As we begin raiding again, I'd like to stress some fundamental practices and procedures that we should be following.
All raiders:
• Avoid damage
This means not standing in fire, getting cleaved, or any other avoidable damage mechanic for a particular fight. What I'm mainly getting at is be familiar with the damage mechanics of the fight: deem what is or what isn't relevant to you. For unavoidable damage (example: Morchok's Stomp), utilize your damage reduction cooldowns. No matter what class or spec you are, chances are you have at least one damage reduction cooldown. Perhaps it's in the form of a glyph or talent. This leads to my next point:
• Know your class
Beyond knowing rotations, cooldowns, stat priorities, etc. knowing the usefulness of situtational spells, glyphs, and talents may become crucial as we progress in the higher raid difficulties. Talents and glyphs will remain flexible; you can change them on the fly before every pull. Use your brain and compare the fight's mechanics to your tools: Is there a talent that I usually never use, but will be useful in this fight?
• Use consumables (they're in the game for a reason)
Use a potion just before every pull so that we can use a second potion later on in the fight. This could make the difference between a shaky and a smooth start to a fight, the difference between making the enrage timer or not. Having 100% uptime on flask and food will be mandatory in our raids. I'lll do my best to provide consumables for the raid, like in Cataclysm, but you'll ultimately be responsible for having a sufficient amount of consumables before the raid starts.
• Get familiar with the fights
I'm going to strive to post boss strategies on this blog, so this would be the first place to come to educate yourself on the bosses we'll be working on. As they become available, I'll start including guides and videos made by others in the blog posts. Also, the in-game Dungeon Journal is better than ever as it contains a summary of a boss's mechanics.
• Pay attention to your trinkets
If you have an on-use trinket as a DPS player, most of the time you should be using it in conjunction with your other cooldowns for maximal damage increase. If you're a healer and the trinket involves restoring mana, use the trinket early (as soon as the mana return is not wasted) and often during the fight. If you're a tank, use it during high incoming damage (impales, high raid damage, etc.).
I'm sure this is all common sense to most of you. However, when you have a trirnket that procs (example: your damaging spells have a chance to grant you 100 mastery for 15 seconds (60 second cooldown)), you should be keeping track of these procs. Among having other uses, I'd recommend the adoon "NeedToKnow" for tracking trinket procs. If you're a DPS with relatively short cooldowns (30-60 second CDs), it's optimal to coordinate popping these CDs while your trinket proc is active.
• Use healthstones
Besides having the ability to summon, Warlocks provide the raid with healthstones. They have three charges and restore enough health to potentially make a difference during progression. Everyone should have a keybind for healthstones. Although I'll call out a good time to use healthstones (for instance, during heavy raid damage), you should use one along with damage reduction cooldowns if you dip low in health (<30% perhaps).
• Utilize keybinds
An argument against keybinds is an awfully hard one to win. Keybinds directly result in smoother gameplay. After your muscle memory takes over, you can spend less time staring at your spell icons and more time analyzing the battlefield and reacting to the raid environment. Although I know most of you do you have your own keybind setup, and keybind setups are different for everyone, if you need help on keybinds, let me know.
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Classes with a "Battle Rez":
• Be prepared to battle rez at any moment and react quickly to a call-out.
It goes without saying that your battle rez spell should be keybound to a convenient location. Furthermore, I'd recommend creating a macro that allows you to cast your battle rez to whatever target you're mousing over. That way, when I say "Battle rez Mike", Trevor, a warlock, or a DK would mouse over "Mamasmilk" in their raid frames and press the keybind for the spell. Easy as that. Obviously, it should be done as soon as possible. If it's a dangerous time to rez or a lot of movement is required, the rez will have to wait.
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