DPS meters all over the place?

[Eekumpokeum]

Hey all, so I have been having this issue between Recount and Skada. I use Recount. Love it. Last night on Garrosh I was pushing 320k, so my meters told me. Other people in raid were saying I was doing bad dps, which I thought jokingly as I was consistently number 1 and 2. I whispered one of my buddies to tell me what he had me as, and he said 286k dps. He uses Skada. Thats a pretty big difference and I wanted to know, why was his Skada showing me with way less DPS? Is one or the other super inaccurate? Let me know. Thanks

[Deleted]

Recount shows the dps you did whilst active, meaning if you stop attacking for a minute your dps won't go down. Skada takes your total damage and divides it by the fight length, so this shows your actual damage per second over the fight. I use recount personally and always have it on the damage done option so that I can see how much damage I've done in comparison to other people, as opposed to damage per second. Due to all this if you die on recount your dps stays what it was at death, whereas skada your dps continues to go down until the fight is finished.

[grimsanta]

Its possible they were out of range for certain periods here and there, which would greatly alter your dps. Those tools should be for personal use. I'm not sure how log websites work, but they seem to be more accurate...maybe?

[SL1200]

I use recount, but i've been told that skada is much more accurate. I think it shares data with other skada users or something like that.

[Deleted]

Could be that your DPS-meter is showing you the dps from over the whole dungeon/raid... this could mean that the dps 'average' gets cranked up by AOE fights ... giving a misleading high number of DPS even when fighting a boss.... I'm just guessing tho

[Deleted]

Damage done has more actual use, distance and many other factors cause different numbers and even diff meters, get a couple of people to take combat logs and upload them to a logs site to get more accurate figures.

[Breccia]

Recount shows the dps you did whilst active, meaning if you stop attacking for a minute your dps won't go down. Skada takes your total damage and divides it by the fight length, so this shows your actual damage per second over the fight.

This is why I like to use worldoflogs.com It refers to the first as DPS, and the second as DPS(e). However, it's not a scrolling addon, you can't access the information instantly.

[Deleted]

Its possible they were out of range for certain periods here and there, which would greatly alter your dps. Those tools should be for personal use. I'm not sure how log websites work, but they seem to be more accurate...maybe?

This also, if your damage done on your meter doesn't match up with their damage done (within a few %) then they probably went out of range of you for some of the fight. If you are a melee dps then whenever you are moving/not attacking your dps on Skada will go down and your dps on recount will stay the same.

EDIT: 400th post, yay!

[Deleted]

From memory, Skada calculates your "effective" DPS from the moment you enter fight until the boss dies or you wipe. Recount on the other hand stops if you die or become inactive for a while (5-10 seconds?)

[Belloc]

OP: Any chance you had Overall damage selected and not that particular attempt?

[Lessthanzer0]

Recount shows the dps you did whilst active, meaning if you stop attacking for a minute your dps won't go down. Skada takes your total damage and divides it by the fight length, so this shows your actual damage per second over the fight. I use recount personally and always have it on the damage done option so that I can see how much damage I've done in comparison to other people, as opposed to damage per second. Due to all this if you die on recount your dps stays what it was at death, whereas skada your dps continues to go down until the fight is finished.

This. It all depends on preference. I use skada but it isn't necessarily more "accurate." It just calculates dps differently. Logs on the other hand calculate both for you. It's called dps (what skada uses) and dps(e) (what recount uses). Logs also don't have the same ranges issues. I don't think logs even mess up on the norushen test realms anymore but I could be wrong.

[Deleted]

Skada is highly inaccurate, don't use that crap.

[Eekumpokeum]

Wow so many responses after a few minutes, haha. Thanks for the insight. For others, I use Current Fight, Damage Done (Not just DPS)

OP: Any chance you had Overall damage selected and not that particular attempt?

I always use current fight selected.

[Belloc]

In that case, do you have a WoL report for that raid?

[mistahwilshire]

Use Damage Done as a metric anyway. DPS is pointless as both addons measure it from flawed perspectives.

[CodeConqueror]

Also, Recount starts tracking from the time combat starts whereas Skada doesn't start until you personally do something which can also account for inaccuracies between the 2. I personally use Recount for Damage Done window so I can see total damage for the fight as well as average DPS and then I use Skada to have a Total Healing and a Damage Taken window open to help monitor general performance during the raid (though only Damage Done window would be useful if you're not raid leading; using combo of both addons because Recount doesn't support multiple windows and Skada's damage done isn't calculated and tracked the way I'd like).

[Bigbazz]

With recount once you stop dealing damage (including dots ticking off) it will stop the counter, and start again when you start doing damage again. This makes it better on fights with downtime/movement inbetween phases and other times when you will not be doing dps, but some prefer to see the dps number drop over time using Skada, as it normalises the dps seen when dots are falling off. With recount classes with less dots can often show higher "dps" than dot heavy classes, due to the dot class dps figure decreasing during non combat as the dots fall off, where as with Skada this effect doesn't happen.

The damage done is what matters ultimately and both will show the same thing, dps is just used for rough comparison sakes. I much prefer to use Recount, tried Skada a few times and just don't like it as much.

[Raiju]

This. It all depends on preference. I use skada but it isn't necessarily more "accurate." It just calculates dps differently. Logs on the other hand calculate both for you. It's called dps (what skada uses) and dps(e) (what recount uses). Logs also don't have the same ranges issues. I don't think logs even mess up on the norushen test realms anymore but I could be wrong.

They still have both issues. You don't pick up people in different phases, and you can outrange (notably on spoils, but seen it happen on immerseus a couple times)

[SlippyCheeze]

I use recount, but i've been told that skada is much more accurate. I think it shares data with other skada users or something like that.

No, Skada just measures DPS the same way that WoL and warcraftlogs do, which is "effective" DPS over the fight, not DPS over the active time. Both have their place; the later is more useful for measuring your relative performance between pulls, the former is more effective for measuring who contributed to the fight overall.

Details! does have data sharing between users of the addon, though I don't know the detail of how that works and what is shared. It also offers the option of both measures of DPS, which is nice. The downside: it's new, and regularly changes so that, eg, skins need to be reset, which is annoying. Performance seems adequate, but not enough to copy with a fully loaded 25 person raid. (Skada had the same problem. Didn't try recount, but expect the same. So it isn't *worse* than the competition, just not enough better to avoid the problem.

[ComputerNerd]

Skada is highly inaccurate, don't use that crap.

Wonderful depth of insight there.
Skada isn't really any more or less accurate than recount, just often called so for no reason other than it having different numbers.
But hardly anyone wants to look into WHY the numbers are different.
Different definitions of DPS, since there is no official or agreed upon standard to which we should be adhering.
Recount became the "de-facto" standard due to being the first to offer a good toolkit and unlike most continued to be updated, much like how people still recommend Quartz or Pitbull.
Recount offers more tools than Skada, but no meter should be used as a ranking against other players without a good look at more than a single number.