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A method to learn damage dealing
aaisoaho
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Hello all,
I've long been pondering about making a post about a method of learning to deal damage. I have written several versions of this exact same method to my guildies and I started to feel like I could share it to a wider audience. Because I'm one of those people that do not enjoy watching video tutorials, I decided to stick to the format I'm most comfortable with: text.
The following method of learning how to do damage is something I came up with, when I was starting to feel like I maybe could do more on the DD department. It requires motivation, will and self-discipline, because my method is not the fastest. I base my way of learning the damage dealing on habits and muscle memories, which requires repetition and thus a lot of time. Also you would need some target dummies. I will also point at some useful addons that are not necessary but can help you.
This guide is only about how to deal damage and requires some basic concepts to be learned, such as skills, barswapping and light attacks. I can try to write about other aspects at some later point of time if enough people shows interest and I feel like I have something meaningful to contribute.
---
The habits
Damage dealing can be split into separate habits that makes up the bigger picture of dealing damage. These habits are layered on top of each other and thus I felt like I should learn them from bottom up. When following this guide, you need to learn them in order and only move on to the next one when you feel like it has turned into a habit. How do you know it is a habit? You will notice it does not take you a lot of concentration to do - then it'll be a habit, something you can do without thinking of doing it.
Habits in order, from the first one to learn to the last one:
1. Click and skill habit
2. 1 second rhythm
3. Keeping up with the uptimes
4. Build minigames
Do keep in mind you cannot rush this. Do not try to multitask. Give yourself a permission to fail at every other department you haven't yet learned. Focus on the habit you are learning and try to keep up the previously learnt habits.
---
1. Click and skill habit
This habit is part of the so called weaving, but I'd like to keep it separate, so the jargon won't screw with you. What this habit is about is: You "click" and immediately follow the click with a skill cast - click being the light attack, which is instantly followed by a skill cast. This is the foundation of everything, so try to form a habit of first casting a light attack and immediately after it you press a skill. There are very little exceptions of when you should not press the light attack before you press a skill, so you really should now start to form a habit of click and skill.
At this stage, do not rush. The time between a click-and-skill and the next click-and-skill is not important, let it be sloppy. Let the time be whatever over the one second. Just click-and-skill, then wait, click-and-skill, then wait... until you feel like you got it.
For this practice, the ideal target dummy is the Precursor. It is a dummy you get by doing The Precursor and The Oscillating Son quests in Clockwork City. The dummy itself has 321.8k health, so it won't take you an awfully long time to beat it over and over again.
Addons
Got this? Yay! Let's start building other habits of damage dealing now.
---
2. One second rhythm
This is the second part of the so called weaving. Now we are moving on to learning to do it at the ideal pace, to cast the click-and-skill once per second. Do keep in mind you can go too fast here, which will hinder you.
If you cast skills faster than once per second, they will queue. This means the game will automatically cast the next skill as soon as 1 second has passed from the previous skill cast, and this skill queueing will override your light attacks. DO NOT TRY TO DO IT TOO FAST! Keep it zen.
In essence, to learn this habit, you will need to learn to wait just the correct amount. You click-and-skill and wait roughly a second before doing the next click-and-skill. Use a metronome or an addon to get the timing right. When learning the correct rhythm, go a bit slow at first, use the metronome tick as the signal to let the next click-and-skill come. Then start trying to get the next click-and-skill in at the tick - and try not to get it before the tick. (click can happen a bit before the tick, but skill must be cast at or after the tick)
For this practice, the Precursor is at first a good option, but when you start to pick on the speed, the Target Skeleton, Humanoid becomes the better choice, since it has 3mil. health making it last longer so you'd get more time at once to practice the rhythm.
Addons
Got the speed and the rhythm to a point you want and think you can do it without sweating? Sweet! Let's ramp up the practices.
---
3. Keeping up with the uptimes
Now, let's ditch the idea of static rotation straight away. You do not need such distractions and complicated lists to remember here.
Here we start practicing to keep our dots up, and for it, I want you to pick your favorite build and search a build guide for it. A good guide has a list of skill priorities, which is what we base this habit on.
First, turn on the skill timer setting in-game or install an addon called Action Duration Reminder. When you start doing a parse, focus on the top priority skill. Try to cast it just before it is running out, and while you are waiting for it to run out, use the other skills. When you start to feel like you can keep the most important skill up all the time, start doing it to the next skill in the priority list. After a certain point you will start to notice you cannot keep them all up 100% of the time, so you will need to start prioritising the top skills, they need to be up all the time. Lower priority skills that you cannot keep up, should be cast when you have time for it, and if you have extra time still, then use a spammable (assuming the build has a spammable). To keep the top priority skills up 100% you might need to cast the skill when the duration is at 1-3 seconds.
