<Undergeared, the Proven Assailant>: How much leeway do they get?

[TheTaurenOrc]

Lol, if you don't have 500+ ilvl at this point it just proves that you're lazy and looking for a carry. It doesn't matter if you can clear Flex with a lower ilvl, not even having 500 ilvl means that you can't even take 15 minutes to get freebie gear before trying to find a flex group. I'd rather filter out those people looking for a carry.

The problem I have with the Noxxic "sims" is that they do the sims in "BiS" gear for that ilvl based off of a patchwerk fight. The factors for doing dps are:
1) Legendary progression (no meta or cloak means that your dps is going to be terrible compared to everyone else)
2) Weapons (even for a caster, having good or bad weapons will greatly influence your dps more than your ilvl)
3) Trinkets (Having the right trinkets can boost your performance far beyond someone with a similar ilvl but worse trinkets)
4) Itemization (having poor itemization in gear can lower your performance below someone else with better itemization. Especially with SoO, its fairly easy to go far over the hit and exp caps)
5) Type of fight (Certain fights play to certain specs strengths and weaknesses - not everything is a patchwerk single target fight.)
6) Skill (Outside of completely playing your spec wrong, there is a small variation in DPS based on skill level. No spec is really all that complicated as far as dps goes)

Not having the ilvl does not equate to where or not a player is good or not. And nor does it prove you are lazy if your playtime is limited. All in all it sounds to me you like to think you are carrying these people, but padding out your raid with <Proven Assailant> types is really making your life easier, an thus they can help carry you. (Btw you do know less than 1% of the player base has the <Proven Assailant> vs 30% who have completed bronze. But I am sure that because you just haven't got round to it right?)

As for Noxxic, fine you don't like it, you have an alternative got to source for ball park dps?

[clevin]

You can find raids that will take a 520 dps on oQueue or Openraid. The group I'm in does this. The fact is that a bunch of us were 52x, 53x and when 5.4 started a couple were 54x. Obviously our ilevel has increased sine 5.4 dropped.

What you can't expect in a group like that is to stomp through and be done with flex in 3 hours. We typically kill 8 bosses in 3 hours. The group's 13/14. Compared to serious raid guilds this isn't impressive in the least; hell, I have a friend whose semi-casual normal mode 10 man goes 10/14 in one night. But it's fine for people who want to kill shit in an organized group, have fun and not act like we're better human beings because we raid better than others (I'm talking to the jacktastic comment above about how the poster wouldn't even talk to someone doing 150k... give me a fucking break).

Would I take a 540 over a 520? Sure, if I thought they were equally skilled, responsible etc, especially in a normal mode group. But in a flex group it just doesn't matter that much so if there was space and the 520 seemed reasonable (gemmed, enchanted, stats done correctly, etc) I'd invite and see how they did. If they played well and were pleasant to be around I'd reinvite. Gear takes care of itself after all. A 520 character that gives half a fuck will be running at least some LFR to grab drops which will pull up their ilevel and if they run flex with us they'll probably get some 540 drops too.

What would warn me off either toon is sloppiness. Poor stat choice, no gems or enchants, that kind of thing.

[Ariluz]

As for Noxxic, fine you don't like it, you have an alternative got to source for ball park dps?

You can use wowprogress simcraft DPS or use Simcraft. Simcraft is great when you're running your own chars because you can see whats best to reforge for based on your current setup. Also, I'm sorry, but pretty much anyone who has played at least 30 minutes this tier is 500 ilvl. Anyways, I generally look at their armory to see if they know what they're doing - so I usually use openraid for forming groups. I'm fine with taking newer people and even people under whatever ilvl I'm looking for if it looks like they know what they're doing.

[Kalmah]

The world of logs thing is easy, just take a look at a page like Malk normal mode ( http://worldoflogs.com/zones/Siege_o...mmar/Malkorok/ ) and you see the median rdps is about 1.4 mil. Assuming 5.5 dps, 2 tanks (each about 0.75 of a dps), and 2.5 healers as the average comp, we can divide that by 7 total effective dps = 204k dps, while the top logs of 10m normal is 485k ~= 42% for this one boss specifically. To be fair, the average player in LFR or Flex hasn't even killed normal Malk yet so this is likely to be skewed to be in favor of the average players' skill, so I dinged it a few percentage points. Healers also tend to do some dps, so again, a few percentage points dinged. Probably a better estimate would be looking for data on multiple classes on wow-heroes or something that provides a 50% median number and compare it to the top ranks for each fight, then get a median on the resulting percentage averages, but I'm too lazy and 35-40%'s close enough.

As for endless waves, there's a wide variance among the classes in how many waves they can do as you can see: http://www.wowprogress.com/char_stat...ield.pg_damage , but the worst performing classes seem to top out at around 50 waves of endless (druid, paladin, shaman). Using those as a limit, 30/50 is roughly 70%.

Edit: Obviously I'm being very hand-wavy here and with an engineering bias, the results are fairly approximate, but close enough to the mark. I guess a more accurate result might be proven title = 35 +/- 15 ilvls worth of gear.

The problem with this reasoning is it doesn't account for gear. What's the average gear level of someone in an average logged kill? What's the average gear level of someone posting a top 10 parse for his spec?

