Quote Originally Posted by Ion View Post
Not to jump in to a thread without having followed it at all...but actually yeah that's exactly what I'm going to do...

If you really want to have a good predictive model you should record damage patterns on bosses and the gear people are wearing when doing it and the abilities they're using into a big database and then run some real statistical analysis on it to give you a good predictive model. It's not going to be particularly useful to small-sample guess against this sort of thing. Plus the viability of TDR as a metric at all is questionable at best. What you want to be able to have is a model that predicts the smoothest possible damage intake for a given set of gear on a given encounter...and that requires a LOT of data to determine properly.

The problem you're trying to solve is probably a solvable one (and, honestly, a pretty interesting one), but the method you're going about it isn't apt to get you (necessarily) interesting results. Someone like WoL might be able to if they were willing to run the statistical analyses...but even they would need to fetch more data than they collect.

Now, you can probably make pretty decent guesses even in a simple mod, but it's going to be extremely tricky...
Thanks a lot for your input Ion. It seems that you understand the nature of the problem a lot better than most people. Being a math major, having the required data to make a good model is my dream scenario, but I don't see it happen. Right now I am just trying to come up with a more useful metric than TDR that is possible to implement within the frames of my small addon. I don't think that it will ever be able to replace knowledge of every encounter, just work as a hint.