It's always like that - DPS depends on the fight length and rest of your raid... Shorter the fight, bigger the dps. Unless, of course, it lasts for just above 3 minutes and you have time for two gargoyles etc. Percentage of length of fight covered by heroism etc...

I just took a look at WoW Meter Online's Player Ranking Scoreboard:

All Classes

The first thing that popped out was how balanced the game seems. All DPS classes have people on those tables. Sure, some fights seem to favor range while others seem to favor melee but the fact that overall the classes all seem competitive is just amazing.

Just DKs

Secondly, when looking at DKs, all specs show up there. And not just all specs but slightly different versions of each spec; for example some blood specs favor necrosis over morbidity or the other way around just like our debates here and they both put up great numbers.

I think more then ever, playing the spec you like will be the best DPS. Although it will be interesting to see if one spec or another is more favored as everyone gears up.

The highest DPS on the list is from Deconstructor, remember that the heart takes 50% extra dmg and makes the DPS go way higher than usual. You should avoid counting DPS from bosses that gives +dmg and such.

Why should you? It's a percentage buff to all damage and doesn't favor any spec.

In a small sample size this will make a big difference. As more and more people complete the encounter and raids get better we should see plateaus for each spec. So while right now the biggest difference between the individual DPS results can be swayed greatly by the overall raid performance, as we get a significant sample size the results should start converging.

In theory

First time poster here, long time reader though. Something you probably should have done by now.

It doesn't make sense to not include it since everyone gets the bonus damage from attacking the heart. Thus nulifying any imbalances that bonus damage would imply. Sure it may not be a good representation of what Single-Target you can expect to push on the average boss but for comparision it is more than sufficient.

In Ulduar every boss favors a spec in some way (or luck with raid strategy and abilities like Ignis) while Deconstructor favors high raid DPS.

Is anyone else getting the feeling that Blizz has designed the bosses in Ulduar to completely counteract excatly what we may be trying to do here? Looks like they sat down and said, lets make a raid with so many different types of bosses that do so many different types of things and put players in so many different types of situations that there will never be any one spec that is miles ahead of another one.

Would make sense since it seems like since BC blizz has been trying to make all aspects of every class usable in any part of the game the player wants to play in. Back in vanilla you had 3 trees and each had their shining points in either pve, pvp, leveling, or whatever. Now, for the most part (there are always exceptions) it seems like any spec can be at least somewhat successful at anything and maybe this is another move further in that direction.

Just speculation but seems to have valid points. Maybe there is no lord of the specs, no one spec to rule them all. (I know it was cheesy but I couldnt resist)

Personally I don't like using encounters with a lot of outbound friendly fire as dps guages. Most combat recording programs/addons include friendly fire in your dps, such as light bombs on XT-002. Although you can easily spot things like this if you take 10 seconds to look into it, it inflates the actual numbers.

For example, if you look at Frigidchaos' WWS breakdown for the 7332 dps he/she did, 5% of it was done by light bombs to the raid. Therefore, he/she was effectively dealing roughly 6965 to the boss, which although is very solid even for the encounter's mechanics, is not the #1 spot on that chart (or at least thats my assumption, since I am for some reason unable to load the parse for Vhalkor).

As another example, one of the DK's my guild is carrying right now due to high competition for decent players was doing 4.4k dps on XT-002, instead of his usual 3k. When I investigated to see what he was doing so much differently, 51% of his dps was done by light bombs (which was both rather entertaining and dissapointing at the same time).

Effectively, this is trivial because it doesnt take a genius to figure that out, but in my mind its just one more way someone who prefers to top the charts rather than kill the boss could grow their ego rather than help kill the boss.

I'd suggest adding Ignis to the list if he isn't. Currently there's a way to do Ignis that makes him kinda like Patchwerk with the random little slag pot ordeal. We did him this way tonight, which gave a good Patchwerky feel. It may be altered in the future ( not sure since the old way encouraged stacking heals..), or it may jsut be another effective way of downing him. either way, it gives a good idea of Dk DPS on a stand still target with only a minor randomness factor.

You guys know what would be great? If instead of mindlessly whining about why boss X is a terribly benchmark boss, you put forth some original thought and came up with ideas about which boss we should use as an accurate measure of DPS.

I originally chose XT because I figured it would be the most easily accessible fight early in the instance from which we could get a reasonably reliable single-target benchmark. Yes, it has gimmicks that you can take advantage of, but you know what? So does every damn fight in this instance, so you're just going to have to deal with that. If it really upsets you that much, go do your own analysis somewhere else. You're certainly not contributing anything of value here.