dps-analysis
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State of DPS in Mists of Pandaria
Mists of Pandaria is well under way, and with patch 5.1 on the horizon. We've now had enough guilds do enough raid clears that we can begin to take a look at the DPS numbers that the classes are putting out and see just where they stand. It might also shed some insight into buffs and nerfs coming on the PTR. As always, we draw our data for the analysis from the wonderful Raidbots.com, which in turn pulls its data from World of Logs, where raiders upload parses of their actual raids. This gives us the absolute best data source that we have access to. These numbers are exactly what thousands and thousands of real raiders are actually capable of putting out in the actual raids, averaged over all of the bosses available. If you'll recall, the DPS spread in Dragon Soul, while not perfect, was actually the closest to balanced we had seen in WoW history. So did Mists of Pandaria improve upon this balance? Or did we end up with boss mechanics and new abilities that widened the gap? The only way to find out is to sort through all the data, and then make pretty graphs out of them.
The state of DPS in early Dragon Soul
Patch 4.3 is well under way with all the buffs and nerfs that came with it -- including the extra 10% AP for melee classes from the raid buff improvement on top of all the class-specific changes. We've now had enough guilds do enough clears of Dragon Soul that we can begin to take a look at the DPS numbers that the classes are putting out and see just where they stand in 4.3. This is also a nice time to take a snapshot of the data, because the rogues do not yet have their legendary weapons, though of course more casters than ever have the 4.2 legendary. As always, we draw our data for the analysis from the wonderful Raidbots.com, which in turn pulls its data from World of Logs, where raiders upload parses of their actual raids. This gives us the absolute best data source that we have access to. These numbers are exactly what thousands and thousands of real raiders are actually capable of putting out in the actual raid, averaged over all of the bosses this tier. So did patch 4.3 bring about a new state of improved balance to the game, or are we going to see more chaos in the DPS spread? The only way to find out is to sort through all the data, and then make pretty graphs out of them. %Gallery-142588%
State of DPS in Firelands
Patch 4.2 is winding to a close, patch 4.3 is on the PTR, and we've recently seen Ghostcrawler (lead systems developer) making some public comments about DPS balance in the Developer Watercooler -- in particular, discussing the increase of the AP buff for melee classes. All of this makes it a great time to take a look at the state of DPS among all of the specs. Of course, we don't have nearly as much data as Blizzard has access to; however, we do have better data than ever before. In particular, the best data source we have comes from raiders who upload raid parses to World of Logs, which then makes these tens of thousands of parses available to all of us. Next, we have Raidbots, a site that automatically parses this data for us, letting us very easily sort through those massive numbers of raid parses. One of the things that I think too many players get caught up on with this data is looking at the rankings -- and I've certainly been guilty of this myself. It's just so easy to look and say "Hey, my class is ranked 10 of the 22 specs." But of course, that's not terribly helpful -- after all, I don't care if I'm ranked 21 if I'm only 50 DPS behind number one. Join me after the cut as we take a look at a different way of examining the data to see how all the DPS specs are performing in Firelands. %Gallery-135598%
The middle of the pack is a fine place to be
When I was a young kid, I was a ball hog. This was most often obvious when I played soccer, when I'd spend entire minutes running the ball down the field in an attempt to score when my teammates were wide open and available. Sometimes, I'd get lucky and score a goal. Most of the time, my unwillingness to pass got me blocked by half the opposing team and earned me a nice, cozy spot on the time-out bench as my coaches tried to instill some sense of being a team player into my young mind. This seems to be a lesson a large number of us playing World of Warcraft missed from our childhood. We may not have a literal ball to hold away from our teammates as we sprint down the field, but we have Recount and our own personal DPS. Last week, I was doing my daily ritual of browsing the official Damage Dealing forums when I came upon a thread about fury warriors. The title of the thread was clearly designed to grab attention, some title along the lines of "Fury Warriors NEED a buff NOW" or something else as startlingly original. The body of the thread was what really got to me, though. It said, paraphrased, "Fury warriors are in a bad place in terms of PvE DPS right now. We're in the middle of the pack in terms of DPS and need to be buffed to be higher."
Totem Talk: Post-patch enhancement shaman still waiting for buffs
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shamans. Rich Maloy lives and breathes enhancement: his main spec is enhance, his off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance and leads the guild Big Crits (Season 2 Ep 06 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. We're now two full weeks into patch 4.0.1 with our new and improved enhancement spec. Improved? Actually, no. Our DPS is only marginally improved over the previous incarnation, while our fellow melee brethren were buffed to the teeth. My rough analysis shows the difference between us and top melee DPS, usually warrior and death knight, has widened significantly since the patch. I'm going to preface all of this analysis by saying that I am not the top enhancement shaman, by far. I play well, I study my class, I optimize my spec, gems, forging, gear and rotations. I don't die to stupid stuff -- well, at least not often! In other words, I try to push my damage without sacrificing myself. Be forewarned that some of these numbers I'm embarrassed to post in such a public manner, and while I'm hardly the benchmark for DPS, I can at least provide a baseline of what your average progression raider's numbers look like. On average across eight of 12 hard-mode fights in ICC (excluding the gimmick fights Gunship, VDW and BQL, and excluding H-LK because we're just now working on him), the top melee DPS was doing 50 percent more damage than me pre-patch and 64 percent more post-patch. I could narrow that gap down to about 15 percent on a standstill fight such as Deathbringer Saurfang, but on high-movement fights such as Sindy, the top melee would do as much as 80 percent more damage than me overall. As much as it pains me to say this, as a raid leader I have to ask the question: Am I dead weight in raids right now? Will level 85 with Unleash Elements bring better output?
ICC DPS analysis by spec
I love numbers. I love facts and statistics, I love looking through them and speculating on the different possible interpretations. As we move into the end of Wrath, I thought it would be a nice time to take a look at everybody's favorite number, DPS, and see how each spec is doing in ICC. But rather than just looking at the top DPS of each spec, I thought it would be more interesting to see where the average DPS for each spec is, across all gear levels, all skill levels -- to get a glimpse of how the average raider is doing. While we don't have access to the DPS of every raider out there, we do have something close, and that something is World of Logs. World of Logs is a combat log analyzer that many raids use to see how to improve their performance. It provides a lot of useful information, far, far more than just DPS, and they also post the top 200 DPS results for each boss and spec. About 30,000 raid parses are uploaded to WoL every week. Miles over at World of Logs was kind enough to spend far too much time writing and running custom scripts to provide me with a massive data dump of information not publicly available that lets us get a pretty good look at where the average raider's DPS is. Join me after the cut as we take a look at both where the average DPS of each spec is in ICC, and where the top DPS of each spec is as well.
