The WoL DPS ranking uses effective DPS, which means your dps goes down even if you do zero damage, so even if you don't have any dots and are not attacking you lose dps.

I do think that to some extent, all the ones on top are cheating, like staying on Lady Deathwhisper, as you said. It'd be impossible to get to the top of the chart if you ran from adds to boss, back to adds. Hell, even just switching targets hurts your damage, due to lack of debuffs on the new targets. Similarly on Blood Queen, all the people at the top are getting the bite first, or nobody really plays that spec. But, well, if that's the case, you couldn't draw any conclusions from the data anyway, since you had so few points.

Not saying your points are invalid, on the contrary. You have to ignore fight mechanics in order to get to the top, or at least work around them. So the numbers don't really mean much in terms of actual usefulness of a certain spec/class.

I think some of the objections above can be taken into account, however not to throw these results out of the window but instead to interpret them differently. For instance, you can be almost sure that the median player in the table for each spec had the best possible conditions going for him, as long as they are reasonable. So for instance the combat rogues up there most likely had hysteria at the time they did their records. Same with warriors. Rogues probably traded tricks. Mages traded their crit thing. Casters probably had power infusion.

So when it comes to comparing classes, you can decide that some classes need to be discounted for the use of tricks and hysteria for instance, but in reality, the tricks would still be traded and hysteria still cast on a warrior or a combat rogue, so the table comparisons would still hold true for inferences made about an arbitrary raid with standard raid buffs and reasonable raid decisions, such as who to use hysteria on.

Looking at a warlock for instance, you can say this is what a warlock is capable of if you give him the right raiding conditions. Now compare that to a shadow priest and make your decisions about raid composition or guild recruitment.

Being a mage I'll comment a bit on arcane mage.

I don't know what the norm is, or if there even is a norm, to how many you bring of each class. Pure math says that you should bring 2,5 players of each class to a 25 man raid. You obviously can't bring half a player so some classes will have 3 members, some 2 members, some 1 member and some might not even be there. All depending on guild preferences, who can come and fight etc.

We usually run with 3 mages. Arcane mage really shines when they get a priest to throw a shield on them because of [spell]44396[/spell]. But there are only so many priests around (albeit other classes can cast other shields to proc it also but I've never seen them do it) so not every mage with the talent will get it every time they can.

And all the players on the top spec list must have had perfect setups, ie they get all the buffs they can and probably doesn't even have to do the dirty work. For example, maybe they ignored the spikes on Lord Marrowgar and figured someone else will do it and just kept up their rotation on the boss. Which is a personal DPS gain in order to flex their e-penis, while slightly penalising the raid by not doing the fight correctly. So, you can't tell all the mages to swap to arcane and expect them to crush everything compared to fire. Albeit arcane is better at the moment than fire, but it doesn't have the 5% crit buff for example and it takes more buffing to really shine.

I guess these kind of lists are interesting, but they shouldn't be taken too seriously. Definitly not as "omg! Let's bring 23 arcane mages, 1 tank and 1 healer. We'll kill the boss in 60 seconds!"

Does it really matter how often they exist? They *can* exist. If people want to be perform at the top level they need to work towards making those conditions happen. I remember when you used to be able to stack as many elixir buffs as you could carry in your bag. There were a lot of comments back then about "well, how often do people really do that?" It doesn't matter.


The subject of the thread is "top performers", not "average schmucks". Yes RNG plays a big factor. Not getting Vile gassed on Festergut or having to keep up a kinetic bomb on Princes makes a difference. But a lot of the key to being a top performer is knowing how to (and being able to) put yourself in a position where you can perform in as near ideal raiding conditions as possible.


With that said, I do think it would be useful to see a variance number. Sometimes you look at the top dps and the number 1 guy is like 20% above the next closest dps.

I'm saying that there might not be 20 players playing in ideal raid conditions in more than just the terrible specs. While they can exist, there's no guarantee that the people making up that graph really are what they are assumed to be-- the best players playing the best they possibly can.

There might not be a single feral druid playing in a top-level DPS-stacking guild, with top-level gear, who plays at a high level, who gets ideal buffs, and reports it publically on WoL. Particularly because the correlation between top-level guilds and public reports is small, and a DPS-stacking guild might not give buffs to a certain spec. Then after that, you still need those players to get "lucky" fights.

There has been some talk about buffs and rng, but there's one equally important factor: adapting the fight length.

For some classes, in order to maximize effective dps, a short fight is perfect, as it increases the impact of heroism/bloodlust and haste or wild magic potions. 30s of bloodlust is a far larger increase of eDPS in a 2 min Marrowgar fight than in a 3 min Marrowgar fight. These classes need to go with the minimum of healers and optimized raid dps.

Other classes need a nice long execute phase to increase eDPS or a good alignment of cooldowns with the fight length.

I believe part of Allev's argument is - you're comparing apples and oranges. Some portion of the top DPS will be mono-focused DPS receiving the full support of the raid. They will receive multiple external cooldowns (Power Infusion, Hysteria, and the like) and provided the ability to stand and DPS a la Patchwerk. Another portion will be people actually performing the fight - doing their particular DPS role with all the fight entails (swapping to adds, movement, etc).

If the proposed purpose is a quick glance to go "This is how a good player could perform", then it will currently fail. Instead you will get a quick glance "this is how 24 other players making one person look good could perform" from many/most of the top spots. Far fewer will be those individuals performing their best without external supports.

I think you guys are really blowing this argument out of proportion. Yes, if you take the median of only the top 20, there might be some distortion from buff stacking. Yes, on trivial content, some raids might use 24 people to support one person so that they'll get a really high number and then upload that log. However all this talk of spamming aoe on phase 1 LK adds instead of the boss, not target swapping etc is somewhat moot, as such meter-padding play as well as obscene cooldown stacking will either (a) extend the fight length, lowering effective dps, or (b) gimp the raid overall (4 blood DKs...) and extend the fight length.

The high variance of using only the top 20 was already discussed and I think extending the top list out to 100 or 200 to get a better picture would be a good idea anyway.

I know that the WMO leaderboards used "damage to bosses" or some such as their official stat so that padding the numbers with aoe wouldn't change rankings, and damage to bosses is an available stat on WoL so a similar strategy could work here if this actually got out of hand, which I really doubt will happen.

/agree . Here's how our guild used these tables in 3.2:

First of all, we made a second set of tables, specific to us, in which we compared everyone's DPS to their "spec potential". These tables looked like this (note the "DPS % vs potential" column):



Note how ordering by the DPS vs potential column is different from the ordering by raw effective DPS. Looking at the bottom of these tables we thought are the people who have most room for improvement.

As you can see that's more of a relative comparison, "who's farthest from the world top20", rather than an absolute "you've got to be in the worldwide top20".

Even so, these tables were not looked at like The Final Answer To All Performance Questions. Officers took into account people's specific assignments, and also week-on-week consistency. Even more, we only measured this on normal modes, not on heroic. Why? Because we also suspected that many top entries were "cheesing the meters", and on normal modes we could tolerate some of that as well (without making it a rule though), just for the purpose of checking everyone's DPS output (which was our problem at the time).

You answered your own hypothetical question, here. This data is useful (and will be more useful as time goes on) as a comparison tool to begin analysis, not a final analysis. From the charts Pashaman linked, a raid leader should be concerned with Foxlius's performance more than Legomancer's. That would not be clear to many people without this data.

Knowing which dps to "audit" is a great time saver, and this data gives a different perspective on relative performance.