to stand next to the mob. Dragons tend to have a big one which means you do NOT need to be glued to its feet in order to hit, just hang out at the rim of that red circle and youll be fine.

Shamans, this may apply for both ele and enh. Wind shear the mob even if it does not have spells to interrupt, this helps lower your threat. Also, Healing rain. Use it! Sometimes sacraficing some dps (mw 5for enh) can help the healer when a few people get hit by a hard hitting aoe. Some fights like Simat or bosses that do alot of aoe, its worth spamming it when you can giving the healer a chance to get to a dps who took some bad dmg.

Learn to strafe. This applies to everyone. I use the wasd to move my char, A and D are set to strafe so i mouse turn instead of using A and D to do so. This helps you get out of the bad quicker than slowly turning to get out of it , running foward to get into a mobs area where you can be cleaved or hit my melee aoe, or slowly moving backwards.

When in doubt if a mob has a rear attack or not, stay to its side. You will still avoid its front aoe attacks n back attacks this way. If your dependant on positions like rogues, its good to spec in a talent tree that does not require positioning for such fights.

Deadly boss mods or any mod that gives you a warning, be it visual or audio is recommended to help you get out of the bad. DBM usually gives you both a audio and visual warning.

If you get aggro, perhaps a hex broke early as mine tend to do in resto (no hit). Run to the tank so he or she can peal it off of you. Sometimes all you need to do is to get within range of the Tanks aoe and that baddy will be oh man I'm gonna get that plate wearer. But, please once you've delivered your baddy and your not melee get out of range of cleaves and other nasty stuff.

Mokin, I disagree with that saying. Sometimes it's just bad luck, sometimes it is the healer's fault or the tanks. We all make mistakes, whether it's just not paying enough attention or forgetting a key boss move that is a wipe. I've done that once, but the best thing to do is to own up to it and if you don't know what happen just say Hey I don't what happen there.

Gaming is a learning process you'll never know all of it and you can only get better by asking questions.

Tsuji, I'm pretty decent at strafing, but I think I'm going to do what you suggest with the keybinds and see if that makes me a bit faster. Great tips!

haha, in my case, I'm almost always being irresponsible with aggro. it's 99% my fault when I die.

It may be wrong, but I try to pull off the tank.
in a way, I like to think that helps them out by knowing that I will pull off, hopefully stepping up their game by trying to get their aggro more quickly or putting a little more strategy into their pulls(i.e. kill order).

it may just be trash, but that's no reason to piddle around either.. (I guess that's my logic lol)

(I think I've done a pretty good job conditioning our tanks. lol)

Anch, that saying more goes with Boss Fights, because unless the tank is just fail, then its a move that will kill the Dps.

I don't exactly agree with the philosophy of the healer and tank are responsibility of each other and the dps is on their own. While that may have been true back in WotLK, it certainly is not in Cataclysm.

Cataclysm changes the game so drastically that much more responsibly lies in the hands of the DPS. Tanks are forced to tank smarter like they had to in Burning Crusade, healers are forced to care about mana efficiency like they did in Vanilla. When Cataclysm first came out, it wasn't the issues of tanks or healers not doing their job. It was the DPS fault for either not killing the boss fast enough, before the healer went OOM, or not realizing that you had to do some utility in addition to your damage, whether that would be crowd control or interupting.

Though one phrase I definitely love is this.

As tank, you position yourself as to not get the whole party killed.
As healer, you position yourself to heal the tank and not get yourself killed.
As DPS, you position yourself to be able to be healed by the healer, and not get yourself killed.

As an additional note, get raid frames that have a healer range function in it.

Some good advice here, though I gotta ask... Why rebind keys for strafing, Q and R are already strafe.