As all fierce queens know, you sometimes have to deliver glamor and fierceness on a budget. You may only have four hours, fifty dollars worth of chair upholstery, and a sewing machine. And whether this means being runway ready or raid ready, YOU CAN DO IT ON A DIME BUDGET AND WITH NO TIME, BECAUSE YOU ARE FIERCE.

Thus, this is a guide on how to QUICKLY deliver a runway ready amount of DPS without spending more than a day or two on it. Considering you’re raiding two days a week, it’s worth the effort.

1. Step 1: Evaluate yourself.

Download a damage meter addon like Skada.

Find the target dummy in your garrison that doesn’t hit back. He has a cute hat.

Turn on a damage meter and slap that target dummy for three minutes. Do as much damage as you can in that period. Write down the TOTAL DAMAGE number. It’s more accurate than the DPS figure.

Now you have a baseline.

2. Download a move predictor addon.

I can hear the gasps from the audience already, but don’t worry, these are just training wheels and test dummies!

Do the same three minute thing with the target dummy, but this time, mash all the buttons the addon tells you to use.

Check the three minute timer.

Did the damage go up by more than 10 percent? If so, that’s the boss dying a full minute earlier! Yasssssssss!

Which means your rotation can be fixed for mega boss destruction!

We’ll get into the rotation later. For now… what if…

3. My rotation still puts out the same dps as with the move predictor!

Then this leaves two possibilities: gear or talents. At least one of them just isn’t working for you.

4. Look up the ideal “single target dps talents” for your character.

We want the talents which optimize “single target dps”. That’s not what you’ll always use, but it’s a good place to start. Switch the talents to those.

The move predictor instructions may also assume that you’re using certain talents–these are usually the ideal talents for single target DPS.

Try that as a good starter.

Slap the dummy again. Any improvement? Remember, 10% means boss dead vs. not-dead.

If things still seem locked up…

5. Then it’s what you’re wearing, queen.

Figure out your ideal secondary stat. That’s the stat that appears on you when you eat a savage feast. Simple, amirite?

Enchant everything with that. Switch out equipment with that stat too. Reroll your crafted items to get it.

Hit the target dummy for three minutes again.

If after all this, your DPS is still not showing any improvement, refer to the section below, appropriately called: “SOMETHING HAS GONE TRAGICALLY WRONG.”

6. You promised you’d help me with my rotation.

Do you know what snapshotting is, and how best to take advantage of it with your dots? (And not the trinket snapshotting that was removed.)

More importantly, does that sentence sound like a foreign language?

If so, your problem is probably a lack of knowledge. Easily fixed!

Google for the best forum for your class and spec. The best forums will have several posts a day, as in, today-today. Millions of people play this game.

Unfortunately, the Blizzard forums are overrun with poor players (and also complaining and mean) and probably aren’t a good place to start. Go somewhere else.

You’ll know you’ve found a good place when they give a satisfying explanation of three things, which most good DPS players take seriously:

1. How secondary stats affect individual spells/attacks/etc. (e.g. does critical strike help one ability but not another?)
2. How each spell/attack/ability/talent SCALES with your gear
3. How snapshotting affects individual spells/attacks/etc. (Edit: Snapshotting has been eliminated from most characters and situations, but knowing what it means is helpful in learning how Warcraft calculates damage)

Every spell in your book (including buffs/attacks/bleeds/cooldowns/self-heals/talents/whatever) has an answer to those three questions.

Hardcore math oriented people figure this shit out to determine the ideal rotation and stats for single target DPS. LEARN FROM THEIR MAGIC.

You’ll then grow to realize that the guide on Icyveins is just the Cliffs notes. You’ll realize that while one secondary stat may be the WORST in one situation, it may be the BEST in another, or it may depend entirely on your style or raid composition.

You want your DPS to be sickening and fierce! CLIFFS NOTES ARE NOT ENOUGH FOR A SICKENING DPS QUEEN SUCH AS YOURSELF.

You don’t have to go crazy.

Ignore the secondary stats for AOE damage and go all in on single target. Theory crafters figure out what works for each situation, but you only care about single target. Why? BECAUSE YOU MAPPED YOUR CC TO MOUSEOVER MACROS LIKE A BOSS.

Also, how many boss fights need high AOE damage? There’s probably someone who dishes it out without trying. Let them take the chain hurl.

Focus on using abilities that are known to scale well–they might have sucked in five man dungeons, but became amazing in raids.

Compromise between the stats that boost active and passive abilities. (If you have done enough research to lean toward one or the other, by all means do so!)

Enchant your shit again.

