Low DPS - Advice?

[Dohagan]

I'm seeing awesome/amazing dps from people's teams in posts. Mine however is still gimp. My boys are only putting out ~ 1600-1700 dps. I know their gear isn't top notch but that's less than 50% of what I'm seeing from other people. Any advice would be appreciated.

Here's a link for my main shaman's gear/talents. I didn't see anything well out of line from other people's builds. The other shamans can be viewed under the guild tab. Their names all end with x.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Crushridge&n=Astex

As far as totems I'm keeping a mix of everything down. I haven't integrated magma totems for most boss fights due to ae/whirlwinds/etc.

dps is primarily a single button macro

/assist [target=focus,exists]
/cast [harm]Elemental Mastery
/castrandom [harm]lightning bolt, flame shock, lava burst, purge

Any thoughts?

[Kaynin]

Have you tried removing purge? Though if there's nothing purgable, it will 'swallow' the physical keypress, if very unlucky and it chooses to purge like 10 presses in a row, you could just as well not be casting for several seconds.

I'd personally remove purge and even flameshock on a seperate button at the least. Spamming flame shock is bad. Just refresh flame shock whhenever it runs out with the flame shock glyph. This would mean you have a 2 button dps rotation, it should be managable.

Anyways, spamming lb's should get you higher dps, seems your macro is just not efficient and has a lot of downtime/dps loss moments. Removing purge and isolating flame shock should considerably improve your dps. Test various macro's and rotations at a dummy to see what suits you best.



Edit: Checking your armory, you should also work on hit as a priority. Your hit is way too low, improving that will significantly increase your dps as well.

[Hachoo]

Of course the previous advice is good. I personally put flameshock on a separate button and apply it first at the beginning of combat. Then I either do a specific rotation:

LvB/LB/LB/LB/LB/LvB/LB/LB/FS/LB/LvB etc

or just spam my

/castrandom Lava Burst,Lightning Bolt,Chain Lightning,Purge

macro and reapply FS as needed. I get FAR better DPS doing the first rotation (not using /castsequence, manually pushing LvB, then manually spamming LB, etc), but sometimes I need chain lightning in there or purge or whatnot and I'll take the lower DPS for less brain power needed.

I prefer to leave my purge in there as on some fights it helps a lot and I always forget to use it, especially in PvP.

But, as I said, if I am on a boss fight, I will see an 800-1000 dps increase using the specific rotation over using /castrandom. (Don't forget to use trinkets/blood fury/ele mastery/bloodlust immediately after the first lavaburst :) )

[puppychow]

i suggest going to a training dummy, taking off your trinkets, and trying a bunch of different things:

1. just have lightning bolt in a button, spam that for 30 secs. see what your dps is.
2. put flame shock, lvb, and lb on 3 sep buttons and rotate between them correctly (fs, lvb, lb, lb, lb, lvb, etc).
3. use a /castrandom macro

the 2400-3k dps you see is when grouped up, elemental oath up 100% of the time, totem of wrath, pally/DK buffs, etc. It's going to be a lot lower when you are solo, w/o trinkets, against a training dummy, but you will get a good idea of the difference between 1-3 and see what works best for you. For some people the diff between 2-3 is HUGE, for others its very, very little; it really is going to depend on your latency, gear, how fast you spam buttons, how good you are about using dmg-boost items, etc.

As hachoo said too you want some hit, at least 60 for heroics and 200-300 for raiding.

[Kaynin]

As hachoo said too you want some hit, at least 60 for heroics and 200-300 for raiding.

Shamans with Elemental Precision:
79 hit rating for trash/heroics
368 hit rating for raids/bosses

[Hachoo]

As hachoo said too you want some hit, at least 60 for heroics and 200-300 for raiding.

Shamans with Elemental Precision:
79 hit rating for trash
368 hit rating for raids/bossesI'm pretty sure 79 is for heroic bosses, its less than that for trash, something like 50 or 40.

