Why do people do low DPS?

[Gadzooks]

i think a lot of it depends on how much attention is being spent focusing on doing DPS. This is the same reason that some multiboxers fail at DPS as well I think. in the case of someone playing multiple roles simultaneously as we do while multiboxing, especially mixed groups, it's easy to let concentration slip from maintaining an optimal DPS rotation. In the case of solo toons who don't perform I think often times you'd find that they're sitting there in /tells or watching TV/Movie or talking to people in RL or what have you...

It's interesting that you say that, because I've had a shift in how I look at my teams, and it's becoming less important to me that my guys all crit and have huge damage reports, and more important that I am getting consistent results, with good solid healing, so if it takes an extra minute or two to burn some mobs or a boss down, so be it - surviving is more important now than two shotting everything in sight.

I got it by getting frustrated with my current team, a priest, a pally, and a rogue. The Pally was consistently topping the damage meter, over a rogue 4 levels higher with better gear - and the rogues dps was about a quarter of what it should be. So I slowed it down and studied the fights and found the errors in my rotations, and after a few days of experimenting I have have the rogue and pally just about neck and neck in DPS - and it's high dps. The priest can now sit back, heal, apply some dots, and I can manually do her rotations if the mobs live long enough. It's a lot less hectic, and they are a killing machine again. I had to bring my 80 mage once or twice, but it's smooth sailing now.

Next I need to work on threat. The Pally loses threat too easily from the rogue. It's a timing thing, I need to overhaul the pally's macros. The two kill so fast, it's not an issue yet, because I'm not running dungeons.