ICC DPS analysis by spec
I love numbers. I love facts and statistics, I love looking through them and speculating on the different possible interpretations. As we move into the end of Wrath, I thought it would be a nice time to take a look at everybody’s favorite number, DPS, and see how each spec is doing in ICC.
But rather than just looking at the top DPS of each spec, I thought it would be more interesting to see where the average DPS for each spec is, across all gear levels, all skill levels — to get a glimpse of how the average raider is doing. While we don’t have access to the DPS of every raider out there, we do have something close, and that something is World of Logs.
World of Logs is a combat log analyzer that many raids use to see how to improve their performance. It provides a lot of useful information, far, far more than just DPS, and they also post the top 200 DPS results for each boss and spec. About 30,000 raid parses are uploaded to WoL every week. Miles over at World of Logs was kind enough to spend far too much time writing and running custom scripts to provide me with a massive data dump of information not publicly available that lets us get a pretty good look at where the average raider’s DPS is.
Join me after the cut as we take a look at both where the average DPS of each spec is in ICC, and where the top DPS of each spec is as well.
About the data
All data is for ICC 25-man normal mode.
The data for average DPS was gathered from a sampling of about 25% of all the raid parses during the 10% raid buff period in ICC. This ensures that the raid buff was the same for all parses, and the gear levels were fairly recent. This data encompasses all gear levels, all skill levels, and includes both wipes and kills. Clearly aberrant results (like 0 DPS) were removed before calculations. There was nearly a half million lines of data that went into the averages calculations.
Some important notes about the averages:
This number does not in any way represent the damage that you can do, or your class can do. It’s possible that certain specs reflect higher not because they’re capable of more DPS, but just because they’re easier to play, as one example. Since this data comes from World of Logs, it is not necessarily representative of all raiders. In general we assume that the kind of raiders that upload parses to WoL are probably a bit more serious about their raiding on average, so across the board these numbers are likely to be a bit higher than average. However, since WoL does not represent a random sampling of all raiders, it is not possible to calculate a margin of error. I do think, however, that this is the more accurate possible data to which we have access, and it’s probably darned close to what’s going on. The graphs are formatted to show the scale starting at near the lowest represented DPS, rather than at zero. This is in effect “zooming in” to get a higher fidelity view of the comparative DPS. Actual DPS numbers are included, rounded to the nearest 100 DPS. Frost mages and subtlety rogues were severely under-represented in the data, to the extent that the results for these specs are unreliable. Other low-representation specs like arms warriors still had thousands of results, but frost mages had at times less than 50. Death knights are not included at all in the averages. Because they can tank or DPS in any of their specs, there was no way to separate out the tank damage from the DPSer damage. This results in inaccurate numbers, for example showing blood DKs as doing less DPS than even frost mages. While the frost mages are under-represented and we don’t know if the numbers are accurate, we know for a fact that the DK numbers are just plain wrong, so they’re not included. The data for the top DPS by spec was taken as the median of the top 200 results for each spec (and here we are able to safely include DKs). Taking the median lets us eliminate some of the over-inflated top results — they guy who got 20 Tricks of the Trade in the course of one fight, for example. However these results are still showing players with fantastic gear, great skill, all raid buffs, and really good luck to boot. They are a fair representation of the potential of a spec in any given fight.