[Kaynin]

As hachoo said too you want some hit, at least 60 for heroics and 200-300 for raiding.

Shamans with Elemental Precision:
79 hit rating for trash
368 hit rating for raids/bossesI'm pretty sure 79 is for heroic bosses, its less than that for trash, something like 50 or 40.

Yes sorry, raid trash/heroic bosses are level 82, raid bosses are level 83. I thought heroic bosses also fell in the 83 category, but apparantly I was wrong! x)

79 hit rating would be needed for heroics. He has that so. *shrug*

[Dohagan]

Hrmmm...retested as you said. It seems when I try to put flameshock into my rotation it slows me down enough to lower the dps for some reason. Straight lightning bolts I'm putting out more than when I try to alter the sequence. Good news is even with straight lbs I'm seeing 2200 dps now. With heroism up it shoots to 3200ish. I'll keep adjusting...I appreciate all the words.

[puppychow]

don't look at just dps either, look at overall dmg. in 30 secs your overall dmg may be 10k and your DPS 4000, or 50k and DPS 2k. The person doing 2k dps will always, always, always be better than the 4k dps person since they did 5x as much damage in that timeframe.

Recount is kind of bad in that DPS is a misleading number, it is really "damage per second CASTING". You could cast a 2 second spell, go afk for 15 seconds, cast another 2 second spell, and the time spent casting would be 4 seconds, instead of the 19 seconds you really were "fighting".

[Catamer]

add this in before your cast random so that you always start a new fight with a flame shock
/cast [harm,nocombat] Flame Shock

however, I know all of the places say those trinkets are the best pre-naxx trinkets.
I have the same trinkets but I'm seeing people with higher DPS that are not using them.
They are using sometype of trinket that has to be used
/use 13
/use 14

I'm not 100% sure but a chance at +509 spell for 10 seconds SOUNDS better than the cannoneer's use for +281 spell for 20 seconds but only if it fires often enough.
I noticed the +281 is for twice the time.
I'm thinking the Cannoneer's trinket would be better, particularly if it's only a 60 second fight.
if the +509 happens often enough that it's always up or fires twice in 60 seconds then it would be better.

I'll be off to the target dummys with both trinkets tonight and see what I can see.

[valkry]

Does that +50 spell power enchant stack with flametongue weapon?

[Hachoo]

The regular spellpower weapon enchant? Yes. Theres also a 63 spellpower enchant with higher mat requirements which I will be upgrading to soon :)

[Mercurio]

The regular spellpower weapon enchant? Yes. Theres also a 63 spellpower enchant with higher mat requirements which I will be upgrading to soon

Yeah, I looked at that bad boy the other day. It ends up being about 6 times as expensive, for 13 more spell power. I just couldn't justify it.

[Hachoo]

Yeah, but eventually you won't have anything more worthwhile to spend money on anyway, might as well get it, especially if you have a weapon where you don't see an upgrade anytime in the near future.

[valkry]

I'll be getting the 50 spell power enchant for now until I finish getting the 5 craftable epics for each character.

[puppychow]

There are two tiers of many of the enchants, the differences are fairly minor. If you really think you will not upgrade an item until the next content patch, then yeah, you should put the better enchant on it. But its fairly easy to get into naxx pugs, and stuff from KelThuzad (or Obsidium Sanctum 1 dragon, Malygos, etc) are quite a bit better than crafted/early naxx drops and do definitely deserve the better enchant, since there is no better item in game.

[Bigfish]

Personally, I try not to compare DPS because you only rarely ever face such a nice controlled environment where meaningful comparisons can be drawn. Not to mention you face an E-peen contest with the highest numbers people can pull out, despite the fact they forgot to mention they were flasked, in a raid, had certain buffs , or any number of criteria that caused the discrepency.

If you think you can improve, by all means, do so, but the important part is accomplishing what you set out to accomplish, not what shiny numbers you can get a program to spit back out at you.