You're also not factoring in kill time. Shorter kills = more dps. Put the same player with the same character in two different raids, and his dps is going to change because of raid dps. On single target fight such as Malkorok, his dps will go up with higher raid dps. For fights like Galakras, his dps benefits from lower raid dps.

[Glurp]

The PG achievement means nothing. I'd much rather take a gamble on a random person with gear than take an undergeared person who is seemingly competent.

[Senen]

and this is Malkorok, one of the more DPS racey bosses.

Not in NM/Flex, no.
We sometimes struggled against some dps requirement in SoO, like against Spoils or Thok, but I'm yet to see a second p2 on Malkorok, I don't even know what his enrage looks like.

I'm pretty sure pre-nerf Flex Spoils was way more tight dps-wise than Flex Malkorok and required some pretty decent dps.

[Deleted]

Not having the ilvl does not equate to where or not a player is good or not. And nor does it prove you are lazy if your playtime is limited. All in all it sounds to me you like to think you are carrying these people, but padding out your raid with <Proven Assailant> types is really making your life easier, an thus they can help carry you. (Btw you do know less than 1% of the player base has the <Proven Assailant> vs 30% who have completed bronze. But I am sure that because you just haven't got round to it right?)

As for Noxxic, fine you don't like it, you have an alternative got to source for ball park dps?

Being below 500 ilvl shows you that:
the person has just dinged, the person just started playing this reset, the person plays like 1 hour a week or the person isn't trying. I'm exaggerating a tad, but you get the point. Skill can only offset for gear difference so much. The dps increase with better gear is just so huge. It's possible to be absolutely shit with good gear, but it's not possible to be better than a decent player who has way higher gear. Gear is very important in this game, unless you find a guild who's willing to gear you.

And yes not many player have gotten that achievement. It's incredibly dull and tedious. There are 2-3 difficult waves every 10 min. Without haste/crit/RPPM trinkets there is almost nothing to react to. It's like beating a training dummy, but without any kind of pre-planning your rotation (or importance of finishers for a feral). Very dull... I've only bothered when I've had nothing to do at all.

Also noxxic is terrible.

and this is Malkorok, one of the more DPS racey bosses.

It's not. Not on normal and not really on hc either. If you keep everyone alive and don't like... 3 heal it, the dps check shouldn't be hard to meet.

[Gilian]

You might be able to avoid mechanics and whatnot but you can not make up for 20 ilvls. 20 ilvls difference is huge at the moment. It's not just 20k dps. And being good at proving grounds doesn't mean much in the end. It doesn't mean I am good at multi dotting for example. I doesn't even mean I am good at adjusting/reacting to situations/mechanics because I could've just as well tried proving grounds 100 times in a row before I finally got that title.

Would I take someone with the title over someone who doesn't have it (with the same gear)? Sure. Same for players with CM gold medals.
Previous raiding experience is still more important.

[spekkiebig]

If the DPS version is the same unbalanced crap as the healer version then the title doesnt really say anything, then again: flex isnt really that hard so it wouldnt matter that much.

[drockrock]

I would argue that PG performance is actually a pretty good indicator of raid skill. Have set mechanics that have to be dealt with, both have optimal strategies that can either be developed independently or followed by someone who has mastered the content before you. Execution of said strategy while handling the unexpected (speaking as a feral again, if I get screwed by RNG and go through a dry spell of no crits for example I'll need to immediately recognize that and burn a cooldown to get caught back up to where I should be in the PG schedule, or wipe).

With the exception of mages/dks (I've only tried on feral druid) I can't imagine anyone is 1-shotting these Endless PGs, so there is some strategy development involved and then execution of said strategy, along with the situational awareness to adjust when things go wrong.

[Glurp]

I would argue that PG performance is actually a pretty good indicator of raid skill.

Being skilled doesn't make your abilities hit harder. You can be the best WoW player in the world but if you're 490 ilvl then your abilities are only capable of hitting a certain number.

[bewsh]

The title means nothing because it's BoA. Any mage/hunter/dk gets no treatment for the title.

This achievement was fucking stupid as a hunter. Get real.

They may as well have scaled us down to dread wastes greens.

[celinamuna]

i'd count it as +5 ilvl boost.

[bewsh]

You might be able to avoid mechanics and whatnot but you can not make up for 20 ilvls. 20 ilvls difference is huge at the moment. It's not just 20k dps. And being good at proving grounds doesn't mean much in the end. It doesn't mean I am good at multi dotting for example. I doesn't even mean I am good at adjusting/reacting to situations/mechanics because I could've just as well tried proving grounds 100 times in a row before I finally got that title.

Would I take someone with the title over someone who doesn't have it (with the same gear)? Sure. Same for players with CM gold medals.
Previous raiding experience is still more important.

Proving Grounds shows that you mastered the ability memorize where oozes spawn and place yourself optimally to maximize buff uptime to make your life easier. You dont even truly need them until like wave 12-14+ and even then messing them up is somewhat forgiven until you're pushing wave 17-18+ when they become required.

It will never be about absolute skill - despite how badly many people want it to be - until all classes and all gear scale the same at that ilvl. As long as things like engineering helm, extra gem sockets, and trinkets from that tier scaling exceptionally better than everything current, people will always cheese it as much it as they can.

And to echo others -- scaling is absurd right now. No way I'm taking a 520 geared person over a 550 for anything serious.