Are we doing enough dps

[ferdy30]

I am the GM of a semi-casual guild. Right now we are progressing through 10 man Ulduar and 10 man ToC (like I said we are casual with some of us being more "hard core" than others).
My current problem is that I do not know if my dps are pulling their weight and doing enough damage. We have a good group of players that I enjoy playing with so right now it isnt a big enough problem for me to start saying a whole lot about, with that said we also get along enough that we take some critisism from each other when it is warranted.

So my questions are two-fold.
1: with us progressing through Ulduar and is there a good way to tell how much dps each person should be doing based on their gear?

2: I have seen some of the online break downs of ppl's damage, what online add-ons do ppl use to put a break down of the dps and how can we use them to help us do better?


Thanks before hand for ur replies and help.

[Sirloinsteak]

our guild has a 4k dps minimum no matter what gear u have, if you don't meet this mark and "claim" its because of gear u are sat out until u acquire such gear as to make the mark ... .. with all the badge loots available atm 4k dps is a very conservative minimum ... very conservative !!

[solocommand]

To get an idea gear-wise, wow-heroes.com is fairly accurate. The damage each player will do depends on how well they know and can play their class. There are intricacies to each class and style of play, so most/all classes no longer have set rotations, and tend to rely more on situational priority queues. Because of this, all players need to have an understanding of their abilities, how they interact, and what ability would be best used to maximize their damage output.

If everyone is playing their class to the best of their ability and are well geared, you shouldn't have any progression issues. From my experience as a leader of a casual raiding guild, many people do not pull the dps they should based on their gear.

Recount is a great tool to use in-game to monitor performance. It can break down damage done by player, as well as show total raid damage. Generally speaking, it should look like a bell curve on the charts, with your "pure" dps classes on top, followed by hybrids, and then tanks. This is not to say that in some fights a paladin won't do more than say, a hunter or a warlock, but for sustained boss fights, this should be the case.

Another great tool you can use is called Wow Web Stats. It uploads combat logs out of game and parses them to give you a detailed picture of your raiders' performance. You can see basically the same data you can in recount, but with a little more detail.

I've only worked one on one with a few players, because I only know 3 classes well enough to tell people when they are doing it wrong But there is a lot of information out there, and many tools to help you find what your problem is.

The majority of the bosses in Ulduar and ToC have enrage timers. If you hit the enrage, your raid DPS is too low. Those tools can help you pinpoint who is underperforming, and why. Hope this helps!

--
To add to what Sirloinsteak said, I think 4K would be an average for your DPS classes. I know a mage that can hit 8, and a hunter who can only hit 3k, with the same relative gear level. It really comes down to your raiders playing their classes correctly. We do not enforce a strict DPS requirement in our raids, but we do look at performance and gear level. We aren't going to bring a Naxx10 geared player into an Ulduar hard mode, nor are we going to bring in a ToC25 geared player who consistently puts out less damage than the naxx10-geared player.

[Thaak]

So my questions are two-fold.
1: with us progressing through Ulduar and is there a good way to tell how much dps each person should be doing based on their gear?

2: I have seen some of the online break downs of ppl's damage, what online add-ons do ppl use to put a break down of the dps and how can we use them to help us do better?

1) Mileage varies. DPS varies by class/spec/gear/non-dps responsibilities(dispelling, interrupting)/individual encounter(some encounters favour certain classes/specs). You can compare your DPSers to DPSers from other guilds(of a similar progression) on a fight by fight basis, on any of the parsing websites.

2)World of Logs(WOL), WoW Meter Online(WMO), WoW Web State(WWS), are all sire that do what you are talking about. For each of those sites, you must setup an account with them. Once you have done that the next time you raid type "/combatlog". That will log all combatlog data to a .txt file in your logs folder in your WoW directory on your computer. When you are done raiding, type "/combatlog" again. This will close the combat log. Go to the website of the service you have chose, launch their client, upload the Wowcombatlog.txt file, and the site will parse/post it for you. Make sure you delete this file everytime you upload it, as it will add to itself and not overwrite itself(resulting in a huge file that the sites won't let you upload).

As far as uses, there are many.
1) It is more accurate than recount, and provides infinitely more details. If you have a disc priest that raids with you, it is basically the only reliable way to see their actual effective healing(yes you can get an addon for recount, but again, this is more accurate).

2)The parses stay up and viewable for a decent amount of time, meaning you can tracks dps from week to week accurately instead of just guessing at what it was on previous weeks. This lets you see if your players are improving. Take note, that RNG can skew numbers from week to week, so don't jump someone because they dropped a couple hundred dps in one fight from one week to the next, you're looking more for trend analysis here.

3)You can use it to see ability usage, buff uptime, CD useage, and the like. It can also help you better your roration. Lets say your highest damage ability has a 10 second CD, and you're in a 3 minute fight. You should have used that ability 18 times. If you look at the parse and see you only used it 10 times, you're probably doing something wrong. Same thing with proc based abilities, specific example-a Fury warrior should only use Slam when he gets a blood surge proc, if he got 10 bloodsurge procs in the fight, but used slam 20 times, there is a problem, flip side, 10 bloodsurge procs and 0 slams, again theres a problem. It will allow your DPS to REALLY take a look at what they are doing and how to fix it.

If you have further questions feel free to ask.