Comparison of DPS classes

[Kisko]

For each dps spec I took #50 dps position for eight heroic 25man boss fights from World of Logs and used average dps to make this chart (ICC buff is present of course). I didn't touched top spots, since they usually include Hysteria/PI/CleavePremade, but still I wanted number which can represent current capability of class using BiS gear and top player skill. It's quite hard to rank into World Top50 and you can frequently see people from CO/vodka/Paragon there.

Every H:ICC fight is included except Gunship/Dream (only trash there, idle time), Blood Queen (highest dps classes will get first bites), LK (not enough parses for heroic fight).

For the sake of comparison I included several less optimal/pvp specs, they are shadowed.

Full table with dps numbers:



Enjoy.

[Rekx]

Not to sure what you want to hear from the other users here.. Its not like we can go change this.

I do agree however that it seems unfair that there is such a large gap between 1st and last dps. Though bliz is already aware of these issues and is addressing most of them as far as I know.
The primary problem of warriors scaling with gear is one that is mentioned frequently, and its being taken care of I believe.

It would be nice to have a fix for these issues now, but I have a feeling we wont see any kind of changes until Cata hits.
So fear not, balance is on the way! (i hope >_< )

[MrWiggles]

don't warriors get free rage on this fight from all the aoe damage?

[Rekx]

don't warriors get free rage on this fight from all the aoe damage?

Its not just this fight, on most fights warriors have nearly endless rage which is a big part of the issue, along with scaling.
Thats why there is so much talk about rage normalization, etc.

[Timir]

i'm glad you picked the absolute worst fight for boomkins.
Boomkins is all about time procs (as in , for 10sec, instead of "next cast").
So we bascially proc eclipse to then have no time to "use" it.

ECLIPSE! puke puke puke move to spore, go back...
ECLIPSE! move to spore, back, puke puke.

just the worst. I sometime do really well, but mostly cause of RNG (not puking, spore on me..)

Plus I think melee in fester Regular have a much easier time than range. Heroic puts a little more complexity but still, stand and dps. we move
Pick patchwerk

[evan_s]

Fury warriors end up scaling too well because of the excessive rage generation. This allows them to spam heroic strike which increases their damage and also greatly devalues hit which allows them to gear for other dps stats. They also scale really well with Armor Pen which is another issue. It's the only stat that actually gets better as you get more of it, up to the cap. It's also why you see combat rogues beating Mut rogues and why MM hunters are near the top and the other 3 specs apparently aren't even viable to make the chart.

Even given that I don't know how statistically significant these numbers are. Top 25 parses is not a huge sample and when you factor in things like the potential for hysteria/ToT stacking on some parses but not others along with the fight mechanics (ranged potentially getting stunned and melee's potentially having to run a spore out, etc) I don't know that the sample size is large enough to eliminate other factors

[Shelly]

While I agree that there should be a much smaller % between the highest on the scale and the lowest on the scale I do want to say one thing about warriors, which is that you're talking about the highest raiding tier and it's a known problem that warriors scale WAY too well with gear. Not only from a rage perspective but from a weapon damage perspective (especially given how the BiS legendary is pretty easy to get.)

I think a more accurate representation would be to go through each raiding tier over this expansion and see where everyone has stood.

I mean it's one thing to just go "Warriors are doing too much damage!" it's another to see how they have built up to that damage.

/Yes, my main is a warrior.

[Gratlim]

In a perfect world, we should never have hybrids on the top, an us poor warlocks should be in the top 4 with rogues, hunter, mages. Now with this graph we clearly see they are outperformed by hybrids (3 plates wearers and cats). They better fix that in Cat.
/cry

[ceelion]

I love that only MM hunters on on this graph :S the point is further proven if you had SV numbers there and don't even get me started on BM

[Deleted]

In a perfect world, we should never have hybrids on the top, an us poor warlocks should be in the top 4 with rogues, hunter, mages. Now with this graph we clearly see they are outperformed by hybrids (3 plates wearers and cats). They better fix that in Cat.
/cry

In a perfect world every class specced for DPS should be able to output the same amount of DPS (Being a hybrid doesn't mean you can instantly start healing/tanking/dpsing etc, you actually need to SPEC and GEAR for that kinda thing (Apart from that, Cats are the class which has to work the most to do DPS, if anything they DESERVE it more than anyone else)).

[Deleted]

You chose the fight on which warriors have literally infinite rage due to the aoe and the fight on which ranged have the worst time by having to deal with goo's puke and spores, the fact that a fire mage is so high on this fight kind of speaks for how high their dps is more than the one fight in which a warrior cannot be beaten.

[Underskilled]

You chose the fight on which warriors have literally infinite rage due to the aoe and the fight on which ranged have the worst time by having to deal with goo's puke and spores, the fact that a fire mage is so high on this fight kind of speaks for how high their dps is more than the one fight in which a warrior cannot be beaten.

If you played a fury warrior, you would know that the best geared ones roll with +50% crit, which makes nearly every OH attack crit, which grants them endless rage regardless of the fight.

As for the OP, speaking as a boomkin, I can say festergut is not a great fight for measuring our dps, since we end doing a lot of moving around, which sucks in the middle of an eclipse.