Go slap around your target dummy.

(Footnote about “snapshotting”: this used to refer to snapshotting trinkets and other things, but now applies only to self-buffs and various other things; in general, it’s whether a buff continues to effect the tick of a dot/hot after the buff expires and the dot/hot continues.)

Are you serving up fierce, fishy, maximum DPS realness?

7. No.

Now it’s time to… Think for yourself. Change things, a few at a time, and continue molesting the dummy. Read those forums about each ability.

Show me on the target dummy where he touched you.

8. Ok, I’ve gotten things better. But the other players are still more sickening, and I want to be a DPS glamazon. I want to be a star!

Good. Are you…

• Piling up every possible buff before fight?
• Prepotting?
• Using your pot at the same time you blow all your cooldowns and timing it to coincide with bloodlust?
• Dotting up both targets in a boss fight with twins?

And remember the limits of that target dummy. You may have abilities that only come in when the boss is at a certain health level. You may want to try duels with a healer friend and count how long it takes to kill them.

9. This shit is complicated!

It only takes a day or two. Then you’ll be amazing.

10. Should you continue to use a move predictor?

I have an addon called Tell Me When and I’ve customized all of the flashy bits and timers to show up at precisely the moments I want to (doing this is by far the most time consuming). When I follow it, even though the rotation is quite different from the move predictor, it’s still within 1% of the total damage delivered by the move predictor rotation. (After repeated 3 minute dummy whacks.)

That’s actually kind of remarkable on a total in the millions, and really suggests that to some extent, there’s really a limit on how much you can squeeze from a rotation (and why you shouldn’t stress over it too much).

I still have BOTH TMW and the move predictor up- they are delivering information only. The move predictor is only giving you the rotation for an unmoving target who’s not fighting back.

This is not reality.

I recommend customizing TMW to lean toward telling you what to do when the boss is about to go running, and to give you 2-3 different choices. Have it give you a heads up, 5 seconds in advance, of what dots/debuffs/buffs are about to fall off. That way, if the fight is about to switch phases, or you’re switching targets, you dump your last five global cooldowns on the good stuff. This matters a lot, since virtually every fight has components where you have to stop what you’re doing and run.

You want to refresh that 20 second DOT before switching targets or running away from the fire. Move predictors will not help you with that.

Move predictors also don’t remind you to use trinkets and off heals.

If your attention is on something else, it’s nice to have something to let you DPS on autopilot. I don’t use it at all on mainspec, because I prefer my personalized TMW notifications (although it’s interesting to see the two flash identical rotations at times). You can have TMW, for example, flash that you should use a health pot if your health is low and there are no incoming heals. Move predictors don’t go that far, but TMW can do anything.

TMW usually flashes three different choices that I’ve decided in advance would be good options based on the conditions. Certainly players can do well without this, but if you’re a casual player, it’s an enormous benefit to have an addon doing some of the thinking for you.

The fiercest players spend the most time manipulating smaller and smaller pieces to a smaller and smaller granularity. You may be able to only reliably snapshot one bleed when they can snapshot two. They have practiced mashing buttons. They have spent time with a calculator and a combat log. You don’t need to go that far, but the advice above will keep you from feeling like you are “holding the raid back.”

11. I’m still a mess.

Go on the (friendly, class specific, non-blizzard) forums and ask for advice from others. It might feel humbling, but fierce queens claw their way up from the bottom.

 You may also need to use a calculator and look at the combat log–sometimes there are questions which just aren’t answered on the forums, and the forums are full of people who think they have answers. But you, you have a calculator! But trial and error with the target dummy is a quick and easy version.

12. I’m still a mess, I have an ego tougher than steel, and I want to be better

Lovely! Download a combat log and link it on a class forum, and ask people to critique what you’re doing. Then, some of the best players out there can look at literally everything you do, and tell you how to fix it. This is a little bit more involved, and it’s definitely unsettling to have everyone else critiquing you. But if, two weeks later, you’re topping the charts, you’ll be happy.

13. I’m a mess and my ego isn’t tough enough to post my combat logs for everyone to gawk at.

If you want to use combat logs to diagnose what’s going wrong, pull up the logs for the best players in your class (they are publicly ranked, so yes, you can see them), and look at those. Compare those to the same fights you’re doing. What is their uptime on certain DOTs? How frequently are they using any particular spell/talent/ability? And how does that compare to you?

Blizzard is known for leaving particular talent trees and specs worthless for entire expansions–this might not be the xpac for frost mages. If you’re a DPS with three specs, you NEED to know which are the two best, and for which situations. Combat logs tell you this very easily.