• constantius

Our guild has been working on maximizing Teron dps, and have been reasonably pleased to see our dps climbing by 500-1000 per serious attempt. Everyone is min/maxing their gear, and we're aiming to have 4 optimized groups in the raid (healers sorta screw with 5/5).

However, we're nowhere near 29-34k that the top 30-odd WWS parses seem to be showing. And we're at a loss to explain how some of the numbers are coming up. Sure, killing Teron in 124 seconds helps a ton in terms of RDPS simply because it means over 50% of the fight is spent with some sort of cooldown active, be it bloodlust/heroism, trinkets, haste pots, or drums of battle. However, there's some oddities I was hoping the posters here could help me clear up.

I'm going to use rogues as an example because that's the one that's easiest to see.

From what I can see from armory, these three rogues are almost identical in gearing, excepting that Statch doesn't have a DST (and we mock him daily about that). Same rough weapons (no glaives among the three, Savagery offhand), same gearing (4/5 or 5/5 T6, etc), and from the reading of WWS, it appears they all had the same group setup : feral druid, fury warrior (3/5 BS+), and enhancement shaman (imp WF/SoE).

How then are the *average* white hits for the other two a full 70-90 points higher? We can't explain it.

The boss in the Defiance WWS had 5/5 Sunder Armor, CoReck, and Faerie Fire, as well as an EW from a 1200-agi survival hunter. What else could possibly effect white hits *that* much?

Any input would be welcome. If this is answered somewhere, just point me at it and Heap this post.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Xav

Blood Frenzy?

 

• constantius

Modrack from Juggernaut used Mortal Strike, so one can assume he has Bloody Frenzy. Same for Qumulox from Vis Maior. So assume both parses had 4% extra physical damage done, so on a white hit of 550, that's an extra 22 white dmg. That accounts for some of it. Still missing 50-60 white dmg.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Xav

"Averages" are going to be skewed by more factors than that, and it's kind of harder to explain; I'll bring up a slightly relevant example.

Drow recently posted a WWS log that really broke all previous Gorefiend records by a lot. Later they admitted the used the Darkmoon Faire buff.

Now the fight's already pretty quick, about 3 minutes or so, so with a raid going all out, properly stacked and min maxed, and then adding the Darkmoon Buff on top of it, you're cutting a lot of time off the duration.

Then when you have stuff like clicky trinkets, timers/cooldowns, and Heroism/Bloodlust, they're going to be up for a much greater percentage of the fight than a normal, longer kill.

Thus the DPS gain you have while under the effects of the cooldowns isn't going to be "averaged" or "balanced" out as much because there's a lot less of that "normal" dps time.

So, it's two fold, the raid damage goes up by at least 5-10%, increasing their DPS by a minimum of 10%, and then the fight duration goes down substantially, so the raid DPS goes up even further, for the previous explained reasons.

Example: 2000 DPS normally, 2600 DPS during Heroism. (Or, 1000 hits normally, 1400 hits during cooldowns/consumables popped)(Random numbers)
If the heroism/timers only lasted 30% of the fight's duration, that's going to be averaged in with the other 70% of the fight at the typical levels.
Now, since I don't feel like actually doing the math because I'm lazy, you can see how if the cooldowns were active during say 40 or 50% of the fight, they're going to be averaged in with less of the "normal" stats, so you're seeing even larger numbers in the reported "average" levels.

This might be why the "average" hits are as you say (+AP trinkets, and so forth), and an actual better measure might be to look at the MAX hits and see if there's bigger anomalies there.

 

• constantius

I get that the shorter fight implies higher RDPS. It also explains higher personal dps (like I said above, if you're bloodlusted for 50% of the fight, of course you're going to do higher dps. Any good rogue can peak over 3k dps for 20 seconds when every cooldown is up; some can break 4-5k).

The question is why white hits are so much higher. Which Faire buff were the rogues using? I remember there being +5 (? was it 10)% to a stat, like agility or strength. Was there an AP one as well?

Also, I don't know any rogues who use clicky trinkets; they're all passive chance-on-hit trinkets like [Warp-Spring Coil], [Dragonspine Trophy] and [Ashtongue Talisman of Lethality].

I'll post a comparison of max hits in a sec to see if the pattern persists.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Xav

Everyone just gets the 10% damage buff, which I think is random 1-10% now.

I addressed your question in my explanation: Trinket/timer usage. Bloodlust Brooch, that thing from Zul'Aman, the trinkets from BT that have procs that increase AP/Armor pen, etc. All of those will drastically increase white damage, and if they're up for more of the short duration, they're going to be seeing higher averages.

