Having a Good User Interface

 A good player must have a good User Interface. The User Interface is the main vehicle for our DPS. King Arthur had his Excalibur; Micheal Schuhacher has his F1 masterpiece car. You can't expect Schumacher to win any races if he was driving a bullock cart. A good UI is necessary if you want to raid well. 

There are some characteristics of a good U that I want to share. 

1.) Keep Important Things near to the center of the screen. 

The logic is obvious. Keep the important things near the place where you look at the most. This prevents you from having tunnel vision where you look at the side of the screen for something else and die because you were standing in a void zone.

For a dps: this means your health/mana and dot timers.
For a healer: this means your healer raid frames

2.)You must have a good cast bar. 

Don't use the default Blizzard one. I will elaborate more on this in a separate post. A good cast bar must have two things: 

• Show Damage Ticks 
• Show Latency/Lag

I highly recommend Quartz

3.) It must have in-built reminders to tell you when your cooldowns are ready!! 

 I never ever miss a dps cooldown ever because I have reminders for all of them. The one that I use is Weakauras. It is very configurable. Basically, when your cooldown, Dark Soul for example, is ready, it flashes "DARK SOUL" on your screen and plays a sound. Some sample graphics from WeakAuras are shown below: 

Beginner Tip 
This can be used to track Boss Abilities as well. If you always die to a particular boss ability, you can set it to play a loud sound or flash a graphic on your screen to remind you. 

This can also be used to track if your health is low. For example, set it to show: "HEAL UP!" when your health is low so that you can use your defensive cooldowns.

4.) You must have a Dot Timer that can track dots on two targets

This is very important for Warlocks because we often have to keep our dots up on a secondary target. For example, Celestial Protectors from Elegon, Stone Guards Boss, Council of Elders, Wind Lord, Garalon, Horridon, etc. 

Its not productive to keep on switching back and forth your two targets to apply dots. This is how it is done. 

Put your secondary target as a focus target by typing /focus 

Use this macro to cast spells on it. 
/cast [modifier:alt, target=focus] Corruption
/cast [nomodifier:alt] Corruption

Basically, when you press down "Alt" it casts Corruption on the Focus Target, when you don't press "Alt", it casts Corruption on the Main Target. You don't have to click on the second target to cast dots on it. 

5.) You must track your Procs, your Proc Cooldowns and the power of your Dots. 

This can be done through Weakauras for the Procs and Cooldowns and Affdots for the Dot Power. This is the general idea. When I have a lot of powerful procs (Bloodlust, Dark Soul, etc), I want to keep them on my dots for as long as possible. When I have poor dots with no buffs, I want to replace them as fast as possible with heavily buffed dots. 

Tracking Dot Power
From the screenshot above, the Green and Red Box belong to Affdots. 
Example: Recasting Corruption and Agony will give make my Dots hit for more than twice as hard (209). Recasting UA will have negligible impact. 

Advanced Tip: I want to refresh my dots when a LOT of my buffs are up. I don't want to refresh my dots when only ONE buff is up (Not value for money). So I track their cooldowns. Look at the screenshot above, My haste buff will come in about 38 seconds, my intellect buff in 36 seconds. I will wait for BOTH of them to come in before I refresh my dots.  

When to refresh Dots

This is a picture of my dots from Weak Auras. Bascially it shows that my Red Buff, my Blue Buff and my Green Buff are going to expire soon. 

This is exactly when I will refresh ALL my dots with Soul Swap (Soul Burn). By choosing to recast dots at this point, I get to keep the benefits of the Red, Blue and Green Buff in my dots for a longer period of time. Even though the proc buffs are gone, their power remains in my dots.

6.) Recount DPS Meter and Omen Threat Meter

I am mentioning both of these together because I "combine" them into one. I overlap them on top of each other. 

Set Recount to Autohide In Combat 
Set Omen to Show Only when in Combat. 

This means that when you are fighting the boss, you see only the Threat Meter. When the boss is dead, the DPS meter magically appears. Don't ever stare at the DPS meter during a boss fight because its pointless and will probably get you killed in a void zone.

7.) Name Plate Addon that shows Dots

I use TidyPlate. It shows dots on all my targets so that I know when to refresh them. 

Photo of my UI