I don't believe the Simple Question/Answer thread is a good or particularly logical place to be putting questions about WWS analysis. So this thread is born.

Please, please, PLEASE do not just post your WWS and ask us to analyze it, or post asking us to rate your gear. Put some context into your post. Say "I noticed that I'm doing significantly less DPS than other similarly geared shadowpriests, and I'm curious as to what could be causing it" and so on.

Some very general things you can look for in your own parses if you think you're not up to snuff:

1) Vampiric Touch/Devouring Plague uptime: Look at the length of the fight, convert to seconds. Divide by 3. This theoretically should be the number of VT/DP ticks you should have. In actuality, a good number is 90% or so of that -- i.e. if the fight is 300 seconds long, I hopefully have at least 90 ticks of VT/DP. Anything under 80% uptime means you are slacking off here.

2) Mind Blast hits. Again, take the length of the fight in seconds. Divide that by your Mind Blast cooldown (it should be 5.5!) plus 1.5. (this should end up having you divide by 7 in almost all cases) Compare that to the number of Mind Blasts you actually cast. Get as close to 100% as you can. For example, with that 300 second long fight, the maximum number of Mind Blasts you could cast would be 42.

Also note that some fights are ideal for analysis, and some much less so. Patchwerk for example is a great fight to analyze how well you are at maximizing DPS. A fight like Gothik with a bunch of low HP mobs -- not so good.

One other helpful hint: Install a DoT timer of your choice if you don't have one. I use DoTimer personally.

Well, look at the numbers:

24 MBs versus 28.
VT damage: 169389 versus 175165
Mind Flays, 114 versus 124, 326152 dmg versus 297132

Both gear, DoT uptime, and also your gimp talent build matters.

Why would you EVER, EVER, not spec into 5/5 Mind Blast? It's been defacto since the 2.4 change to spellhaste.
You get much less out of haste on your gear if you don't have 5/5.

From what I have seen with SW:P is that any direct increase in spellpower will be accounted for on each tick, where as any percentage based modifier will not (Power Sparks, Shadow Weaving, etc.). The spellpower from a Destruction Potion wouldn't have an effect past it's duration, I don't think. You spend 6 seconds (no lag, perfect execution) getting SWx5 (VT, DP, MB, SW), that leaves 2 ticks of SW:P with the 120sp bonus to it.

If you can prove me wrong on this, go ahead. Just stating what I already know from playing around with SW:P, P&S, and MF.

So I'm looking at my last Patchwerk to see where I can improve:

Wow Web Stats

I was staring at this and wondering how in the world I only managed to cast eleven Mind Blasts in a three-minute fight when I looked at the total damage. If I did 151k damage with only eleven casts, I'd have to be averaging almost 14k per cast, which simply isn't possible with my gear. Something isn't right here.

I'll report this on the WWS forums for further investigation, but in the mean time you guys might want to double-check your detailed breakdowns before reading too much into them.

Thank you for pointing that out snowy. I thought I was doing a terrible job with my mind blasts, by my calculations, I was doing one every 12 seconds. After a reinspection I realized I was missing a column, it turns out I average one every 7.83 seconds.

Greetings , long time lurker first time poster here.

This is our lasts week's wws from Patchwerk , i tried and keep a tidy cycle but as seen in the report some mistakes were made (low DP uptime for instance) and it leads me to another simple question , is it worth canceling flay to switch to mind blast asap?My priest is prety well geared atm mostly from 25 man enconters and i belive i can get bether numbers out of it if i change my game play , thanks in advance for any coments.

In TBC I believe that it was more dps efficient, if you had the mana, to clip your MF. I don't believe this is the case now that MF can crit. I would suggest finishing out your MF, because some of those crits are pretty nasty.

Hey, last night in Naxx I had an exceedingly bad parse on Patchwork. I was having horrid lag, but nowhere near enough to explain how absolutely horrible my damage was.

After, looking at the WWS, I saw that my dots were ticking for almost no damage and later in the rest of Naxx my dot ticks seemed similarly anemic.

Anyone has ever had anything similar occur? Check it out:

Wow Web Stats during Sarth 3 drakes:


Wow Web Stats during Patchwork:

and during the rest of Naxx my damage was incredibly low. I am not particularly concerned with my rotation being abysmal since the lag was horrendous, but I was shocked at how low my dots were ticking in the rest of the evening, especially compared to Riendra but I cannot really find rhyme or reason for this.

My gear was not broken, and at least on Patchwork I was still flasked from Sartharion. How could my vampiric touch end up ticking for 1400 average, down from 2200 average the previous attempt? Even assuming I had forgotten to shadowform (I hadn't) that still doesn't even come close to accounting the difference.

That's not technically true. Mind Flay stole the arcane missile code but NOT the graphic. To understand what this means, you need to understand how Arcane Missiles works. Every second the client renders a bolt being "fired", which lands half a second later. But the moment the bolt leaves your hands, the damage it deals will lock in. The damage just don't apply to the target for half a second.

In other words, the timeline for arcane missiles looks like this:

0: Start of Arcane Missiles cast
1: Bolt #1 fires and server computes damage. Client renders bolt leaving your hands.
1.5: Bolt #1 has its damage applied to target. Client should have rendered bolt impacting target by now
1: Bolt #2 fires and server computes damage ...
1.5: Bolt #2 has its damage applied to target ...
...
5: Bolt #5 fires
5.5: Bolt #5 applies damage to target

But it's worth noting that Arcane Missiles takes exactly 5 seconds to cast. At time 5, you can cast another spell and it won't "eat" the last bolt. That bolt will still land at time 5.5.

What does all of this have to do with Mind Flay? Well each mind flay tick has the half second "bolt" delay even though the client isn't rendering a bolt. A mind flay will deal damage at the 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5 second marks if you have perfect latency, which is why so many people are reporting that Mind Flay feels lagged. It's not lag. It's just a bug in when the server applies damage. However, this doesn't affect the optimal time to break casting. If you cast a new spell at 2.1 seconds, the second bolt will be locked in and you'll still get the second Mind Flay tick at 2.5 seconds.

Well in all honesty that very well could explain the difference. Don't forget you're not only losing out on 15% more damage, you're also forfeiting the extra dot damage from your crit %, which could be 40% or so if you're properly waiting for debuffs on the mob.

That may not resolve your claim you were in shadowform, just pointing out if you weren't, it's a lot more detrimental than you think.

Just to test -- completely unbuffed with 5x Shadow Weaving, in Shadowform my SWP does 1082. If I drop Shadowform, it's 786. 786*1.15*1.1969=1082. Your 1400 would go 1400*1.15*1.40=2254.

Here's the WWS from our last raid: Wow Web Stats - Archavon, Naxxramas, Malygos & Sarth3-wipes
For testing I ran with 160 hitrating and suprisingly there seem to be no misses among those 24,9 million dmg (6 hours). 0,3% miss on MF and 1,2% on MS (only on trashmobs as far as I can see). I say "no misses" here, because the minimal MF misses and the MS misses on trash also occured with 312 hitrating.

Here's the Patchwerk breakdown: Wow Web Stats - 4461 dps, but at least according to the log I was slacking with MB, though the fight didn't feel like I missed more than 0,5 sec here and there to keep VT&DP running. Would focussing more on MB add too much risk on losing too many DoT ticks?