On this habit, you want to learn to follow several timers and to prioritise some timers over the others. This takes time, which is why I wanted you to first learn the click-and-skill and then the rhythm. This can take a while and will need to be kept up to date every time a major patch happens.
Do not worry, even the best of damage dealers have some issues with this. If you start to feel like your fingers entangles, curls up and cries in confusion, take a break. You are not in rush here, and are more than welcome to use as much time with this as you need to.
At first the ideal dummy is the 3mil dummy, but as you start to get hang of this, you should move on to an iron atronach target dummy. The said target dummy is bought from crown store, but most of the larger guilds have it available in their guild houses or at some player's house. If guilds are not your thing and don't fancy to spend 6k crowns on a target dummy, I understand you - in such scenario, I'd like to propose the 6 mil dummy. 6 mil dummy will not provide a comparable DPS to the iron atronach, since it won't offer the buffs and debuffs, but it at least takes some beating before it dies, letting you to practice the uptimes.
Addons
---
4. Build minigames
At this point you start to be a solid damage dealer willing to push it a bit further. You have a habit of click-and-skill, a rhythm for it and know which skills to cast. So, let's practice the final component, that varies by your builds.
The minigames are something that are built into the builds. The examples of what I mean is:
- Bound Armaments (Sorcerers) should be cast as every 4th skill
- Blast Bones (Necromancers) should be cast as every 3rd skill
- Spectral Arrow (Nightblades) should be cast as every 5th skill
- Magicka should be kept low throughout the fight (Bahsei's mania -set)
- You can only spend 4 seconds on backbar (frontbarred Kinras's Wrath)
Here I do not have universal advices on how to do this. You need to keep track of the minigame, like with kinras frontbarred you need to restrict the skill casts to 3 skill at backbar before swapping back to front bar. With bound armaments, you cast 3 skills and then the bound armaments.
Addons
---
Thank you
Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you have any questions or suggestions, feedback or success stories, do reply. I would like to hear your thoughts on this.
I've long been pondering about making a post about a method of learning to deal damage. I have written several versions of this exact same method to my guildies and I started to feel like I could share it to a wider audience. Because I'm one of those people that do not enjoy watching video tutorials, I decided to stick to the format I'm most comfortable with: text.
The following method of learning how to do damage is something I came up with, when I was starting to feel like I maybe could do more on the DD department. It requires motivation, will and self-discipline, because my method is not the fastest. I base my way of learning the damage dealing on habits and muscle memories, which requires repetition and thus a lot of time. Also you would need some target dummies. I will also point at some useful addons that are not necessary but can help you.
This guide is only about how to deal damage and requires some basic concepts to be learned, such as skills, barswapping and light attacks. I can try to write about other aspects at some later point of time if enough people shows interest and I feel like I have something meaningful to contribute.
---
The habits
Damage dealing can be split into separate habits that makes up the bigger picture of dealing damage. These habits are layered on top of each other and thus I felt like I should learn them from bottom up. When following this guide, you need to learn them in order and only move on to the next one when you feel like it has turned into a habit. How do you know it is a habit? You will notice it does not take you a lot of concentration to do - then it'll be a habit, something you can do without thinking of doing it.
Habits in order, from the first one to learn to the last one:
1. Click and skill habit
2. 1 second rhythm
3. Keeping up with the uptimes
4. Build minigames
Do keep in mind you cannot rush this. Do not try to multitask. Give yourself a permission to fail at every other department you haven't yet learned. Focus on the habit you are learning and try to keep up the previously learnt habits.
---
1. Click and skill habit
This habit is part of the so called weaving, but I'd like to keep it separate, so the jargon won't screw with you. What this habit is about is: You "click" and immediately follow the click with a skill cast - click being the light attack, which is instantly followed by a skill cast. This is the foundation of everything, so try to form a habit of first casting a light attack and immediately after it you press a skill. There are very little exceptions of when you should not press the light attack before you press a skill, so you really should now start to form a habit of click and skill.
At this stage, do not rush. The time between a click-and-skill and the next click-and-skill is not important, let it be sloppy. Let the time be whatever over the one second. Just click-and-skill, then wait, click-and-skill, then wait... until you feel like you got it.
For this practice, the ideal target dummy is the Precursor. It is a dummy you get by doing The Precursor and The Oscillating Son quests in Clockwork City. The dummy itself has 321.8k health, so it won't take you an awfully long time to beat it over and over again.
Addons
Addons I found handy were the light attack helper and combat metrics info page. At this stage, ignore the LA/s part of the Light Attack Helper and only focus on the big number, it shows you how many light attacks were succesfully cast in tandem with a skill. You want to be able to keep the number raising, to not let it reset often when practicing.
