Damage difference from normal to Heroic, too high?

[Yoshimiko]

I recently got to join in with a heroic raid group and the very first thing that really shocked me is the sheer numbers players are able to pump out. On trash pulls, very few people were under a million dps, on bosses, players were regularly over 500k dps, even on fights with high levels of movement. This really made me think..why is there such a difference in just 30 item levels?

I regularly do things, scenarios, dungeons, old content, etc. with a group of friends. We're all DPS, in gear between 500 to 550 ilvl. Our weakest geared player pulls ~95-100k dps pretty regularly. He's pretty close to what he should sim at, and he's ilvl 505. I'm sitting at 551 Ilvl, and I pull roughly 200k-220k on everything. Sim shows me at 250kish, and I pull around that in raids. I was 483 about a month ago, and I was pulling ~75k dps, and sim showed me around there.

Now, here's where my issue is. In the group I was just running with, a Normal SoO run, I was the bottom DPS. That's fine and all, but I was dwarfed by #18 by so much I didn't even feel like I should be there. #18 was pulling 396k DPS on Garrosh. #1 was pulling upwards of 900k before we got pulled in. Mind you this is *without lust*. Blackfuse most of the raid was over 1.2million DPS the entire fight, ending with the second lowest DPS player*ignoring healers* at 650k. Me at 265k. This is with pre-pot, proper food, proper rotation, etc.

So my question is: Do you think the difference between those last 30 item levels should be this..massive? To be frank, this feels kind of ridiculous. We're not talking 20% between normal vs heroic gear. We're not talking even 100%. We're talking *500%* damage difference on blackfuse. Ilvls 483-500 is about a ~30% damage increase. 500-535 is ~30-50% damage increase. 535-550 is ~50-70%, 550-588 is ~400-500%. Something just sounds..wrong.

[adynn]

Now, here's where my issue is. In the group I was just running with, a Normal SoO run, I was the bottom DPS. That's fine and all, but I was dwarfed by #18 by so much I didn't even feel like I should be there. #18 was pulling 396k DPS on Garrosh. #1 was pulling upwards of 900k before we got pulled in. Mind you this is *without lust*. Blackfuse most of the raid was over 1.2million DPS the entire fight, ending with the second lowest DPS player*ignoring healers* at 650k. Me at 265k. This is with pre-pot, proper food, proper rotation, etc.

Relying on sims for this kind of stuff is misleading as players often forget about the simulated fight length. No one is going to be simming 1.2M dps in any kind of gear unless they modify the conditions to emulate Blackfuse (really, really short fight I'm assuming). So saying you're doing well when you just hit your sim numbers on this fight is probably not a good conclusion as you should be hitting higher numbers there even in 550.

Also Garrosh phase one is a bunch of padding.

[Totaltotemic]

There are two things at work here, the first is that a lot of those fights involve AoE. No one is doing 1.2 million single target DPS on any fight, but Crawler Mine AoE is a ton. The only real purely single target fight you can look at is Iron Juggernaut, looking at anything else won't give you an accurate picture.

The second is that skill is a massive part of DPS. That's not to say how good you are at your class, but also how well you know the fights and what your muscle memory is like. A typical guild farming heroic Garrosh has been doing so for probably at least 3 months by now, which means they've done the fights before that a lot more. I personally celebrated my 35th Immerseus kill on my Monk on Tuesday, it's a lot different when you've done a fight 30+ times than when you haven't done it much before.


It's not that the item level difference is that massive. There isn't a 50% damage increase from 535 to 550 ilvl, that's ridiculous, there are only 15% more stats for 15 ilvls. The real difference is that people with better gear are also usually people that play more, and if they play more they are generally better because they're a lot more practiced.

[Teye]

Its not the 30 ilvls. Its the skill of the players involved. When you raid with people who are progressing on normals, you raid with people who are meeting 60% or less of their potential dps. When you raid with a 14/14H group, depending on when they cleared the content, they're doing 80%+ of their potential DPS.

[Jiigeri]

I agree that it's not only about the itemlevel but you're seriously underestimating the difference between 550ilvl and 580+ itemlevel. It's a huge gap and definately has huge impact to DPS. Assuming OP is decent (or good) at his class, the ilvl difference is likely to be the main cause of such a huge dps gap.

[Larynx]

I don't have any numbers, but there is very obvious exponential growth with ilvl vs performance. Stats scale wonderfully off each other. Like assuming 1 intellect at 500 ilvl = 1 dps, at 550 ilvl 1 intellect might equal something like 1.5 dps. At 580 dps it might equal close to 2.5 or 3 dps.

Crit effect is the most obvious one. Crit effect is directly proportional to the amount of crit chance. At 50% crit chance, 1% crit effect = 0.5% crit chance. At 100% crit chance, 1% crit effect = 1% crit chance. So by gaining crit rating, I'm also indirectly getting more benefit from crit effect even with the exact same crit effect.

Disc priest mastery and crit (on top of crit effect) likewise scale off each other. More mastery = higher crits. More crits = more benefit from mastery.

