Originally Posted by Toots Hepcat

I've been to Magister's Terrace three times in three days. Same gear and group each time.

One night I did 921 dps. Once, 814. And once, 791.

That's a deviation of 17%! That's why a single parse is irrelevant to theorycrafting. If I had to rely solely on parses to evaluate gear, specs and strategy, I could never do so reliably. As much as you seem to think there's some magic behind computer-generated randomness that makes it different from a roll of the dice (Stephen Wolfram would agree with you), the fact is that everybody has good nights and bad nights.

Furthermore, the equations we use to calculate things like "DPS" can be gamed through playstyle. For example, if I have to run out of melee range and stay there for longer than 3s, I'm going to shoot off a lightning bolt. Guess what? This means my DPS stats will actually be lower than if I hadn't done anything.

This is why we have formulas. This is why we have EP. This is why we have the simulator. And they all work very well.

The second you start trusting your "feelings" more than reason, you're resigning yourself to making poor choices. Such as making foolish statements like "everyone who has EVER played this game has never observed 2 boss fights that were substantially different when ALL ELSE WAS EQUAL." On the contrary; i don't think I've ever had two such fights where the results were the same.