DPS Basics

What is DPS?

• "Damage per second (DPS or dps) is a measure of the damage dealt by a person or group over one second. DPS is a more practical measure of damage output than plain damage, as it allows characters of differing levels and classes to effectively compare their damage output." - WoWWiki.Fandom

How to maximize DPS?

• It is a simple thing: Maximize the number of spell casts/globals and Maximize damage with each spell/ability.

How to maximize the number of spell casts/globals?

• 1 - You should be 2 'steps' ahead in mind. It means, when you start to cast a spell you have to know what the next 2 spells are going to be! This requires you to know the basic 'rotation' of your class!! This also requires practice!

• 2 - Use (at least the most important spells) on spammable, comfortable keybinds! You will have to spam keybinds really quickly to eliminate latency, latency variation and human error. You should be able to use all your keybinds without looking, just from muscle memory, and be able to spam really fast with the highest frequency possible. (You wouldn't believe how important fast keyspamming is until you try and get used to it!!!)(Spellqueuewindow can come handy at this question but this feature is not available in WOTLK, except for Tauri WoW server (.spellqueuewindow x).) Also an addon called SnowfallKeyPress is strongly recommended! (You will be able to use your abilities on keypress instead of release that makes your actions faster!)
• 3 - On boss fights you have to always move and you have to exactly know how to move as little as you can (but of course do not die because you were greedy). Plan your movement on each boss. While moving use instant cast abilities (such as Shadowflame or Life Tap up - get on low mana by the time you must move).
  

How to maximize damage with each spell/ability?

• 1 - Natural increase by obtaining better gear.
• 2 - Overlap your cooldowns, trinket procs and potions, enchants. To do so, you will have to have addons to monitor the internal cooldown (or cooldown) of your trinkets and for instance the tailoring cloak enchant, track the cooldown timers. Ideally you should not react to your trinket proc but use your dps increasing cooldowns right when your trinkets internal cooldown wears off. This is crucial, you want to use all your cooldowns and procs for the longest time overlapped. (Use Metamorphosis ideally 1 sec before procs, not after you got the procs! You will lose precious seconds with not overlapped proc+CD which means less DPS.)
  Illustration of CD stacking: (Bottom of this page). Next to it there's an illustration of trinket proc (with 10 sec uptime and 45 sec iCD) + cloak enchant (with 15 sec uptime and 60 sec iCD) and Metamorphosis with 2.4 mins CD (2/3 talent on Nemesis) and how they could be stacked. A great example of waiting on Metamorphosis is when the fight is 04:05 long! In this case you would not hit your second CD on 2.4 minutes but wait for next double proc at around 03:49... (But also in this case you would want to use Metamorphosis 30 seconds before the end of the fight to use the whole length of the CD!)
• 3 - You should know the fight if there are any DPS increasing factors on boss fights (such as sparks on Malygos, or Staggered Daze on Icehowl etc..) because stacking these with your cooldowns (or also with procs if possible) will make you do enormous amount of DPS!
• 4 - Know when Bloodlust/Heroism comes. You should stack as many of your cooldowns as possible (and procs if possible) for this period of the fight.
  

How can I do all of these at once?

• 1 - It is not possible to learn all this and use all this at once. First make your user interface clean and transparent for yourself, make your keybinds comfortable for you, set up your addons to be able to track everything you will need during raids. WeakAuras, TellMeWhen are great addons to track your procs, DoT's and such, and I personally use Heatsink to track your CD's and internal CD's.
• 2 - Practice. Yes, simply go and fight with target dummies. Learn how you can reach the best Burst DPS, learn your opener moves. Also do longer fight practices try to beat your bests on dummy. Don't forget to learn DPS'ing more than one mobs as in raids you will need to face multiple targets on many of the bosses. Usually I look up DBM to see how long each fight was in raid and practice on dummies for those lengths (ofc not 10 minutes ones) to see exactly how I could manage my cooldowns, potions and procs.