Wrote this up for my guildies, thought y'all may appreciate it as well.
Addons. Everyone knows about them. For the uninitiated, Addons are not just a shaman that raids with us, they're an integral part of maximizing your raid performance. The best addons for your class/spec may vary but at the very least,
DBM, a unit frames addon (
xPerl,
Pitbull, etc),
Omen threat meters,
Recount DPS meters, and assorted class timers (
Event Horizon,
ForteXorcist) all provide excellent utility for the raider.
What do I use? I've raided as a Disc Priest and a Combat Rogue. When I was priesting, I was never a fan of grid, instead preferring to use mouseover macros for a core set of spells and xPerl Unit Frames. There are other addons out there for a healer,
VuhDo,
Gridand
Healbot I've heard all bandied about amongst the chat panels. Not being of a healy persuasion anymore, I can't say which is best for you. Xperl allowed me to see the buffs and debuffs on my target (Being mostly a single target healer, this was sufficient for me), and provided timers on my DoTs, HoTs, and weakened soul. Again, YMMV on this front. To be honest, I never really used DBM much, as I didn't feel that it provided anything useful to me, after all, I'm ranged... there's no fires for me to stand in.
As a rogue, my thinking had to change. PBAE effects and other (insert color here) stuff on the ground now affected me. And, I also have a tendency to tunnelvision a mob. The first thing I did was downloaded
DBM.
Deadly Boss Mods is an addon that I have found to be invaluable on a raid. Aside from the warnings to "Hey! Get out of the Fire Noob!", there are a group of boss timers that tell you about when the next raid event is going to happen. This enables you to get out of the way when something's gonna happen, time your cooldowns for a phase where you can have full use of them (Burrow phases on worms, shield phases on twins, burrow phases on Anub, etc). There's no fun in burning a 3 min C/D only to have the boss run away from you for the duration of that c/d. So,
DBM showing you that Anub has 4 seconds left till he burrows... might not be the best time to pop heroism, adrenaline rush, etc.
DBM is far more useful than just a fire avoidance tool.
A couple of other rogue specific addons I use are called
Energy Watch Reborn, and
Combo Points Redux. These give me a nice movable yellow bar, and yellow and green dots that I can put right in my line of sight so I have quick access to my current energy, combo points, and deadly poison stacks. (I'll post pics when I get home.). The default Blizzard UI is not set up for optimal information parsing. To have your eyes travel from one corner of the screen, to the bottom, back to the center isn't ergonomically efficient. I want to optimize my display area, and maximize the information that I take in so I can better focus on what's going on around me.
It *sounds* counter productive... but its really not. The human eye will generally be able to focus on a relatively narrow field of vision. To maximize information input, the most pertinent information needs to be in that field of view to minimize eye travel. The quicker you can assimilate what's going on, the more aware you can be, and the less likely you will be to die in one of the aforementioned fires.
A word on
Omen. We all know Isley and Aurik are gods among players. They both have a crapton of threat on tap and we rarely ever need to worry about pulling threat, right? Well, yes and no. The goal is to pull as much DPS as humanly possible and *not* pull threat. So, a threat meter will show you how much overhead you have before Gormok turns and whups your *** for 50k. If you're not throwing everything you have at these mobs and riding the fine line between inspecting the floorboards and putting on a shiny new purple. Yes, Blizz put in a threat meter. It sucks though.
Omen is better.
Recount. I'm a DPS whore. I love seeing big shiny yellow numbers when I hit things. I like throwing out reliable numbers on a fight and being on top of the dps meters at the end of the night. (Hey, it happens. Don't laugh Epidemic
Hax... :p).
Recount has its purposes, and DPS meters are a good thing. However, not for the reason you might think. See, during the fight, DPS meters really aren't that important. You should already be maximizing your rotation, blowing C/Ds, trinkets, and all that other good stuff on the boss mobs, and a DPS meter isn't really going to help with that. Recount is useful mostly for the way it can help you see where you are with your DPS, and comparing it to other similarly geared and specced members of your class. If rogue A is doing 4k, and rogue Y is doing 6k, you can take a look at your gear and spec and see why.
Recount tells you *if* something is wrong. Not *what* is wrong. Think of it as a Check Engine light. If your DPS is low, you know about it because of recount, but you don't know *why* its low. But as GI Joe said... Knowing is half the battle.
As a disc priest, I didn't really have to worry about DoT timers, self buff timers, etc. xPerl showed me if WS was up, and how long renew was still gonna tick for. As a rogue, I had to watch SnD, Rupture, HfB(until I dumped Mut.. bleh.), so I needed a way to quickly reference the buffs I had up on myself. Enter
ForteXorcist. FX will place a set of diminishing bars on your screen that has the name of the buff/dot/debuff and the time remaining. I currently have this set up just above my energy bar and CP bars. Its insanely customizable, and you can set it to ignore anything that's not useful to you. It'll even keep track of things like PRoM bounces remaining, maelstrom weapon stacks, and other things like that. For me, this has allowed me to better maintain my rotation, maximize my cooldowns, and prioritize my energy usage.
Another addon along these lines is called
Event Horizon. This shows a group of bars on your screen that give you a snapshot of dots and spell cooldowns. Basically, it gives you a rolling snapshot at a glance of what's going to drop off in the next 10 seconds or so (I think this is configurable), as well as what cooldowns you will have available in the immediate future. Good for shadow priests, it'll show your dots, mind blast, vamp embrace, and everything you need to know to help you know what's best for casting next to maximize dot/dps uptime.
Something I just downloaded this weekend is
Mik's Scrolling Battle Text. Again, being a DPS junkie, I love the big numbers. This addon will organize all of those numbers and display them to you in a meaningful way. Incoming and outgoing, this is another tool that will assist you in your situational awareness. Triggers and announcements can be configured to let you know when C/Ds are up, when certain abilities like clearcasting or eclipse trigger, etc. Used in combination with DBM, this can be a powerful set of addons. Plus, you get to see pretty numbers. So, bonus.
Yet another addon available is
Power Auras. This is another highly configurable addon (again, not the shaman. He's not that configurable :p) that allows you to create a graphical image to let you know when you have an ability proc. I used this a bit on my DK as its not real clear when killing machine or freezing fog proc. Haven't played with it too much really, but I found it useful for those classes that have crit/hit based procs.
Basically, the idea with addons for a raid are to maximize the information presented to you, and organizing it in a useful manner. If you can keep focused on what's going on in front of you and in your immediate area, you won't have to waste EMCs (eye movement cycles) on transiting the screen from character portrait, target, character buffs/debuffs, action bars, boss mob, raid frames... you see the point here. Enhance what you *need* to see, and eliminate or minimize that which you do not.
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