How to do Top DPS

Credits to Kripparrian

This post is gonna talk about the basic skills required to do the maximum DPS and it assumes you know the basic of the hunter class.

The most important thing is how you play. It's not about  gear, gems or specs and there is evidences about this cause if you look at the dps for a class on a particular encounter you will see a big variation in max DPS

So what is DPS?

Maximizing your Globals

Maximizing the number of spell that you can cast in a given period of time and how much damage you can do with each of this abilities. Maximizing this 2 factors is what you need to do Top DPS.

Part 1

Increasing the number of Spells casts

The first thing you need to know when maximizing your globals is that you have to know which ability you are going to use 1 or 2 global after the current one. So you are not reacting to what you already done, you reacting to what you are going to be doing. If you are casting something you have to know before the cast finishes what ability you are gonna cast next.

For instance if you have just started casting steady shot and you see that your Aimed shot will be up 3 sec from now you are gonna know ahead of time that you have 1 more Steady Shot before you can use Aimed shot. You should learn to plan that out before actually execute it.

Once you planned all your skill and know a general rotation of your class you want to know the best way to use those abilities. To press the buttons.

• The worst way of doing that is actually pressing the button. Don't do it.

• Second worst way is reacting to a finished cast

When a cast end you notice that has ended and you start casting a new one.

• 3rd worst and most popular of all is to react according to the latency bar of your cast bar 

Although this is better since you take into account the latency the problem here is that the latency is calculated at the beginning of the cast and may vary of the latency you will have at the end.

The method that is gonna resolve as the best use of global cooldown is spamming your keys:

With this method your in advance reacting in any possible error you might do and you will do errors admit it or not.

So as a tip of advice is to macro your most used ability, for a hunter that would be Steady Shot, to your scroll down or scroll up keys of your mouse.

Planning your Movement

In a boss fight it's best to avoid movement but then again the reality is different. You have to move. For that reason only you  have use abilities that does damage or will help you do damage later in the fight. For example you can use Arcane shot or Aimed Shot since those skill are instant casts and doesn't require you to stand still to use them.

2nd Part

Increasing Average Damage per Cast

The next step of maximizing your dps is maximizing the damage it's of the spell does.

And to do so you stack your cooldowns.

Lets say you have 2 different cooldown that 1 increases your Damage by 10% and the other increases your Attack Speed by 10%. If you overlap this 2 cooldowns you will be doing 10% more damage while attacking 10% faster.

 

Something else is trinkets and their internal cooldown.

Most use addons to monitor when their trinket proc but this is half the information they gaining.

Many people use this bar to monitor the procs or other abilities but they usually react a bit later than the time the trinket actually proced. The best way to get the seconds back is having addons that monitor also the Internal Cooldowns of those abilities. That way you will know ahead of time if the internal cooldown is about to go off that your trinket will proc soon. If you have this kind of info you can use for example your Rapid fire before the trinket proc and time them so that you will get the whole benefit of the trinket while on rapid fire.

Another thing is that you have to know is how long the fight is going to last and also things in the fight that will give you additional damage benefit ke Icehowl encounter. When Icehowl crashes on the wall he get 100% more damage so you have to time your cooldowns for that moment so that you can gain and additional multiplier to your abilities.

All the above will require a lot of practice and it wont be easy at the beginning but seeing your DPS increasing in every fight will motivate you to do more (MOAR!!!!) DPS each time. You will find yourself a lot of ways to increase your dps like learning to DPS 2-3 targets at the same time, pots(preports), elixir and food or even items.

Till then Happy Hunting.