There are many things that can be a detriment to a gamer's performance in a raiding situation, and this article is aimed at anyone who gets lagspikes, don't know why they don't do more damage in their current gear, get game freeze moments and any other misshap that may happen to a person or their machine during a raid encounter.

I will list as many reasons as I know of that may result in poor performance and hopefully it will help people out . Also I'm not saying this is a definitive listing, so dont have a go if I forget something.

1. Latency (Lag) ...

This can be a huge performance inhibitor and can be virtually eliminated with the use of addons, taking the definition from a trusty webby. In networking, the amount of time it takes a packet to travel from source to destination. Together, latency and bandwidth define the speed and capacity of a network. (source The definition of lag) .

The most successful method of latency combat I have found within World of Warcraft is Quartz. This is a casting bar addon, which shows you how much latency you have, thus lets you time your casts with lag so you do not have time not casting (you would be surprised how much more time on target you will have if you take latency into account).

Another way to combat latency is to get a faster internet connection though this may not always help.

Also, you could buy a gaming NIC (network interface card) these can be a bit pricey but according to reviews on websites such as toms hardware these devices can give a good amount of stability to a connection.

And please please please, don't download torrents or large files, stream huge video or anything else that may tax your connection while playing.

2. Game Freeze ...

Have you ever had a moment when you are just casting a spell, and the whole game locks up for 10 seconds or more? This is game freeze or a lockup, and generally it occurs because of hard drive activity (in MMOs especially) because MMO clients tend to be on the rather large size  (my install is currently weighing in at a whopping 14Gb).

To combat game freeze you can do a host of things, such as making sure that your hard drive is defragmented on a regular basis, turn off all un-needed programs (especially virus scanners and malware protectors as these cause a lot of disk activity and you are in very little danger of a virus attack if you are connected to nothing but WoW) chat clients (MSN, Yahoo, Trillian etc) and anything else that you are not using at the time, and don't try and render those Maya scenes while raiding cause you will only be asking for trouble

3. Talents ...

There is not really anything more important to your DPS/Heals/Tankage then your talent points, having 1 or 2 misplaced points can be a massive performance drain, I won't go through every single talent spec in this article, in fact I wont even do one, but there are plenty of places to go to look for ideas, I have generally found wowwiki to be a fairly good baseline for talent specs, though I don't copy and paste them exactly and I like to read each and every box and try and compliment each talent with the next, if you are no good at this sort of thing then by all means plagiarise away .

But also be aware that many PvP talent builds are not always that good in PvE (raiding) so always come prepared with a decent PvE spec. And there is absolutly nothing wrong with sacrificing a little bit of personal DPS/HPS/TPS in favor of giving the whole raid a nice buff on damage or what have you (it's not all about the vanity meters you know!)

4. Buff foods and flasks and hit rating and other miscellaneous things.

Buff foods and flasks / elixirs are a no brainer really, and should never be avoided. They can tip the scales between good and excellent DPS/HPS/TPS (though not TPS so much). Even if they only add an extra 10 DPS to you, that gives an extra 2,400 damage to the average boss fight (taken as 4 minutes) with 7 people thats 16,800 damage over the fight. That could easily prevent a 1% wipe (granted the average flask and buff will add considerably more than 10 DPS).

Hit rating is an often altogether underrated stat which people don't seem to bother with unless they "have" to. But put it this way, if you can't be bothered to get within 1% of the hit cap, you don't have the dedication to raid. It is the number one damage increasing stat point for point over anything without exception for a raiding dps character. Take this for example:

If your frostbolt did 1,000 damage (again making up numbers for ease of math) and you cast 100 of them over a boss fight with no hit rating. The stats say you will miss 17% of the time though in truth this can be higher or lower depending on luck but we will stick with 17% and let's say your crit rating is 30% and you normally crit for around 3,000. You would be missing out on 29,000 damage over the course of a fight, that,s not small potatoes.

I'm not even going to touch on gear in this article as gear comes and goes and is easy to build up with the craftables and BoEs that infest the AH.

Minimum numbers for raiding is for another article though there should be ample information on this on the internet.

5. Concentration ...

Now this can be the biggest performance inhibitor. If you can't hold your concentration tight for the length of a boss fight (normally 4 minutes ish) and not daydream about the loot that's going to drop or roll a quick ciggy in the middle of the fight playing one-handed while talking to the wife about the shopping, then maybe you shouldn't have signed up for raiding. When you don't give all of your concentration to the job at hand you are letting 9 other people down, not just for those 4 minutes, but for the time they have to take for getting gold for repairs, replacing buff food, reagents for buffs, the time it takes to sit and eat and drink up, and everyone to faff around and going for bio breaks, casting buffs and running back to the boss. You would be surprised at how much total time you have wasted and it is easy to say "well, the other 9 people will do their jobs". Well, what if another person goofs off or someone asks you to do a boss critical job (look at Ignis) and you didn't hear. Raiding is all about working for a higher goal as a close knit team with everyone doing their best to take down the big nasties and lacking concentration is probably the biggest raid killer of every other thing I have listed.

What can we do to combat lack of concentration? Go to the loo before the raid starts, have a big bottle of diluted squash or coke or something near where you play, have a smoke while summons are going on (if you need to leave the room to smoke that is), unplug your phone and get someone else in the house (if there is anyone that is) to keep an ear out for the front door (and if you are home alone just ignore the front door, if its important they can wait a couple of minutes), turn off the telly (or if you have a laptop, go play in a quiet room). All common sense, and I'm sure most people do most of these things, I know I do.

Well, that's about all I have to offer, and I hope some of this will help people with any of the problems I have listed, and thanks for reading.