DK DPS on WoW Patch 5.4 … again

I shouldn’t look at DPS Rankings, as they are skewed in ways that mean they are one source of input for performance and are nothing like a perfect. That said, the recent updates from SimCraft are giving me deja vu.

I wrote about the 5.3 Dps rankings in August this year, and this post could use many of the same words. Meaning the upward geared DKs will be fighting harder to get the same dps as some other classes. Ref: http://www.noxxic.com/wow/dps-rankings/realistic#553. 

This is the Ranking for ilevel 553-ish gear, and I’m uninspired by how the ilevels scale.

What do we have here for Patch 5.4?

dps rankings for pve raiding

Saw the wowinsider post about dps performance in raids, 10 man through LFR to 25 man Heroic. The disparity (based upon raidbot) between Unholy vs Frost Death Knights is wider than I thought, especially when you show the data given an average, and the Unholy is below average; approx 10-20% difference based upon ideal scenarios, depending on what style of raid you are playing in. Bugger.

Nobody likes being below average. 🙂 I’ll have to rectify my spec choice asap. 10% might translate doing ~12.5% of the dps in a fight into ~13%, which could also be considered a slightly faster transition between boss phases in most fights. That is a key factor in killing bosses successfully!

What is disparaging is that some classes-specs are not suffering a 10% gap, they’re in the 22-35% below average range! Some BM Hunter, Frost mages, and one Rogue spec are horrid, and Monks are not far behind them. By comparison a DK being 10% shy of average is doing OK. Now in contrast Rogues and Mages have a spec each that can do well, so all is not lost. Afflic Warlocks, Fire Mages and Shadow Priests should be lighting up the dps charts.

What should this type of information lead to?

Perhaps it should create awareness of the potential to improve by switching play styles amongst characters, and it should certainly serve as some guide for who to take to a raid. Taking a Mage who is not spec’ed into Fire is not doing the raid any favours (that is not to say don’t bring the player, et al – just be aware).

It should not be taken as an excuse to whine about balance and favoritism, there is enough of that already. As always theory crafting, especially via graphs should always be taken with a grain of salt. Happy killing.

Where do you stand within the Gearing community?

Today I ponder my item level. Non-gear junkies might look away?

There is a way (well many ways from different websites and many methods) to know how you are gearing for PvE by comparison to others, in guild, on server, and in general. Fundamentally this is a score based from the item level of the gear your character is wearing. I like using Wow-Heroes ranks to check gear and enchantments. It is a bit less math-y than some tools, and covers good recommendations to improvements.

Aside – ranking of position, and gear scores are essentially epeen malarkey, and only worth something to the owner, or if used “properly”. Wrath’s short romance and break-up with GearScore was a very interesting time in WoW, and one that could be a set of blog-posts unto themselves. As a tool for drawing quasi-intelligent conclusions the websites like wow heroes give us that opportunity. It considers

• real value of all items (not just their item level)
• all gems (their value and quality)
• all enchants (their value and quality)
• also gives a small penalty for using a resilience (PvP) items according to benefits from the useful stats from that item

What that tells me is that the GS is a useful measure of how advanced a character’s gear is, giving a plausible ceiling value and range for the character’s performance. The game also uses something similar when considering if a character is ready for Heroic dungeons and raids, although the algorithm in game appears to be less fussy and far more forgiving of offspec gear and bad choices.

Use any of the sites you like, understanding none are better than the other in the long run, unless you’ve a particular need.

So: I know that Mortigen’s dps gear is scored as 6663 from Wow Heroes, which ranks around 6-7ish in guild, and ~264th on the Nagrand server. That is also approx 10th on the server for Dps Death Knights.

While I’m proud I’m also a bit surprised and put off.

I play 3 nights a week and should be far lower in the rankings. It seems that something is not 100% in the ranks as presented. Perhaps this is the players who are ranked because it is what the servers can find on the players, or those players have had their data refreshed recently, and others have not. I imagine that all the high geared players would be ranked to a close approximate as they’d care and want to know, but then that itself is a huge assumption.

Then I checked Wow Progress (another tool, focused more on what the charterer has done, as well as what gear) and saw more humbling figures. They have my Death Knight’s Gear-Score (not the same math rules for the numbers) as 10550, which sits as 1024th on the realm and 83rd for Death Knights. That sounded more in line with what I expected.

But then I updated the Wow Progress tool, fetching the latest data. It altered to 10618, making Realm overall 712, and DK 49th. Fark, for a casual scrub that’s ok. It’s not even close to mid 200s on the server, but then that always sounded like a bunked number.

Finally for the sake of being particular I checked what Mr Robot had, and my very old score was 80602 from around 18 October (again the ranking on each site mean totally different things, they do not correlate). Then when updated today it rose to 84569.

I see also that almost all the higher geared DKs are using Frost, which matches what I’ve seen around and means I’ll likely switch soon to test it out too. The actual position is variable because of things like the rating given to different enchants or gear; and what gear a character is logged out wearing. eg. Sometimes I log-out in my Tanking set and fall down 25+ positions as it is poorly setup and not configured correctly.

Overall – odd. Something is not quite right…