Don't stand in the fire!

Honestly people. If you can manage to do this one thing and one thing only, that already makes you better than 50% of the players in wow.

It took me a while to learn this important fact: if you stand in something, 99% of the time it hurts you. Back when I was a noob I stood in all sorts of things - poison pools, fire, lava, void zones, ominous circles that are surely a sign that something will fall on you. I didn't know better, and to be honest I rarely ever noticed what was under my feet. I was too busy looking at my DPS and looking at my next cooldown.

When I began raiding was when the concept of moving out of fire was drilled into my head by the raid leader screaming "GET OUT OF THE FIRE" several times over the course of a boss fight. Because in dungeons, you can still stand in fire and not die. The healer will heal you through it, or you might just die and wonder what happened. It's not until you hear a 17 year old nerdraging at you over vent that you really get it. Fire is bad, don't stand in it.

The most dangerous thing that can happen to you in a fight is getting tunnel vision. God knows I've wiped my share of raid bosses by getting too excited about using my cooldown, too excited about seeing my DPS climb up on recount, too excited about nearing the last 10% of the bosses' HP, too excited about DPSing hard to pay attention to anything else. And before I realized it, I was dead, or worse yet, I had killed the raid by standing in some kind of explosion.

This is what really separates a noob from a quality player. A noob only cares about DPS. A noob only looks at the number and only cares who did the most damage. A noob will constantly link recount info and /flex, never mind that fact that he drained the healer's mana completely by ignoring fire circles and poison pools. A noob doesn't even realize how bad he is for standing in all sorts of baddie pools of bad.

A quality player on the other hand, is always vigilant and aware. A quality raider knows where he should be and where he shouldn't, when he should re-position and when he needs to step around a fire patch to get there. A quality raider is watching when the next poison pool will drop and watching his feet. A quality raider knows that he's contributing his best to the team not when his DPS is amazingly high, but when he doesn't take avoidable damage, gets the interrupts, and brings down the boss without anyone dying or triggering a heart attack from the healers. A quality raider has flawless situational awareness.

Now that's not to say that I'm the latter. Far from it, I still get tunnel visioned from time to time and stand in the bad. But usually after one or two deaths I get it, and I'm able to focus again. I could care less that everyone is out-dpsing me. If that hunter pulling 25k dies halfway through the fight and I stay alive while pulling 18k through the whole fight, I've won.

As the levels get higher and dungeons and raids get tougher and tougher, it's not so much about killing things as much as staying alive. Things will die sooner or later, but everyone has to stay alive long enough to make that happen. Unless you're dealing with a strict enrage timer (which is most often just a gear check anyways), survival trumps DPS. A dead DPS is useless to the group. That scrappy guy who's pulling 8k but never taking a tick of poison and interrupting like clockwork, that's the guy you want in your raid.

I feel like a broken record but I see so many stupid DPS who refuse to strafe two yards to avoid fire. I didn't notice it so much until I started playing a healer, and it would send me into a rage spiral to see dumbass DPS just standing in bubbling poison or a ground tremor. Sure, I could heal them, but that is effectively just me carrying a bad player. Once I get into heroics I'll be too busy doing triage healing to be topping off every bad player who wants to stand in fire.

Just to drive my point home (not that I think I really need to, it's just fun to flex my wow knowledge), here is a list of all the times where standing in something is bad (and can kill you!) in cataclysm. I'm sure there's many more but this is all I can muster off the top of my head:

Almost every boss in ZA/ZG has a ground mechanic:
High Priest Venoxis - breath of hethiss, poison maze
Bloodlord Mandokir - devastating slam
High Priestess Kil'nara - wave of agony
Zanzil - zanzil fire
Jindo the Godbreaker - shadow spike
Akil'zon - lightning cloud
Jan'alai - fire bombs, flame breath
Hex Lord Malacrass - D&D, consecrate

Tier11 raids:
Omnotron Defense System - fire, poison, arcane pools
Atramedes - fire, sonic rings
Nefarian - um, how about that thing where the entire room FILL WITH LAVA
Valiona & Theralion - twilight swirls, twilight fire, twilight meteor
Ascendant Council - fire pools, glaciate patches, ground/air debuff mechanic
Cho'gall - that black shit that makes you puke if you stand in it, yeah, that thing. It hurts.

And of course, Firelands:
Shannox - immolation traps, crystalline traps, ring of fire
Rhyolith - fire pizza of doom!
Alysrazor - Swirling fire tornadoes of death, brushfire, worms' firebreath
Majordomo - seeds of fire
Ragnaros - Sulfuron smash, engulfing flames, magma traps

The mother of all "don't stand in that shit" mechanics has got to be the lich king's defile. It's probably the single reason why it took the top guild on my server a month to down heroic 25man LK. The damning thing about defile is that the longer you stand in it, the bigger it gets and the more damage it does. If you don't move out of it literally the moment it happens, you'll find that it's covering the entire little platform your raid is standing in and everyone is dead.

But seriously folks, just watch your damn feet!