A year ago, I started the "Sustained DPS" thread. It came right after our first Patchwerk kill, as I started thinking about what DMs on Patchwerk looked like, and how "pure" a test of different players', classes', and specs' raw DPS potential the fight was. I wondered what other guilds' DMs looked like. Over time, it became a useful tool for guilds to compare against each other as a benchmark and and try to figure out how they measured up, and where there was room for improvement.
In conjunction with the Armory, it was a useful to tool to look up the specs/gear of the people you saw dominating other guilds' DMs. It became quickly apparent that 10/48/3 was THE mage spec, for example, and that tailors were the ones dominating early DMs and continuing to perform strongly even through the present date.
However, the old Sustained DPS thread is now a mishmash of random screenshots, and a simple DM seems wholly inadequate for real analysis or learning. It doesn't say what group makeups were, whether players died early, whether they had specific roles that enhanced (AoE) or detracted from (CC) their DPS, and so forth. The fact that Rogue A does 950 DPS and Rogue B does 650 doesn't necessarily mean A's spec, gear, or skill are superior to B's if A was on the boss fulltime in a group with an enhancement shaman while B was running around interrupting adds without the same group support.
And so, we have this thread. WoW Web Stats (available at
http://lossendil.fr/serendipity/ ) is an incredible tool. It offers a real look at the skill breakdowns, target selection, and crucially, the actions taken by a given player (was someone high DPS but sloppy about maximizing their DPS time? is a DPS difference explained not by gear but by the fact that one player got off 10 more casts of the same spell than another player, under the same conditions? etc.). A lot of guilds that I see with weak DPS have uniformly weak DPS, and I think the lack of contrast is what creates the problem. The lack of a reference point. If you had a mage that could do 900+ DPS every fight, you wouldn't have all your other mages struggling to break 600, because they'd be dominated so thoroughly on DMs that it would force them to say "wow, I'm really not doing this right, let me see what HE's doing, and copy it." But if there is no one to copy, everyone just kind of continues merrily along their way, not realizing their inefficiency.
There is a thread in the UI forum discussing technical aspects of WWS:
Getting the most out of WoW Web Stats
This thread is for posting your own hosted (locally or at lossendil) WWS parses of fights, either as examples, but also hopefully in the context of asking for advice. I'd like this to be a thread where people can offer constructive criticism to help guilds out, while also learning in the process.
One word: Do not post sloppy WWS parses that include trash clearing, multiple boss attempts in one unseparated log, or otherwise obfuscate what really happened. They'll be deleted as they aren't constructive. Go to the UI forum thread and ask there if you need help getting a good parse.
And just to kick this off, here are a couple of random parses:
Gruul (5/24), with some DPS still sporting flasks from Vashj:
http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=p635hap2anm3c
Morogrim (4/24), pre 2.1, largely unbuffed:
http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=sw54zrlv2dwbw