[Melee] Teron Gorefiend DPS
 

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.

Blood Frenzy?

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).