Item level scaling in WoW is ridiculous once players approach the end of expansion top gear levels. That's compounded by the fact that those players are significantly better than other players at lower gear levels, on top of having shorter fight lengths (more uptime on heroism + CDs = more avg DPS).

[kamuimac]

Its not the 30 ilvls. Its the skill of the players involved. When you raid with people who are progressing on normals, you raid with people who are meeting 60% or less of their potential dps. When you raid with a 14/14H group, depending on when they cleared the content, they're doing 80%+ of their potential DPS.

well that is just soooo not true - my skills didnt change between hc tot and hc soo - yet im doin 3-4x the dps i was doin in 545 gear now that im 586 - yes the itlv scalling is ultra crazy this expansion and anyone claiming different is just simply plainly laying to make himself look better.

[Larynx]

well that is just soooo not true - my skills didnt change between hc tot and hc soo - yet im doin 3-4x the dps i was doin in 545 gear now that im 586 - yes the itlv scalling is ultra crazy this expansion and anyone claiming different is just simply plainly laying to make himself look better.

Heroic ToT DPS was around 200-300k. 3-4x that is averaged around 900k dps.

Pulling that much DPS is on very specific fights, for specific classes, with the raid intentionally letting that player pad for the entire duration of the fight in near BIS gear. I really think that's quite an exaggeration. The vast majority of situations you're gonna average probably 400-500k in H SoO for top end.

Like just taking someone in my guild, 96th percentile he did 410k dps on H Garrosh. 4% of all parses are better than that. Different guy, first fight I pulled up his most recent parse is 97th percentile for H Thok. He did 388k dps. Protectors looks like the highest, with 4m kills and 3 target cleave. His most recent parse is 99th percentile, did 672k dps.

[Wilderness]

1) You and your group of friends who are 500-550 likely don't have legendary cloaks and may not even have the legendary meta gem either. Those things are a nice boost.
2) Yes, those ilvls can make a big difference for a variety of reasons: Amplification trinkets, having perfect BiS which gives you the absolutely best stats for your spec rather than suboptimal ones, set bonuses (I doubt a lot of 500-550 people have 4-sets, and possibly not even 2), and how many classes scale so much better with higher levels of stats.
3) The level of play in a guild in full BiS who has been farming 14/14H for months is simply going to be much higher, and they know the fights very well at this point.
4) Because of the level of skill and gear, fights are much shorter which gives you higher numbers, and also may allow you to do fights in ways that allow for better padding (such as tanking H Shamans together the whole time).
5) You are either exaggerating the numbers or just looking at specific segments of fights that have AoE in them (like P1 on Garrosh) - some classes have very high burst AoE damage (hi chain lightning!). But those numbers are not sustained for a whole fight - for instance, the #1 parse on warcraft logs for H Seigecrafter is 970k. Most of your raid is not doing 1.2m sustained dps on that fight, and 650k on that fight is in the top 200 with the vast majority of those parses being tanks.

So yes, there is a rather large difference in performance at different ilvls for a variety of reasons - but its not quite as huge as you're making it sound.

[Tharkkun]

Its not the 30 ilvls. Its the skill of the players involved. When you raid with people who are progressing on normals, you raid with people who are meeting 60% or less of their potential dps. When you raid with a 14/14H group, depending on when they cleared the content, they're doing 80%+ of their potential DPS.

Even if that's true, someone with 580 gear would have an extreme advantage due to the way gear scales as ilevel goes up. Someone doing 60% at 580 would beat someone at 80% with 561 gear. That stat inflation and how stats are baked into skills causes this problem.

[trystero]

Now, here's where my issue is. In the group I was just running with, a Normal SoO run, I was the bottom DPS. That's fine and all, but I was dwarfed by #18 by so much I didn't even feel like I should be there. #18 was pulling 396k DPS on Garrosh. #1 was pulling upwards of 900k before we got pulled in. Mind you this is *without lust*. Blackfuse most of the raid was over 1.2million DPS the entire fight, ending with the second lowest DPS player*ignoring healers* at 650k. Me at 265k. This is with pre-pot, proper food, proper rotation, etc.

This is ridiculous. I do not believe "most of the raid" had over 1 million DPS on Blackfuse for some random NM SoO run. The kind of players who pull those numbers, and end the fight so quickly that it basically concludes during bloodlust, are locked and full clearing 14/14H Tuesday night. Boy that was some group you fell into, where everyone would've broken the rankings on World of Logs.

- - - Updated - - -

So my question is: Do you think the difference between those last 30 item levels should be this..massive? To be frank, this feels kind of ridiculous. We're not talking 20% between normal vs heroic gear. We're not talking even 100%. We're talking *500%* damage difference on blackfuse. Ilvls 483-500 is about a ~30% damage increase. 500-535 is ~30-50% damage increase. 535-550 is ~50-70%, 550-588 is ~400-500%. Something just sounds..wrong.

