WoL Rankings - How useful are they.

[cleotaurus]

Rankings are definitely not useful as factual evidence of healer imbalance - yet I see this crap being cited the most as reason to buff/nerf certain classes.

[CptAwesome]

If you are looking at your own raid team and wondering why one hunter is 5k below another, then yes they are very useful.

If you are looking at the world top 50 hunters and wondering why you're 10k below them, then no.

[cFortyfive]

WoL rankings make farm raids more fun!

This. Gives you a reason to try harder despite having everything on farm and not go into a slump. Also they are great for guild applications.

[Quenios]

WoL rankings on their own are iffy sometimes. It's common for top parsers to get buffs they may not get on a normal fight. Things such as a Tricks of the Trade to a non-rogue, Unholy Frenzy from an Unholy DK even though Frost DKs are technically better,Dark Intent, excess legendaries in the raid, and Focus Magic are all buffs that skew results.

Giving tricks to a non-rogue, is not "skewing" results. It's smart.

[MrExcelion]

WoL is very useful, but as others have stated in this thread, with the rankings, not so much. It's definitely a lot to do with how you do the fight, and what role you are assigned (ie: are you flying on Alysrazor, soaking on Baleroc, punting Meteors in P3/P4, etc). I'll always get a low parse on Domo because I immunity soak, but I'll be high on Baleroc because I'm usually not on crystals. Perhaps it is too storage-intensive for WoLs servers, but I've always found it a bit silly that the cutoff for ranking has always been 200. I've always felt it should be a larger number, especially with the substantial number of guilds killing heroic bosses now. I've found that the raidbots overall percentile thing is a better way of seeing how you did against the rest of the field, especially since only the top 200 are ranked, but again, your parse is more influenced by the strategy used than anything. Plus a lot of the top parses are either falsified, in addition to a lot of guilds having private parses. So I'm a small fan of raidbots, but still I don't put much stock into it, especially with the lack of Patchwerk fights. That said, Ultraxion in this next tier will be pretty close to one and DPS will be very important in that fight on Heroic, but even then, if you have a low-end computer, there's signficantly more lag switching between loading the two phases.

[eternalwhitemoon]

Rankings are fun, but not indicative of anything. Like the others said, strat, buffs, composition all come into play. For healing rankings, it's also affected by how much avoidable damage your raid is taking.

It's nice to rank, but it's not an indicator of skill.

WoL itself is an amazing tool. Rankings are just there for the epeen value

[Argg0]

All in all I thought Omnotron, V&T, and Cho'gall to be perfect encounters for WoL rankings, and they haven't been topped in Cataclysm. But hey, to each his own.

Omnotron and V&T are multi DoT dreams and they have some considerable buff and a lot more movement than Baleroc not to mention target switching that some classes aren't good at.

Cho'gall... I don't know, AoEing will make quite some difference.

IMO, Baleroc and Chimaeron are the ones.

[sinisterwyvern]

I was having a discussion with some guildies who were of the opinion that WoL rankings don't mean anything. While I agree they might not be the best metric, they are atleast some sort of metric and relatively effective in discerning top performers from average performers atleast. I didn't get very far into the discussion though so I thought I'd pose the question to my fellow MMO Champion forum goers.

1 - Do WoLs ranking matter?
2 - How effective of a metric are they?

Cheers!

1) Only if you're 14
2) Terrible because of the many ways one can cheese the logs.

[Deleted]

WoL is a great tool to check if anything is going wrong, and what it is.
Rankings are just for epeen

[Deleted]

Any meter be it WoL/Recount are useful tools but nothing more, numbers don't mean everything (including DPS epeen) survival and other factors mean more.

Our guild logs are 100% true, why cheat, its very petty.

[Frozendekay]

If there weren't rankings I think I'd have given up on firelands a while ago. It keeps things fun and gives you something to aspire to. It also gives you something to complain about (WTF I HAD 15 LESS KM PROCS THIS WEEK FUUUU).

Also great for applications. If a guy is in near full BiS and has never ranked on any fights it's an immediate warning. Not enough to decline ofc because a lot of factors are there, but enough to warrant looking into.

[Deleted]

I raided T11 with a ret pala and warrior that had a bit of a competition going and I think they both held nr1 spots on like half the bosses. The bosses still died and they didn't do stupid shit that wiped the raid so why not? I don't think it's a coincidence that those kind of players are some of the best even when you're progressing on a new boss. Maybe the competition in 10 mans just suck?

[draeger]

If your guild is good and not single healing encounters, your healers will go from ranking on the first kill (which you probably squeaked by on) to having hps so low that two of them don't even combine to the top hps people on the site. The only way to rank as a healer is if your raid is god awful, your healing crew (minus you) is god awful, you solo heal something, so few people have killed the boss that you rank by default, or all of the above.

I've solo healed like 2/3 of heroic 10man alysrazor after a nasty misplay and still didn't rank. I can't possibly fathom how awful those 200 players minimum above me had it on their runs. We don't really do much else in the way of getting healers ranked so the glory days are in the first few kills and after that you get to be bored for the rest of the tier.

[zakayron]

1) Only if you're 14
2) Terrible because of the many ways one can cheese the logs.

What do you mean skew the results? WoL results are impossible to skew.[/sarcasm]
http://www.worldoflogs.com/rankings/...10H/Fire_Mage/

[cFortyfive]

What do you mean skew the results? WoL results are impossible to skew.[/sarcasm]
http://www.worldoflogs.com/rankings/...10H/Fire_Mage/

Well okay buffs happen :P

[zakayron]

Well combat log bugs happen - I don't really would blame wol on that though.

He had the Alysrazor debuff the entire time and he's a fire mage. Not a combat log bug

[cFortyfive]

He had the Alysrazor debuff the entire time and he's a fire mage. Not a combat log bug

I checked that right now - I thought it was something obvious like those recent baleroc parses that have been removed or one of the other bugged logs that swirl around. But I have to admit they cleaned up a good bunch of those.

[krelianzg]

I use WoL to evaluate the people I raid with. I'm not interested in competing against top 100 guilds that are bored on farm runs and take crazy comps to cheese logs. Or, as has been evidenced before, people who are very good about manipulating parses to make them seem 100x better than they are. It's a raid leader tool. Nothing more.