Comparing ilvl% in Warcraftlogs between raid members

[Deleted]

I've heard that the ilvl% from Warcraftlogs isn't the best way to evaluate someone's performance (because of boosting and different fight lenghts) but doesn't it give a good picture when the comparison is done between members of the same raid group?

Example: we have a hunter who's constantly below 25% compared to other hunters from the same ilvl bracket and a shaman who's constantly above 75%. Is it safe to say that the shaman is playing a lot better?

[Gorgodeus]

That would be a fairly accurate assumption, provided the numbers (sample size) is large enough.

[Deleted]

No it is not safe to say someone plays better just by that. e.g. you may put one of them to soak fires instead of tunnel visioning. That being said if you have 4 people doing the exact same thing, and they all do it relatively correctly, then yes you might go with ranking.

I believe ranking makes more sense when someone has an extreme amount of kills. For example, looking for ranking on 2-3 kills is kinda meaningless since you likely had half the raid dead on the kill. But, if you have 40 kills on a boss, ranking gets more meaningful.

[ThePants999]

I'm with Gorgodeus. Obviously you have to account for if you gave someone a special role, but that's pretty rare, so for the most part, comparing people to how other people playing their spec performed - and then comparing THAT metric between players in the same raid - is fine. As you highlighted, things that can skew the numbers such as fight length cease to be important when you're comparing the numbers between two people instead of looking at what the number is in an absolute sense.

Again, as Gorgodeus said, sample size remains important. For example, we had a hunter who continued to play BM long after the top hunters had switched en masse to MM. His rankings made him look godly because he was being compared only to those few hunters left playing BM. He WAS really good, but it would have been pretty unfair of us to say "Hey, X is getting 99% ilvl rankings all the time, why can't you?"

[McTurbo]

I'm with Gorgodeus. Obviously you have to account for if you gave someone a special role, but that's pretty rare, so for the most part, comparing people to how other people playing their spec performed - and then comparing THAT metric between players in the same raid - is fine. As you highlighted, things that can skew the numbers such as fight length cease to be important when you're comparing the numbers between two people instead of looking at what the number is in an absolute sense.

Again, as Gorgodeus said, sample size remains important. For example, we had a hunter who continued to play BM long after the top hunters had switched en masse to MM. His rankings made him look godly because he was being compared only to those few hunters left playing BM. He WAS really good, but it would have been pretty unfair of us to say "Hey, X is getting 99% ilvl rankings all the time, why can't you?"

You are correct. but at the same time as long as you have a decent sample size you can also ask the question of why are you performing at 9% of your ilvl on nearly every boss.. aka we have a DK that is struggling and despite having 724 ilvl .. he can barely break 50k and is alot of times below that. Comparing one class to another is useless but Ilvl% will let you know is someone is struggling with rotations or resource management. For us.. we set a number for players to try and reach.. (50k) anything over 50k and you are helping down the boss.. anything less and we are having to make up for the health you are adding to the boss..

[Deleted]

late in tier its harder to compare good % due say mage stacking for speedkills, or letting certain players aoe adds when they shouldnt. you can play very well but not get that high % due this kind of stuff for certain fights.

[cFortyfive]

Example: we have a hunter who's constantly below 25% compared to other hunters from the same ilvl bracket and a shaman who's constantly above 75%. Is it safe to say that the shaman is playing a lot better?

While it certainly is a good indicator I don't think it's always that simple. Specifically in this scenario I'd consider a whole lot more better players picked hunters over shamans just because they weren't particularly popular for progression over the course of the expansion. Our ele shaman constantly had ridiculous rankings simply because there wasn't much competition and only very few high quality players choosing the spec during progression for its rather bad reputation.

[tclphz]

I think if someone is consistently at 25%, there's probably opportunity for improvement.

That said, as many mentioned there are circumstances that will cause lower damage performance e.g. handing mechanics. But it's worth looking further into to see if there's something off.

[Deleted]

First thing :

Target breakdown. Could be that your hunters are padding and lower on prio targets.
Check ability usage, cooldown usage and all that, could be the hunter is lower activity or not min maxing enough.
Ilvl itself says nothing if it's not the right stats and so on.

[Bigbazz]

There is a lot more to it, someone with low ilvl in a group full of high ilvl players will generally get much higher ilvl% rankings due to faster kill time, though the opposite can happen on some fights (specifically burst AOE, or sustained cleave where the extra targets die too quickly). Personal ranking % is just as much about the group effort, raid strategy and raid dps distribution as it is about your actual playing as an individual.

A real skilled player of a class analysing another player should consider actual rankings as not super important, if you really know your stuff you should delv into the log and find out of the player is actually doing well, or is just benefitting from circumstance. The large majority of high rankings are group efforts, ilvl% or otherwise.

[BiggestNoob]

The brackets are directly correlated with actual DPS values. If there's a large disparity in DPS consistently, someone is doing something wrong. If someone is consistently really low on bracket percentiles they're also probably doing something wrong.

Dealing with mechanics often doesn't have a substantial impact on DPS unless you blow CDs outside of ring or opportune times to deal with them, and AFAIK that's not necessary, even on Archimonde.

You just have to be aware of how mechanics would impact someone's DPS, like getting eaten on Gorefiend. If you get eaten in the first wave on Gorefiend, you have a huge DPS disadvantage because that's ring/CDs missed. Or if you get eaten in the last wave and your group jumps the gun on lust/ring so you're just coming out having spent your resources making sure the group doesn't get overwhelmed with skeletons and so your burst will be less than spectacular, etc. Other than that, if there isn't an obvious explanation, you shouldn't see a large disparity between players in the same raid or players and DPS done by other people in other groups with similar fight lengths.