I often find myself trying to get my head wrapped around the numbers of wow. To me there's something calming about crunching numbers, maybe it's because 1+1 will always be two. Anyways, Recently I was in a "heated conversation" with some friends over class dps outputs, which left me searching the log sites to see what classes are doing what damage in TOC 25 both normal and heroic.

I saw these numbers, and couldn’t help but feel as though they can’t be right, and with the way the systems work, it'd be very easy to "pad your stats" as it were, given they record raw damage, not raw damage done under normal play. What I mean by this is it felt as though a lot of them were logs posted of fights where people were throwing extra dots on trash, or factoring in AoE on fights like Jaraxxus. We all know that spreadsheets will tell you x class in y gear will do z dps, but they don't take into account the human factor, and are at best, your dps to strive for but with the complexity of fights are often unrealistic goals.

That said, I thought to bring this question to the minds of all reaches of the game, top raiding guilds, and "we do it for fun" alike. Assuming ideal raid synergy, every buff, every debuff, what do you find the average top dps to be within a raid? Do you find the numbers at the bottom of the post to be a fair assessment of the current contents "top tier dps" for their classes, or just an overly inflated average thrown off by people's own desire to be number one? Using EJ's own logs and Premonition's last posted log as a comparison, these numbers seem to be way off, yet most I see are similar. Keeping in mind these assume best gear, or near best gear, for ALL members.

This thread can't possibly go anywhere good.