Where are you getting these numbers? You're right, something does sound "wrong": you're just making them up just like you made up that phantom raid's DPS. As someone who has gone from a 550 ilvl to 580+ I can verify that the damage increase is not 500%, lol. Are you aware how high that actually is?

[Andaja]

Garrosh p1 dps is just pure add damage. You can go up to million. Nothing surprising there.
For blackfuse, im sure you are overexagerating it. Even if it is zerg tactic you still need someone on belt. So if belt was taken care of it is possible for the fight to be so short that people can get into 600k range or more.
All in all, im not sure if you are asking about the "butt rape" you received or the damage difference overall. If its overall I don't see any problem since that was padding coupled with bis gear, which for last raid in expansion, an ok in my eyes.
but if it was the first one, then as people said, its just the gear difference. You can't do anything about it if you just don't have the sheer stat points to pull the same weight.

Btw, I just remembered blackfuse is normal. On normal there is literally "nothing" going on for dps. They can just nuke nuke nuke (belts still matter to a degree). The fight is going to be extra short, thus the numbers are super inflated.
So cheer up and just know it is not your fault, you just need to get accustomed to fights and get the gear to back it up.

[Vereesa]

You're exaggerating the numbers by a pretty ridiculous margin. Over 50% of the raid ending 25N Siegecrafter Blackfuse with over 1.2m DPS? There are very few specs that can mathematically sustain that much DPS over Bloodlust, let alone the entire length of an encounter.

But to answer your question: Yes, the 40+ ilevel difference between now and ToT BiS can definitely account for more than a 100% DPS increase, and for some classes that difference is significantly higher.

[Spotnick]

Blackfuse most of the raid was over 1.2million DPS the entire fight, ending with the second lowest DPS player*ignoring healers* at 650k. Me at 265k. This is with pre-pot, proper food, proper rotation, etc.

Considering the top log for Blackfuse is 900k and it's a tank with the buff from the shredder, you must have found an amazing raid. The top non-tank DPS on that fight is about 650k DPS... I think it goes to 800k on asian servers due to the ilvl boost they have.

And to answer your question, Blizzard already said it's exponential and that is why they are doing the stat squish in patch 6.0

[Larynx]

Considering the top log for Blackfuse is 900k and it's a tank with the buff from the shredder, you must have found an amazing raid. The top non-tank DPS on that fight is about 650k DPS... I think it goes to 800k on asian servers due to the ilvl boost they have.

And to answer your question, Blizzard already said it's exponential and that is why they are doing the stat squish in patch 6.0

Exponential gains are relevant only for single level increments. Higher levels have reduced scaling, due to an increase of stats. 600 crit = 1% crit at 90. 14 crit = 1% crit at 60.

None of the issues presented in this thread are solely unique to MoP, and the stat squish literally has zero to do with it. The stat squish does nothing to address these issues, and they will still be present in WoD with or without it.

[Socialhealer]

sounds like you have 17 dps all 587 ilvl and killing siegecrafter in 2 minutes flat to keep dps that high.

in that case your 265k is pathetic and you should be well over 400k for a short fight.

oh and garrosh sounds like whoring, if you single target and don't actively cleave you'll get it done much faster than going full AoE just for numbers and adds will still die to single target passive cleave/AoE. oh and you can knockback adds for 50% of their health into an iron star so that high damage is worthless damage.

it's about as useful as me spamming chain lightning into the shaman trash with 8 healing tides up, yup over 1million worthless padding dps.

[Gardiff]

Dunno if it was already stated, but one of the biggest things is kill time and buff up-time. Basically if each DPS is carrying their weight, then it actually helps the group as a whole due to lust uptime, pot uptime, proc (to an extent) uptime, cd uptime etc. Underhealing adds to this (more dps = boss dies faster = same stuff seen) along with solo tanking to an extent.

Just think like this for an example with lust (its pretty easy to see and you probably already know it).

Lets say you are in a group that kills nazgrim in 160 seconds (roughly 20 seconds before def stance ends or 2:40). Lust uptime in this case will be 25%. Now lets adds another 160 seconds (roughly 5:20 or 20 seconds into the 2nd def stance). Lust uptime becomes 12.5%. What happens if we added another 160 seconds (8 minute kill). Now lust uptime is only 8.33%.

Look at that difference, however. In the latter case of a kill of 320 seconds vs 480, the lust uptime difference is small. But when the kill time is 160 vs 320 seconds, lust uptime difference is huge. This kind of idea can be extended to pretty much any other buff / cd (to an extent) as well.

Thus, as people collectively get better, buff times and what-not become more and more pronounced as the fight goes shorter (its not just a linear increase in buff-time is my point) which helps to let them pull those kinds of numbers that you observe.

Of course there are SO many other things (padding, better players, ilvl increase in gear being high, etc etc), but this is still a pretty big one that you should remember and I did not see it mentioned too much.

[cFortyfive]

We're talking *500%* damage difference on blackfuse.

You are exaggerating the differences by a metric shitton. Still the differences are quite huge this addon - I don't think though it matters too much in the end.