Help me improve my dps

So, a guild mate showed me the raid training golem dummy thing last night. He said my dps was pretty bad, so I want to know where to focus on improving. The settings were no buffs or debuffs, I didn’t use consumables, and my dps was about 7750. I know full buff theoretical is like 30k+, but have no clue what unbuffed should be. Should I be like 15k unbuffed? 20?!? 25?!?!?!

I’m a staff Elementalist using Tempest. The build came from metabattle. So, where is the most improvement to be had for me?

• Build: I know weaver is supposed to be better than tempest. Should I drop everything else, focus on getting hero points, and learn Weaver?
• Rotation: I know I’m not perfect, and it slowly improves as I play, but should I declare an emergency, stop worrying about gear, and hyper focus on tightening it up? Should I not wait for a #1 ability cast to finish before using other abilities?
• Gear: I have 3 ascended armor, 3 exotic, an ascended staff, all berserker/zojja. My trinkets suck. I have one berserker ascended earring, and everything else is a work in progress. I have two ascended toughness/power/ferocity rings, an ascended power/precision, vitality/ferocity amulet, a rare berserker back, a rare berserker earring. I’m working on winter berries and low level fractals to get this fixed, but should I panic and focus on fixing this faster?
• Mob attention: how do mobs pick who to attack? I find myself getting targeted a lot (can compare to my wife easily). I’ve learned to deal with it, but it prevents me from using my 5 skill, forces me into water and even not facing mobs at times, so must be taking a toll on dps as well. This wouldn’t cause major golem dummy issues, but I know is an area I can potentially improve since I’m even using the run speed/blind ability to help me stay alive.
• Profession: do I just need an easier profession because I suck too much? I’m fine with being told that as I just picked Elementalist because I was told it dies easiest, so I figured I would learn to survive quicker on it. I have no attachment to staying Elementalist. If I should try something easier, what is a good choice?

Oh, I forgot to mention I am trying to be ready for fractals. So far, I have done only tier 1 fractals with guild mates who could carry me the whole time even if I did nothing.

I would like to use LFG for fractals so I can do dailies more reliably, move onto tier 2, eventually 3 and 4, etc. I know MMO players have a tendency to be fairly hostile when someone isn’t meeting expectations, so I am trying to make sure I am doing well enough to meet expectations in LFG before starting to join groups with total strangers.

(I’m not sure if the original post sounded like I was trying to raid already, or if raiding has different performance expectations)

Weaver is more desirable but there's nothing wrong with Tempest and if you're pugging (not playing in premade groups), Tempest is arguably better. As for gear, just keep working on it. It's better to start with ascended trinkets and weapons before moving on to armor, but you can't change what has already been done. As for your dps without buffs and food, who cares? If you're doing buffs and food, then I'd be worried. Dps checks are really only needed for raids anyway, but keep practicing. Tempest and Weaver have more challenging rotations and can lose quite a bit of dps if you mess up.

I've noticed that quite a bit of groups like eles if no one has toughness. Not sure why.

Well, tempest is the top DPSer but it's also one of, if not the hardest class to get top DPS due to really intricate rotations.If that's your first class, its normal that you won't be getting great numbers. You'll need practice, a lot of it.Also food and the right buffs do make a HUGE difference in your numbers.Also, even if you hit 40k in the golem, if you can't translate that into actual gameplay it'll be useless.I'd say try your best and improve.

@"Richard.1079" said:So, a guild mate showed me the raid training golem dummy thing last night. He said my dps was pretty bad, so I want to know where to focus on improving. The settings were no buffs or debuffs, I didn’t use consumables, and my dps was about 7750. I know full buff theoretical is like 30k+, but have no clue what unbuffed should be. Should I be like 15k unbuffed? 20?!? 25?!?!?!

Not sure.I’m a staff Elementalist using Tempest. The build came from metabattle. So, where is the most improvement to be had for me?

• Build: I know weaver is supposed to be better than tempest. Should I drop everything else, focus on getting hero points, and learn Weaver?Tempest works just as good, weaver is slightly better, but tempest is arguably better for survivability.

• Rotation: I know I’m not perfect, and it slowly improves as I play, but should I declare an emergency, stop worrying about gear, and hyper focus on tightening it up? Should I not wait for a #1 ability cast to finish before using other abilities?Well, with better gear, and a half-decent rotation you'll be hitting decent damage.

• Gear: I have 3 ascended armor, 3 exotic, an ascended staff, all berserker/zojja. My trinkets suck. I have one berserker ascended earring, and everything else is a work in progress. I have two ascended toughness/power/ferocity rings, an ascended power/precision, vitality/ferocity amulet, a rare berserker back, a rare berserker earring. I’m working on winter berries and low level fractals to get this fixed, but should I panic and focus on fixing this faster?Farming those winter berries with multiple characters will get you ascended trinkets quite fast. Also eventually you'll need Full ascended for fractals to be actually rewarding/difficult. I mean until you hit upper T3 or T4 fractals, you can get away without food or even decent gear, damage, whatever, they're just that easy.

• Mob attention: how do mobs pick who to attack? I find myself getting targeted a lot (can compare to my wife easily). I’ve learned to deal with it, but it prevents me from using my 5 skill, forces me into water and even not facing mobs at times, so must be taking a toll on dps as well. This wouldn’t cause major golem dummy issues, but I know is an area I can potentially improve since I’m even using the run speed/blind ability to help me stay alive.Well, if no one else is targeting them, they'll target you. Otherwise, in most cases they'll go for the person with the most toughness. Others will randomly switch.

• Profession: do I just need an easier profession because I suck too much? I’m fine with being told that as I just picked Elementalist because I was told it dies easiest, so I figured I would learn to survive quicker on it. I have no attachment to staying Elementalist. If I should try something easier, what is a good choice?Guardian/Dragonhunter is really easy to pick out and has a very easy rotation for decent damage. I can easily get top DPS in raids and fractals (outside major bosses where condi gets ahead) without even doing the full intricate rotation. It's just really bursty and can get most of it's DPS from 4 skills. Which is also good for actual "live" situations outside the golem, because that simplicity allows you to adapt better to situations.

As others have said, it's down to practice more than anything else. For me personally, I find the target golem to be of limited use. With enough practice any idiot can put out good dps onto a golem which doesn't fight back or force you to move. But the main difference between the good players and the bad ones is the good players can keep their dps consistent on many different encounters. Once you have a basic handle on your rotation I would practice in t1 fractals instead. The thing about dps rotations is you are training your fingers as much as your brain. Ask any top dps player and they will tell you that they don't even think about the keys they are pressing in their rotation. Their fingers just do the movements automatically. Every time you need to think about what button to press next you are slowing yourself down so you need to train your fingers to be able to do the rotation without you thinking about it. This has the added bonus of giving your brain more time to think about the specific encounters rather than what keys to press. As a result your survivability will naturally improve as well. You will improve, it will just take time.

There's a good way to test your muscle memory to see how good it is. Do your dps rotation on the target golem while talking to someone (either irl or over voice comms). If you can keep your dps rotation going while talking to someone else, that is a good indication that your muscle memory is working. This is very important because in a raid environment you are not only responsible for your own survival but you may be needed to call out information over voice comms. Obviously you can't do this effectively unless you can do your dps rotation without thinking about it, so train those fingers as much as you train your brain.

As for your build and rotation itself, you are best asking on the elementalist subforum for that. They will be able to help you finetune to increase your dps more.