Emanee Sucks. Her DPS, That Is

My guild had a good outing in TK last night, but Emanee is starting to struggle a bit. With my gear, fully raid buffed, I should be pulling 1k+ dps on the more raid friendly bosses.

But I'm not.

I'm just eking out 700. And I don't think my guild is going to long suffer that. Even if they would put up with it, it's a matter of pride to perform better than that.

So I've been doing a bit of research. Shadowpriest.com is a great resource for, surprisingly enough, shadow priests. From that site, I've gotten a good idea of where my dps should be, and how to go about getting it there.

First and foremost, I need to macro inner focus to shadow word: pain. I also need to macro my trinket to vampiric touch. I waste valuable time moving my mouse over to hit my trinket, when one-button can not only activate the trinket, but also launch the corresponding spell.

Part of the problem is I recently respecced to adjust my spellhit needs. In the process, I was able to boost my mind blast cooldown. Long term, that will be a good thing, but right now, it's killing my practiced timing. I think the source of my weak dps is I'm not maximizing my burst damage spells, shadow word: death and mind blast. I do a great job of keeping the dots up, but I now need to focus on getting my timing down so sw: d and mb are used to their maximum potential. I'm also going to go back to interrupting mind flay when sw: d and mb come off cooldown.

A symptom of my dps woes: I never come close to running out of mana, a bad sign, since it indicates a decent return on the vt I always maintain, but a weak overall dps output. As someone said in the shadowpriest.com forums, if you're not running out of mana towards the end of a boss fight, you're not dpsing hard enough.

I also want to investigate the mod Quartz. Shadowpriest.com talks about the spellqueue and server lag. My dps might be getting gimped because of this lag, which means I need to find away around that, namely by managing cooldowns around both the gcd AND the server latency.

So that, coupled with some strategic use of macros, should see the dps boost I need to be doing. If that doesn't work, I'm going to reroll a 'lock so that all I have to do is roll my face back and forth on the keyboard to top the damage meters.