[xxAkirhaxx]

Choosing to reference one fight for damage output is kind of skewed. Although warriors will dominate on fights which require burst dps and movement. Fury comes at the cost of providing shit utility though. They can piercing howl. Also with there large amount of dps comes the cost of no threat dumps and high threat attacks. Most warriors can't put out there maximum dps unless rogues/hunters/paladins are playing with the threat tables.

[Kisko]

I appreciate the discussion going, I didn't knew that Warriors excessive scaling is well known and likely will be fixed one day.
I'm well aware that my comparison is not perfect, but I believe main trend is showed correctly here.

- I picked Festergut, because it's the only true single-target fight at ICC. At other fights cleaving comes into play and some classes manage to pad meters to insane degree on these oozes/adds/etc. Right now I'm not trying to measure AoE dps. But I'm open to suggestions of how to improve this comparison, so feel free to post your ideas.

- I understand concern of Boomkins about excessive moving, but keep in mind that it's the Top25 World dps with 30% buff active. You don't need 3 spores during the fight anymore, you can survive with 1 or 2. Due to sheer amount of parsed logs you can be 100% certain that these 25 parses represent lucky cases where people didn't hamper their dps in any way, otherwise they wouldn't make Top25.

- It's not the only fight where Warriors do very well, browse WoL and you will see that they are dominating or near the top on every boss.

- Yes, melee have the easier time on Festergut, since they only have to move from one leg to another, but it's the case for most fights at ICC, we all know that. Mages still do well, regardless of the fact of being ranged and you can always compare yourself only to the same type of dps class, if you want to.

- Sadly, we can't pick Patchwerk since top guilds don't raid Naxx anymore. Existing Naxx parses don't have enough top world players to justify comparison.

- And yes, there is usually a few premade Hysteria/PIs parses at the top of each class, but since I'm picking #25 I hope it won't skew results. We can probably go lower, like Top100, but I doubt that picture will change much.

- I don't think analyzing how everyone was performing two Tiers ago is really interesting.

- Yes, I only put MM Hunters to the graph, since other two specs were much lower at 14-15k range.

- I believe pure dps classes should have dps advantage, since they have less possibilities to secure their raid spot, compared to hybrids.

[Lazertrooper]

I still maintain that heroic putricide is the best indication of a class's dps, there are aspects that handicaps both ranged (goo, plague) and melee (adds, bombs). Can you try making a graph for putricide? Pretty sure it will be very similar anyways to festergut.

[Bearcattreeowl]

I'd rather see a fight that involves little to no movement

Boomkins do a lot more than that, and its not fair to the people at the bottom(casters) because you need to move a decent amount

[Kisko]

I updated first post with new data and new chart, which use average of 8 boss fights.

While we can see some changes in ranks in between from my original Festergut-only chart, best and worst are pretty much the same, which was expected.

Warriors continue total domination, making gap between highest and lowest as large as 33% (both of them being a melee btw). Fire Mages come strong 2nd.

Boomkins and Shamans can use some buffs.

[LeperHerring]

In a perfect world every class specced for DPS should be able to output the same amount of DPS (Being a hybrid doesn't mean you can instantly start healing/tanking/dpsing etc, you actually need to SPEC and GEAR for that kinda thing (Apart from that, Cats are the class which has to work the most to do DPS, if anything they DESERVE it more than anyone else)).

In that perfect world of yours nobody would roll a pure dps class. Why would I roll a rogue when I can roll a kitty druid and have tank/caster/healer offspec just by farming gear for a week or two?

The top 4 dps should be rogue, mage, warlock and hunter, possibly with rogue doing slightly more dps than the ranged classes. The hybrids should do something like 5-10% less damage than pures.

[Link3492]

In that perfect world of yours nobody would roll a pure dps class. Why would I roll a rogue when I can roll a kitty druid and have tank/caster/healer offspec just by farming gear for a week or two?

The top 4 dps should be rogue, mage, warlock and hunter, possibly with rogue doing slightly more dps than the ranged classes. The hybrids should do something like 5-10% less damage than pures.

Exactly, 100% correct. I rerolled a priest for DPS utility, bringing a 3% hit buff to everyone, and the ability to go disc for LK whenever we needed it. Now my Mage couldn't do that, but that's precisely the reason my Mage should have a higher damage and dps throughput than my shadow priest, or any other hybrid for that matter. (I'm not saying that's the way it is now, but that's the way it should be)

[Om1]

In that perfect world of yours nobody would roll a pure dps class. Why would I roll a rogue when I can roll a kitty druid and have tank/caster/healer offspec just by farming gear for a week or two?

The top 4 dps should be rogue, mage, warlock and hunter, possibly with rogue doing slightly more dps than the ranged classes. The hybrids should do something like 5-10% less damage than pures.

why would I play a warrior, druid, paladin etc, when playing a hunter is so much more fun?
I'm just saying -Play the class you like the most because in the end blizard's goal is that all the dps-classes should be able to do equal amount of damage. no one will ever bring only 1 class because that class does more dps than all the other classes.

Hybrid classes work just as hard to gain their gear and skill with their spec as a pure dps class do, so why should they be punished for that?