WoL bug? Or am I miscalculating

[nocturnus]

Hey guys, I was just checking out some WoL parses and I noticed something odd:

On last week's deathbringer saurfang I did 2034112 damage on the boss. The fight duration was 04:34 min. My recorded dps on boss and dps(e) is: 7688.3 and 7494.2

Another player, a mage in this case did 1967056 damage on the boss. But his dps and dps(e) is 9545.4 and 9382.1!

How is it possible, that whilst I did more damage on the boss, his dps is so much higher? What am I missing? Does this have to do with him being able to nuke more adds thanks to mirror image - which consequentially puts him on higher overal damage?

[Gilian]

Or he is really good on the adds or it's a bug. Or he just nuked really hard and then went afk ;p.

[Greyarea]

Check the activity also, you should find you have more activity/casts than he does, which means if you have no damage ticking, it stops your DPS from going up or down cos no more info is being collected on that person.

They could of had a great string of procs, then died right after, thus keeping his/her DPS high, but damage done low due to it not having a chance to average out.

An example is Patchwork. Blow BL at the start, all your CD's and everything and have the raid go totally nuts. All peoples DPS will be 1-3k DPS more than their normal DPS due to the insane about of buffed damage they will be doing Vs the amount of time not buffed by BL/Trinkets/CD's.

In a longer fight doing the same thing, even a Patch style fight the DPS will start to average out to the peoples normal numbers.



Summing up i think he just had a great string of luck with procs/crits and CD usage...then suddenly stopped due to a death?

[nocturnus]

hehe, well his activity is basically as high as mine. I also remember my recount showing me on ~8.6k dps - I remember cause I was flexing it in party chat and typing 'get ready for execute phase you noobs!'... ahum...

I think I know what it is: He did WAY more damage on the adds. So his total damage (not damage done on the boss) is higher. This is divided by the time spent on the encounter and voila his dps for the FIGHT - but not for the boss.

So my dps on the boss is higher than his, whereas his dps on the boss and adds is higher than mine.

LAME, I hate fights with fucking adds. Bah

[scandore8472]

That's about normal for a mage for a couple reasons:

Mages have a lot of cooldowns, so their dps is going to be spikey.
Mages' aggro dump (invis) requires them to stand around and do nothing for 20 seconds.

[gherkin]

WoL functions with an activity timer (standard across meters) that turns off dps calculations after 5 seconds of inactivity.

Mages also have spikey damage. Theoretical scenario:
Blast blast blast Oh shit I pulled aggro on a beast, but got Missile barrage proc.
<kites the beast for 9 seconds while everyone else does damage>
Missile Barrage on Saurfang

So basically what happened was that he did zero dps for 5 seconds, which turned off the meter, and openned up with a buffed to all hell Arcane Missiles on the boss, because he can. Therefore his dps shoots right back to where it was with absolutely no ramp up time.

You on the other hand have dots to refresh and spells to cast on the mobs and probably won't pull aggro, unless you're affliction this fight.

[harky]

How is it possible, that whilst I did more damage on the boss, his dps is so much higher? What am I missing? Does this have to do with him being able to nuke more adds thanks to mirror image - which consequentially puts him on higher overal damage?

Remember when I told you to look at the effective DPS, instead of the raw DPS figure? Yeah, that's why. The DPS(e) figure is very close to the expected DPS figure of 7,478.

That means you spent almost zero time on adds. It also means he did comparable damage on the boss to you, while doing much more damage on the adds. So, on a fight where he did not need to split to adds he would have done about 22% more damage to the boss than you.

[borelock]

DPS is "damage per second", not average damage for the duration of the fight.

random theoretical example:
10 seconds of combat.
a warlock does 1000 damage in 10 sec.
a mage is asleep at the keyboard for the first 5 sec, then does 501 damage for 5 sec.

Lock has more total damage, but mage has higher DPS. Which is why the DPS number shouldn't be your goal, but that's another topic.

Pay attn in physics class

Just like horsepower. Its a measurement dependent on time. Not a raw force. If my car peaks output at 350hp at @ 5000rpm, that doesn't guarantee it can beat a car with only 300hp peaking at 4000rpm.

[gherkin]

DPS is "damage per second", not average damage for the duration of the fight.

random theoretical example:
10 seconds of combat.
a warlock does 1000 damage in 10 sec.
a mage is asleep at the keyboard for the first 5 sec, then does 501 damage for 5 sec.

Lock has more total damage, but mage has higher DPS. Which is why the DPS number shouldn't be your goal, but that's another topic.

Pay attn in physics class

Just like horsepower. Its a measurement dependent on time. Not a raw force. If my car peaks output at 350hp at @ 5000rpm, that doesn't guarantee it can beat a car with only 300hp peaking at 4000rpm.

Which is why time is the most important factor in dps. You don't get more of this than anyone else, but you can have less due to wasteful habits such as excessive movement.