Game Guide: DPS -The Numbers, The Fire, and You.

Written by Lightbeard of Winterhoof with written permission to be posted here.

Part 1


Greetings, and stuff.

The purpose of this post is a generalized guide for DPS. It is not my intention to go into specific classes or give specific rotations or sequences or strategies. Everything contained herein will apply to all classes, whether melee, ranged, caster, or some combination thereof.

1: Know your abilities and what they do.
You've adventured through 80 levels of content with your toon. By now you should know what your abilities do. You should be aware of which attacks affect multiple targets and which one affect only a single target. By now you should also be familiar with what buffs and debuffs you bring with you. In short you should have a general working of how to play your character.

1a: General Stat information: The caps listed here are for PvE, against Boss-level (+3) Mobs.

Hit Rating: improves your chance to hit your target. In most cases capping hit rating is the most efficient way to improve DPS, though there are some exceptions. In general though, you can't hurt what you can't hit.

Melee Hit: Single-weapon cap: 8% (263 Hit Rating)
Dual Wielding weapons: 27% (886 Hit Rating, don't even bother trying for this much)
Melee Special Attacks: 8% (263 hit rating)
Spell Hit: Unmodified Cap: 17% (446 Hit Rating)

Note that very few casters have to deal with the unmodified cap for spell hit. The S-Priest ability Misery, and the Thunderchicken ability Improved Faerie Fire will also reduce how much hit rating is required, as will a Draenei's Heroic Presence. Because of this most casters in a group or raid setting will only need 289 Hit Rating, and Draenei, and anyone grouped with and in range of a Draenei, will only need 263 Hit Rating.

Expertise: Reduces the chance your melee attacks will be dodged, blocked, or parried. This stat has no effect on ranged attacks or spells, and should therefore be avoided by hunters and casters. For some specs and classes expertise is not vital, but it is something to keep track of.
Expertise Soft Cap (Your attacks cannot be dodged):  6.5%, 26 Expertise (214 Expertise Rating)
Expertise Hard Cap (Your attacks cannot be parried): 14%, 56 Expertise (460 Expertise Rating)
Talents and some racials give extra Expertise, reducing how much Expertise Rating is required. An important note as well, mobs cannot parry attacks from behind, which is one of the reasons melee should attack from the back whenever possible.

Haste: Increases the speed of your attacks. More specifically, reduces the time between auto attacks and reduces cast times by a specific percentage. Haste has no effect on instant-cast abilities, but it does reduce the duration of the Global Cooldown (GCD) on spells (not physical attacks) to a minimum of 1 second. Doing so would require an extraordinary amount of Haste Rating to achieve without buffs or talents, so it's not worth it to really try, but for a lot of classes and specs haste is very beneficial. Some classes do better with haste than others, however, and for a few specs and classes haste is not as advantageous as other stats.

Armor Penetration: This stat reduces the effectiveness of the target's armor. For classes that deal mostly or entirely physical damage, Armor Penetration is quite useful. For other classes that deal a significant amount of non-physical damage, Armor Penetration's effectiveness is reduced. In general, if you deal mostly or all physical damage it's a good stat to have on your gear, but there's no real need to gem or enchant for it. IF you deal 40% or more of your damage as any type of spell or bleed damage, then armor penetration, while not useless, is not as valuable as other stats.

Spell Penetration: This stat is used mostly in PvP as most mobs do not have extra spell resistances. Certain specific mobs do have increased spell resistances that can be overcome by Spell Penetration, but in general it's not all that worthwhile to bother with in a PvE setting.

Crit: This is the fun stat. The one that makes those big numbers bigger. The great thing about Crit is that your Crit Chance can be increased not only by Crit Rating itself, but also by Agility for melee and ranged, and Intellect for spells. In general it's desirable to have around 30% or more unbuffed crit chance.
At Level 80: 45.91 Crit Rating = 1% crit chance.
For melee the amount of Agility needed to gain 1% crit varies from 83.3 for most melee classes, to 62.5 for Warriors and DKs, to 52.08 for Paladins.
For Casters, every 166.6~ intellect will grant 1% crit.

Attack Power and Spell Power: While these two stats are quite separate, they are very similar in what they do. Increaseing your total AP or SP (or both, depending on class and spec) is a top priority. Typically, after reaching a specific level with the other stats these become the top DPS improvements.


That's it for the moment. I'll post Part II tomorrow.
-Lightbeard, Winterhoof US, Alliance

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