Combat Metrics (CMX for short) is an addon that is designed to be used as a tool to evaluate your performance. You can open it by typing
On the cmx info page you see your gear, CP and skills, plus a lot of numbers. The thing that interests you at this point is the miss -column and "weapon attacks: X Skills: Y" row. Miss column shows how many times have you missed a light attack before a skill, which you want to keep at 0. The purpose of this practice is basically to learn to keep the miss columns at 0. Weapon Attacks indicate how many light attacks have you done and the Skills indicate how many skills have you cast succesfully, and they should be about the same.
Combat Metrics (CMX for short) is an addon that is designed to be used as a tool to evaluate your performance. You can open it by typing
/cmxin chat and sending it. Here you will see a window pop up with the previously beaten target as the title of it. On the side you see icons stacked vertically - these icons indicate different pages. The info page I'm fussing about is the circled letter 'i', go ahead and click it.
On the cmx info page you see your gear, CP and skills, plus a lot of numbers. The thing that interests you at this point is the miss -column and "weapon attacks: X Skills: Y" row. Miss column shows how many times have you missed a light attack before a skill, which you want to keep at 0. The purpose of this practice is basically to learn to keep the miss columns at 0. Weapon Attacks indicate how many light attacks have you done and the Skills indicate how many skills have you cast succesfully, and they should be about the same.
Got this? Yay! Let's start building other habits of damage dealing now.
---
2. One second rhythm
This is the second part of the so called weaving. Now we are moving on to learning to do it at the ideal pace, to cast the click-and-skill once per second. Do keep in mind you can go too fast here, which will hinder you.
If you cast skills faster than once per second, they will queue. This means the game will automatically cast the next skill as soon as 1 second has passed from the previous skill cast, and this skill queueing will override your light attacks. DO NOT TRY TO DO IT TOO FAST! Keep it zen.
In essence, to learn this habit, you will need to learn to wait just the correct amount. You click-and-skill and wait roughly a second before doing the next click-and-skill. Use a metronome or an addon to get the timing right. When learning the correct rhythm, go a bit slow at first, use the metronome tick as the signal to let the next click-and-skill come. Then start trying to get the next click-and-skill in at the tick - and try not to get it before the tick. (click can happen a bit before the tick, but skill must be cast at or after the tick)
For this practice, the Precursor is at first a good option, but when you start to pick on the speed, the Target Skeleton, Humanoid becomes the better choice, since it has 3mil. health making it last longer so you'd get more time at once to practice the rhythm.
Addons
Here the most help for me was from the Combat Metronome addon. It is an addon that will add a bar that empties itself in a second and will make ticking sounds. I use it to time my click-and-skills in a fashion of: I click when it reaches the red and is about to run out and as soon as the red is empty, I will press the skill - but at first you should time the click-and-skill to happen as soon as the bar is empty.
The previously mentioned LA/s of the Light Attack Helper can help you here too. Ideally you'd want the LA/s to be 1.00 LA/s, but it is nearly impossible to get, so you can settle on 0.8 - 0.9 LA/s for now. The faster speed comes from experience and with a lot of repetition, so don't sweat it.
Here the CMX info page I talked about earlier comes in handy too. I shows you "weaving average", which indicates how many seconds have you lost on average with your rhythm. Ideally it'd be 0.0, of course, but yet again such numbers are nearly impossible. 0.100 is something a lot of people strive for, but 0.150 is not too shabby either. At this point, it is up to you to decide when you got the rhythm habit right, what is the DPS you want to land in when moving on to iron atronach parses. The weaving column just averages the time lost per each skill, and skills like stampede are notorious for being hard to use because they lock you out of casting skills.
The previously mentioned LA/s of the Light Attack Helper can help you here too. Ideally you'd want the LA/s to be 1.00 LA/s, but it is nearly impossible to get, so you can settle on 0.8 - 0.9 LA/s for now. The faster speed comes from experience and with a lot of repetition, so don't sweat it.
Here the CMX info page I talked about earlier comes in handy too. I shows you "weaving average", which indicates how many seconds have you lost on average with your rhythm. Ideally it'd be 0.0, of course, but yet again such numbers are nearly impossible. 0.100 is something a lot of people strive for, but 0.150 is not too shabby either. At this point, it is up to you to decide when you got the rhythm habit right, what is the DPS you want to land in when moving on to iron atronach parses. The weaving column just averages the time lost per each skill, and skills like stampede are notorious for being hard to use because they lock you out of casting skills.
Got the speed and the rhythm to a point you want and think you can do it without sweating? Sweet! Let's ramp up the practices.
---
3. Keeping up with the uptimes
Now, let's ditch the idea of static rotation straight away. You do not need such distractions and complicated lists to remember here.
Here we start practicing to keep our dots up, and for it, I want you to pick your favorite build and search a build guide for it. A good guide has a list of skill priorities, which is what we base this habit on.