Warp Spring Coil is an excellent example of something that would really raise an average if it's up for a bigger % of the time in the lower fight due to PPM breakdown and however it works for that.

 

• constantius

Maximum Melee (white) hits:

I agree that uptime is huge on a 2-minute fight, and if you happened to be running DST/WSC, up-time on the WSC is the key determining factor to your average or max white dmg. The procs on ATL and DST aren't going to effect either of those, since they either increase haste (more hits) or crit (higher crit %), but not the white dmg amount or max whites.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Xav

Seems to fall within decent ranges of a benefit of Blood Frenzy paired with very minor gear advantages.

 

• constantius

I'm happy to say 14% is almost precisely the differential, given that the gearing is almost identical. 10% from Faire, 4% from Bloody Frenzy.

Mystery solved. Xav wins.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Whiteknight

Something orthogonal to your question about rogue avg damage.
When I first started looking at guild's parses for teron I noticed something rather odd - some guilds were posting seemingly gigantic rDPS figures that seemed out of proportion to other guilds at similar progression levels.

I eventually tracked it down to a reporting inconsistency - if you report Vengeful Spirit as a pet (as opposed to a mob), your rDPS is approximately 20% higher (obviously depending on how long the fight goes - faster fights it contributes less).

So when comparing different WWS parses, it pays to look at the duration of the kill and check how Vengeful Spirit is recorded.

 

• constantius

If you've seen Manly's sig lately, it references this as well.

The easy way to check seems to be to say that any parse that shows over 5.0 million damage done is inaccurate and should be scrapped. Given that we know the boss' HP, it's pretty easy to see that any extra damage done is completely inconsequential.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Xav

I don't think VM and whoever else you were comparing used Faire, however I haven't asked, I only bothered to be curious about Drow's because of how much of a difference it was; where I've been told personally by members in the guild, as well as a post on EJ here by Cruor that they got the buff.

I'm guessing the max hit differences, being rather small all things considered, are merely the Blood Frenzy + gear differences, it wont take but a few top end and a small amount of AP to fill the rest.

EDIT: Just remembered something else that I can't check because WWS is asking me to login or something weird to view fight details? Whatever, anyway

Were all 3 enh. shamans twisting GoA at some point? A max crit hit with timers with the additional bonus of a GoA totem would provide quite a nice boost to a max hit number.

Second edit: Looks like a big negative on that one, I checked VM's and Statch's and saw no GoA gains on anyone in the melee group, and no performs by the shaman. Sweet.

 

• constantius

I don't believe Wardance was twisting, which likely explains the difference, since an extra 88 agility is enough to boost a rogue's AP high enough to get most of the difference.

And the rest can be explained by the 50 AP differential from Statch's neck/cloak: we've never seen a [Shadowmoon Destroyer's Drape] drop, and only 1 or 2 [Choker of Endless Nightmares].

Edit: WWS is purty now. Too bad the links don't work off the Raid Display pane. Someone forgot to put the extension in. Hopefully fixed soon, as I keep clicking on them by habit.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Whiteknight

Well, technically they're not bugged - there's a lot of bosses for which the parse will list variable amounts of damage due to heals and adds.
The parse should only be scrapped if the damage done *to teron* is larger than 5mil.

However it does mean that there is a significant difference just due to those guilds who decided Vengeful Spirit was a pet and contributed to the fight, and those who thought it was a mob. Reporting it as a mob is technically worse because it's doing damage for your side, however the inconsistency is by far the most damaging problem.

A lot of the top guilds (but not all) report this as a pet - Juggernaut and Drow for example, while guilds like Blood Legion and EJ do not.

 

• constantius

Well, I consider any inaccurate parse in the top 50 as something that should be scrapped. It's just not honest. Counting environment (i.e. the spirits) as part of your *raid* dps isn't an accurate display of what is possible on your own steam. Anything over the 5.0 million mark gets counted toward RDPS, and skews the results by a reasonable amount, sometimes up to 4000+ RDPS (the difference between 1st and 50th).

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Xav

I'm not sure people do it completely on purpose, for example, I know the guy currently doing the uploading for Premo's WWS just installed it because the old person left. He pushes one button at the start, and one at the end, or whatever, then posts it. I could ask him to not count it, however, since a lot of the guild that are counting it as a pet are also doing rather great DPS aside from that anyway, it's still decent to compare sometimes. (Although how would he/we go about not counting it as a pet? I don't know much at all about how WWS works on the client)

Of course it would be nice if, due to Teron Gorefiend currently being the only mildly competitive/entertaining thing in raiding right now from week to week, that all WWS parses on the site were forced into the same guidelines for reporting of events.

