So you hit 80, you blew out all your fireworks, did a little dance, now let’s get down to the business of really dominating.

If you reached level 80 within a month of the expansion, you’re already setting yourself apart as a DOMINATING player on your server so: Congratulations!

This writer is assuming that anyone who gets to 80 this fast wants to play the end-game content. By end-game content I mean Naxxramas, Vault of Archavon, Chamber of Aspects and Eye of Eternity. That’s nice but before you head in there you might want to get better geared … waaaaaay better geared.

There are many places where this can be done that include:

• Crafting it yourself

• BoE blues (I hope you kissed your lucky rabbit’s foot this morning)

• BoE Epics (You better have all 4 of that Rabbit’s feet!)

• Regular Dungeons (Easiest starting point)

• Heroic Dungeons

• Emblems of Heroism Epic Gear

Then you can think of heading into Nax and other raids to pick up the T7 stuff.

However before you even think about setting foot in there, just how well do you know your stuff? How much DPS can you put out? Have you mastered your spell/abilities rotation? Do you know your Cool Downs?

Well this is your lucky day. As Blizzard would have it they thought it would be a good idea to allow players to test their skills without the gold associated with monumental failures and wipes of under-geared Heroic runs. I introduce to you, the Training Dummy! (In Boss and Elite flavors) It’s kinda like asking Patchwerk to just stand still for a few minutes while you “try something out”.

You can find these training dummies in every capital city for both Horde and Alliance.  They look like, well, dummies, with wooden swords, straw heads and the whole dummy bit as you can see in the screenshot above.  Unfortunately you can’t use them to level weapon skill (boo) but they come in handy for testing your damage rotations.

Along with a solid DPS meter like Recount, that can give you a detailed break down of every single hit you made (or missed), this is the starting point of any serious raider.

First things first. The training Dummy is obviously more useful to DPS classes but Tanks can test use it too. To really DOMINATE you might want to start writing some numbers down on paper or taking screen shots of Recount.

• Try out your spell/abilities rotation as you would normally do and keep track of that number.

• Try out each spell/ability individually and keep track of the numbers

• Add up the individual numbers (DPS) and if they are less then your current “normal” rotation you have some work to do.

• Re-read every description of every spell/ability in your spell book. Don’t think “Oh I know what this does”. Just re-read every spell as if for the first time. You might find yourself saying “Really? … Hummm I wonder if … “ (That’s a good thing)

• Reevaluate your rotation and possibly your Talent spec.

• Rinse and repeat until you fine tune your play style to something suitable.

Bear in mind that in patch 3.0 Blizzard changed so many spells/abilities that their impact on the end-game content has yet to be fully explored.

You see, theorycrafting is something that a lot of people take seriously – very seriously.  It’s not for everybody, but fortunately not everyone has to be good at it.  There are some folks out there who are really good at numbers and they break the game mechanics down to see how things really work.  Since not everyone can look at calculus without going cross-eyed, it’s a really good thing that no matter how complex this stuff is, there is someone out there who can take all that number crunching and break it down to make sense to everyone else.

We’ve done some of this at DYS, but frankly no one person or even team of people can cover theorycrafting for every little aspect of the game.  But there are some good places to start.  More than likely you will find the information staggering and a bit overwhelming at times, so we’ll just give you our favorites.  So, to really DOMINATE, head over to some of the web sites dedicated to high level, end-game content.

Elitist Jerks has something for everyone

Warlocks Den for warlocks (including detailed math of spell mechanics)

Tank Spot for plate wearers, tanks and melee in general.

Dominate Your Server archives (just look in the right hand column)

Take a few hours (Yes … Hours … not minutes … Hours, plural) and read through some of the threads that are up there. Yes it’s time away from WoW but the knowledge you gain here will probably help you far more then the 2 heroics that you didn’t finish because you kept wiping on that last boss.

After you read up on the boards try to see how it applies to you, change things around, go back to the training dummy and try out your theories, see if they hold up or if it only works … in theory.

This is also an excellent way to answer the age-old question … “What’s better “this” or “that”?” If you want a real answer, why not test it out on a boss that doesn’t fight back.

Using this method I was able to raise my Personal DPS by 300 just by changing a few things around and one of our guildies went from 900 to 1400 DPS, just because he now understood the mechanics of his class and it’s inner-workings.

So hit those training dummies before you hit those raid bosses and find out if you are really ready to Dominate!