First, turn on the skill timer setting in-game or install an addon called Action Duration Reminder. When you start doing a parse, focus on the top priority skill. Try to cast it just before it is running out, and while you are waiting for it to run out, use the other skills. When you start to feel like you can keep the most important skill up all the time, start doing it to the next skill in the priority list. After a certain point you will start to notice you cannot keep them all up 100% of the time, so you will need to start prioritising the top skills, they need to be up all the time. Lower priority skills that you cannot keep up, should be cast when you have time for it, and if you have extra time still, then use a spammable (assuming the build has a spammable). To keep the top priority skills up 100% you might need to cast the skill when the duration is at 1-3 seconds.
On this habit, you want to learn to follow several timers and to prioritise some timers over the others. This takes time, which is why I wanted you to first learn the click-and-skill and then the rhythm. This can take a while and will need to be kept up to date every time a major patch happens.
Do not worry, even the best of damage dealers have some issues with this. If you start to feel like your fingers entangles, curls up and cries in confusion, take a break. You are not in rush here, and are more than welcome to use as much time with this as you need to.
At first the ideal dummy is the 3mil dummy, but as you start to get hang of this, you should move on to an iron atronach target dummy. The said target dummy is bought from crown store, but most of the larger guilds have it available in their guild houses or at some player's house. If guilds are not your thing and don't fancy to spend 6k crowns on a target dummy, I understand you - in such scenario, I'd like to propose the 6 mil dummy. 6 mil dummy will not provide a comparable DPS to the iron atronach, since it won't offer the buffs and debuffs, but it at least takes some beating before it dies, letting you to practice the uptimes.
Addons
As said, Action Duration Reminder is a solid choice to help you keep up with the uptimes. You can fiddle it's reminders to be suitable for you, but is absolutely not necessary, and the timers provided by the game are solid enough for this.
Here the cmx info page will help too. The interesting part now is the Time column besides each skill. It indicates how often on average do you cast the skill. In an ideal scenario, each skill is cast once per their duration, so for example stampede should be cast once per 15 seconds, and thus the Time should be close to 15 seconds. Ideal scenarios are not realistic, so by going by the example of stampede: stampede is usually a high priority skill, so you often end up overcasting it - that is casting it before it runs out - and thus a number between 14 and 15 seconds is a solid result. The goodness of the number in each row of Time columns depends on the skill priority and skill duration. High priority skills should be cast way below their duration, low priority ones can be cast over their duration.
Here the cmx info page will help too. The interesting part now is the Time column besides each skill. It indicates how often on average do you cast the skill. In an ideal scenario, each skill is cast once per their duration, so for example stampede should be cast once per 15 seconds, and thus the Time should be close to 15 seconds. Ideal scenarios are not realistic, so by going by the example of stampede: stampede is usually a high priority skill, so you often end up overcasting it - that is casting it before it runs out - and thus a number between 14 and 15 seconds is a solid result. The goodness of the number in each row of Time columns depends on the skill priority and skill duration. High priority skills should be cast way below their duration, low priority ones can be cast over their duration.
---
4. Build minigames
At this point you start to be a solid damage dealer willing to push it a bit further. You have a habit of click-and-skill, a rhythm for it and know which skills to cast. So, let's practice the final component, that varies by your builds.
The minigames are something that are built into the builds. The examples of what I mean is:
- Bound Armaments (Sorcerers) should be cast as every 4th skill
- Blast Bones (Necromancers) should be cast as every 3rd skill
- Spectral Arrow (Nightblades) should be cast as every 5th skill
- Magicka should be kept low throughout the fight (Bahsei's mania -set)
- You can only spend 4 seconds on backbar (frontbarred Kinras's Wrath)
Here I do not have universal advices on how to do this. You need to keep track of the minigame, like with kinras frontbarred you need to restrict the skill casts to 3 skill at backbar before swapping back to front bar. With bound armaments, you cast 3 skills and then the bound armaments.
Addons
I have no special one-size-fits-all solutions here. Sorry.
For the bound armaments/blast bones/spectral arrow you can use the # column and the skills -row in CMX info page to estimate how good you did. For bound armaments, you want to have the # be one fourth of your skills, for blast bones it is one third of your skills and for spectral arrow it is one fifth of your skills.
For the bound armaments/blast bones/spectral arrow you can use the # column and the skills -row in CMX info page to estimate how good you did. For bound armaments, you want to have the # be one fourth of your skills, for blast bones it is one third of your skills and for spectral arrow it is one fifth of your skills.
---
Thank you
Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you have any questions or suggestions, feedback or success stories, do reply. I would like to hear your thoughts on this.
3
-
Thanks.
From a tank that used to be DD, gonna digest this and see if I can occasionally resurrect the Magplar.
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