Having just entered BT and exiting our SSC/TK farming rotation we're starting to pick up WWS again and now we're again comparing our individual performance and stats against people at the top of the WWS charts, but a lot of it just seems like people are generating dps out of nowhere. i.e. What makes this fury warrior do 1700 dps compared to my 1100?

After pouring over all the numbers I came to the conclusion a lot of you probably consider obvious by now: The faster the fight, the higher the "dps", and not just in the obvious way; the shorter the fight, and the greater percentage of the fight you've had cooldowns active, and the higher your "damage / combat time". I ran into this looking at the WWS for a warrior with less AP, less crit, and less +hit, who did 600 more dps on a 2.5 minute Naj'entus vs our hitting enrage timer (ya, pretty sad).

The Question: Is there any 'rule of thumb' anyone here uses when comparing themselves to higher guilds with faster fights? Otherwise beyond being completely new to raiding and picking up things like 'I should use whirlwind all the time' I really can't see much value in looking at other players? Or maybe thats thats the point - it really isn't a very good tool for straight comparison.

So follow-up question: Where do you get value in WWS?

It all depends on the guild. Personally, we do not use WWS as an e-peen tool, but more for record keeping. It's used to see who is putting out acceptable levels of DPS, who is using consumables, and to a lesser extent, who is attacking the right target (damage output on Spitfire Totems for example.)

Steps to a proper comparison:

1. Check armoury. Gear comparison can be pretty important, checking overall stats both buffed and unbuffed. Talent check can be quite good too - you might have missed something blatantly obvious somehow. This may not be applicable dependant on whether they logged out in PvP gear or if armoury is down.

2. Raid buffs available to both you and them. Checking if things like Curse of Recklessness are up, Improved Hunters Mark (may have to check talents of other characters in the raid), Expose Weakness, Fairie Fire (and improved), or whatever.

3. Personal buffs (and group setup). Check whether you have full optimisation of buffs such as Battle Shout/auras/etc and whatever was available.

4. Special buffs. Check as to whether they have things like Drums of Battle chaining (may be hard to pick up - potentially another trawl through armoury to find the leatherworkers and working out who was in what group - one gain can be 10 chained because of how WWS picks up buffs). Haste Pots/Destruction Pots and Bloodlust also fall into this, along with weapon buffs (warglaives/whatever).

5. Check fight length and compare against special buffs - shorter the fight the more effective particular buffs are likely to be, especially when chained with particular effects (execute range + bloodlust for mages/warriors).

I think that's pretty much everything.


Just because you're looking at comparison with WWS, it's doesn't have to be an 'e-peen' tool. Anything that will let you improve your performance by looking at what others do well is a good thing - look at the megathreads for an example of guidance towards being better at a class in general (or understanding other classes to help others, from another perspective).

Although I run a raid that is effectively entering SSC I think the way I look at WWS is still valid. I use WWS more from guilds entering an instance to see what I should be looking for in terms of general performance. I find little value in looking at how a guild farms an encounter but a lot of value in seeing how a guild is learning to farm an encounter. Specifically I look for single boss logs.

In analysing a raid I specifically break up each encounter I want to understand, and then create stats based on that particular fight. You really need to dig to find WWS logs that are broken up this way. We're learning Leo, Hydros and Tidewalker at the moment so the day following our raid days I manually separate the combat log and parse each file. I then go through what each class, each player's stats are and what role they were on to understand whether I need to focus more on getting extra out of them the next week.

I do not use WWS to work out why we wiped, I tend to do that analysis in game using assessment and verbal discussion. I found that when I posted the WWS logs in a guild public forum they became about vilification and e-peen rather than analysis.

While my current usage of WWS is quite different than when I started, there are several things I have done at one point in time:

For someone starting out in a zone or learning a new encounter:
-Who attacked what (Spitfire totem is a very good example, Inferals on Anetheron later on too)
-Who healed who
-Who took damage from what and when
-Who used what cooldowns
-Who healed themselves (dps'ers using health pots, healthstone, etc)

For someone wondering why they wiped:
-Check parries on the boss, did a melee attack from the front or the tank get unlucky w/ his own attacks?
-Check for Shield Block if your tank is a warrior
-Check for Crushing streaks if your tank is a feral
-Check for unlucky combinations of "White swing + Special + AoE Raid dmg + white swing"
-Check which healers are doing a flash heal every 4 seconds and standing around doing nothing the rest of the time

For someone wondering why a caster does low dps:
-Check their spell breakdown (number of casts) and compare vs fight length and average cast time. Are they chain-casting or slacking?
-Check for dot uptime (if applicable)
-Check if they use the right rotation (Fire mages spamming Pyroblast?)

For someone wondering why a melee does low dps:
-Proper usage of abilities? (Warrior used Mortal Strike and not Slam?)
-Parries? Make sure they aren't standing in front of the boss (some bosses spin around to cast instants on people - melee will parry during that split second). Over 1-3% parry (and usually more like 7-10%) is a strong indication they stood in front of the boss.

General dps problems:
-Check spec, gear, gems, enchants, etc.
-Group buffs are huge.. don't underestimate them.
-Did someone get super unlucky with crits one day? This goes especially for casters, who may only have ~50-100 casts in a given fight. RNG is random - 30% crit on your character sheet does NOT mean you will get 30% crit every fight.

Consumable usage:
-Are people using consumables?
-Did the caster who complained about mana issues even use Super Mana Potions?
-Did the melee who got hit by random raid damage ever healthstone?


Overall though, if I understand your general intent, comparing dps against another guild's <insert class here> is difficult until you fully understand the complexities of various buffs involved. There was a thread a while ago about melee dps on Teron which went into this fairly well. Consider than an enhancement shaman is roughly a 30% dps increase for me over no shaman. While that number is for a specific fight with a high level of other buffs - it just goes to show how much party and raid buffs will change your dps.

Well I think, most raids lose much dmg to bad group composition (enh-sham in meleegrp is about 15-25% more dmg for every melee...) and especially consumables. Flask and bufffood is normal but what about manaoil, wizardoil for caster, sharpening stone/weighstone on offhand for warrior.
And what people often forget: destruction potions for caster, hastepotions for melee. They are expensive but when comparing raids killing illidan 6 month ago and raids now entering bt they make mostly the difference.