 

• constantius

It's pretty easy to fix, even for a neophyte. There's a tab which allows you to parse the log and select all the "actors" and define what they are. You can set which pet belongs to which hunter (not always auto-detected), you can tell the client which names are actually PCs and which are mobs, and you can assign certain totems to certain shamans, if you know for a fact which one belongs to which.

One of the names is Vengeful Spirit, and you can easily set that to Mob instead of Pet. Unassigned pets just get added into RDPS without showing up in any easily found way.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Whiteknight

You change the mob type in the actor's panel from 'Mob' to 'Pet' or vice versa. It remembers this setting across sessions.

I think calling it dishonest is not correct. I can make a solid argument either way. The fact that folk with a track record of rational decision making and a history of clean parses made the decision differently indicates that it's not clear cut.

In fact the spirit really *is* a pet. The player controls it and if they don't take any action, you get no dps from it.


oh, and Xav - I've asked Lossendil on his forum to discard parses for which the damage done to the boss deviated significantly from the norm. I.e. double logging bugs and other kinds of truncated parses indicating a broken parse. The response I got was they're working on it. Obviously it's not entirely an easy thing to figure out given bosses like Anetheron which can heal.

 

Myul

Rensy
Drums of Battle x4

Crookgrin
Drums of Battle x4

Statch
Drums of Battle x0

His WF Proccrate was low, did you see that on logs before? Rensy got 23 WF Proccs (4:36'30 till 4:39'27 ~ 3.0 minutes), Crookgrin 27 WF Proccs (5:03'12 till 5:06'10 ~ 3.0 minutes) and Statch only 23 WF Proccs (6:11'26 till 6:15'09 ~ 3.75 minutes) during the fight.

 

• constantius

Drums do not effect white *damage*, they effect total *number* of white hits. I'm fine with the dps differential, what I wanted to know was why the *hits* were so different. Xav did a great job of figuring it out.

The difference in % of WF attacks will be part of the difference, you're right, since every WF attack is +AP, which means it should hit harder. The enh shaman may have died on the parse I linked, I'm not sure. I'll look into that.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Valen

Blade of Infamy has a weapon range of 182 - 339. Good roll of dice can mean that people can get a fight with a string of high end crits. The cross proc's of mongoose/executioner/MotB or WSC can also increase your average hit by quite a bit.

Do you have access to Improved hunter mark or Expose Weakness in your raids?
Scroll of Agility V is also a buff that some rogues use alot. Or some rogues use +hit rating food/agility potions while some others use flask/AP food (125 AP difference right there).

Anyways, Teron is a short fight so luck can play a big role in overall raid dps.

 

◊ manly

I haven't seen this mentioned, i assume this would be standard fare for teron, although somewhat cheesing up the numbers.
[Elixir of Demonslaying]

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.

 

Valen

Teron is an undead, not demon.

 

• Latito

Those ARE however handy for Hyjal (and Supremus if you really care).


constantius - Looking at MAX hit generally won't get you very far. With several proc'able buffs going around, getting a lucky max roll on the weapon while several buffs are active can really create some drastically different numbers. Average and Min hit are generally better measures. That said, your rogue is scoring lower even on the min/average hits.

Basically it comes down to AP and Armor Pen when looking at average hits. Haste, Hit and Crit will help your DPS of course, but not your average attack.

Does your warrior use Solarian trinket?
Does your rogue use AP food or Hit food (hit food is more dps.. lower max hit)
Does your rogue have Illidan and ZA-timed rings? (armor pen)
Does your rogue generally have gear which favours AP instead of other stats?

I *could* gear to get max hits by stacking AP and ArmPen.. but that wouldn't help my overall dps. Take those "max hit" type numbers with a grain of salt.

 

• Aldriana

The thing to keep in mind, though, is that the difference we're seeing is not a matter of 70 AP from Solarian's Sapphire. We're talking 70 damage on a 2.6 speed weapon, after armor reduction; this is easily a 500 AP difference. Hence, I think the percentage buffs explanation is more likely to be correct than the random 70 AP here and there.

Your point about not putting too much stock in average hit size is a good one, though; while hit size correlates with DPS, it's not as good a measurement of effectiveness on the whole.