Results tagged “stats”

There was a discussion on one of the forums I frequent this week about the relative merits of DPS and Total Damage. I say discussion, as there was the usual degree of name calling about which was most relevant. In fact, as someone who spends all day crunching numbers I can happily say both are, and neither are.

(Sorry for the egg-sucking lesson for those who do understand basic stats, but for those who don't ...:)

DPS is a measure of damage over time. The more damage you do in a given period of time, the higher your DPS score. However, this can be skewed - a mage who does a single 10k hit on a mob with an instant cast and who is then splatted may appear to have a high DPS rating (depending on how you calculate the time element of the DPS stat), but in fact they made only a minor contribution to the fight.

Total Damage is an open-ended stat that does what it says on the tin - it adds up all the damage inflicted during the fight/raid/whatever. However, the significance of that varies a lot - a 3 hour raid will naturally have a higher total damage than a 90 minute one (and the same with a 10 minute fight vs a 2 minute one) .. you'd hope at least.

In reality, you want to look at both - high DPS and high total damage = result. High DPS but low total damage, or low dps but high total damage are going to be less helpful in a raid (the former is dependant on how long there was active contribution to the fight, the latter on the need to down in a fixed period, e.g. enrage timers) and a low-low result is pretty obviously a bad thing.

Of course, when deciding on who to involve in your Emalon pug you can't really look at exhaustive raid stats and, assuming they're not a complete muppet who'll die to the first rockfall, DPS is probably going to be close enough (so, horseshoes, handgrenades and pug-forming) but if you're looking at your own performance over time, or your associates, you need to look at a broader range of stats, for which I'd heartily recommend Wow Web Stats (though there are other alternatives I've not investigated at yet).

Last night the Ravens ventured into the Halls of Stone (and also took a quick peek into Halls of Lightning before deciding out level 78 was better suited to the Violet Hold, which we murderized a couple of times). Andro's performance was okay but not great so I'm planning on spending the weekend looking at her kit (her spec is, I believe, fine ... at least until the Arcane buffs in 3.0.8). At present I have 4 broad sets of gear: Hit, crit, haste and PvP. The haste set is something of a "not quite sure what do do with this" and what I want to do is come up with 3 rather than two sets that are: Bosses, general DPS and PvP.

The current problem is that my +hit gear lacks the crit of my general gear (which, given my build is designed to deliver big crits, is an issue) and dps gear has haste or crit, rarely both (and I'm not overly familiar with haste). Finding a decent balance could be ... interesting.