I’ve talked before about how the dps calculations of recount are frequently off and you should use Damage Done to evaluate your dps. One thing I’ve noticed pretty consistently is that the meters love to boost mage dps – sometimes excessively.
I’m not sure why this is. Does it have something to do with mages ennervating (or whatever) freezing their dps calculations rather than counting the time against them? Does it manage to stop calculating time while they cast long cast spells?
I was raiding 25-man beasts last weekend and saw a great example of this, and a rather frustrating raid fight.
Early in the worms phase the tank turned the worm a bit more than he should have and nuked a chunk of the dps with the worms breath, including me (and let me just say it sucks to be a tank – if I make a mistake only I die). I was fortunate enough to get a battle rez, so after some time in viper I was able to continue the fight until I died again on the yeti to the breath and no heals (though of course I was without buffs now – perhaps with buffs I’d have survived it.)
So a frustrating fight, and either one of those deaths are generally enough to lose the top of the meters for that fight, which of course I did. I was happy to see badass mage from my 10-man team on top, but then I was shocked to see a crazy 7k dps!
This meter makes no sense to me. Of the top 5, everyone but me lived through the entire fight. We’re looking at damage done where Badass Mage topped the meter with 7,044 dps and 8.5% of the damage done. I’m at 5,306 dps and 8.0% of damage done. So that 0.5% drop in damage done is 1,738 dps.
But wait — if we go down another 0.5% to 7.5% damage done we have a ret pally with 5,024 dps – just 282 dps down. So is a half a percent difference of overall damage done throughout the entire fight 282 dps, or 1,738 dps? The time and total damage done are constant here — so dps should be the only variable.
What is it about recount and mages? It’s not uncommon for me to have more damage done than a mage and the mage is reported as higher dps. My best guess puts this meter off by around 1,500 dps (my hunch is the mages actual dps for the fight was around 5,700).
I have no idea what the reason is here, only speculation. But the point is – always use damage done and not dps to see damage contribution. The only time to really use the dps is to compare someone who died to someone who didn’t – and then realize that it’s probably wrong (did dying make my dps report higher, since I didn’t lose dps time on yeti crashes, stuck to the wall as time and my dots ticked away? Was it lower because I didn’t get to dps the yeti when it was stunned and damage was doubled?).
This has been a pretty constant source of recount frustration for me – and I wish they’d identify the problem and fix it. I mean, really.
I got a few possible answers to your problem. One day. while browsing somemacro site, in search of macros, I found a macro that fakes a big hit varible causing the meters to boost. It basically sends a big hit to the recount, not the actual boss. But i don’t think anyone but the dude who wrote it and noobs would be dumb enough to try it. I don’t like cheaters so i quicky closed the page and soon after found this site, which “actually” helped me. BUt just saying, as a video game programmer, it wouldn’t be hard.
But what i do think happened here?
If you are not targeting the enemy. the dps on the meter haults. Thats why, i tend to off click the boss after death, while the long term stings and such from my SV spec will continue to burn for a duration of time. I am not sure about MM shots, but listen to what i seen a mage do.
THey AOE the thrash mob, (mages have uber AOE) get there DPS up to +7000, untarget every boss, and guess where there DPS sits? Yeah, on top of the hunter, whos giving it everything they got. But wouldn’t we pass them in damage done? Usually thats the case.
Conclusion?
I dunno, im stuck…..but they gotta fix recount. BIG TIME!
I definitely agree that damage done should be used a lot more often for examining performance on a fight.
Use DPS to *predict* how much a person will output during a fight.
Use damage done to get the actual reading.
It all depends on the fight, anyway. AoE spam wins out big time for stuff like Ony, making damage meters ultimately useless.
I prefer Skada as a damage meter, which gives slightly different reads. Also, and this is an issue in 25 man fights if your PC is not some gaming console on steroids, Skada uses on hell of a lot less resources. (On that note, I’ve recently started using an addon called Leatrix to reduce latency and it helped an awful lot).
But yes, there’s something amiss with mages and (to some extent) destro locks and dps meters (anything with massive AoE, really, on Ony whelps, goes even for Rogues and Warriors sometimes). I remember some fool in an Ony25 PuG, linking dps (without percentage and damage total), playing a mage, of course and it read 9k dps for him or thereabouts. He then went: “Pwned succers” (direct quote). Problem was, he died during the first breath, because, well, nice to AoE whelps, but standing in a huge flamecloud often hurts. His damage total was better then two tanks and worse then the complete rest of the dps. So, tbh, I really look at damage total, not dps, because the latter can be manipulated so easily.
I whole hearly agree with you Frost and Ciddy. I’ve personally never really trusted the actual DPS portion of Recount though I do look at it from time to time to see what my group/raid is approximatly putting out. I have my Recount set to Damage Done. If I top the charts or come close to the top on Damage Done, I’m going to be happy with myself.
One example that people missuse Recount Data is when splitting groups up for a fight, such as Thaddius in Naxx. They will look at either the Overall Fight or the most Current Fight which is about 4 mobs. That is not what you look at, you have to go back to one of the previous Boss Encounters, preferrably Patchwerk. That meter is what you need to use to base your split off of. I’m sure there are other boss fights in raids past Naxx that would benefit from a smart Raid Leader in this type of situation but I personnally don’t know much past Naxx yet.
If an AOE is used at any point during the fight then Recount is going to be off. There is no doubt about that.
well in a fight like beasts there is no real aoe so thats not what makes it seem off. I think what it is, is that arcane mages have high burst and zero ticking dots and its the ticking dots that keep recount calculating dps so say if we shoot the boss with our serp sting and then say the worms go under the ground or icehowl does his huge stomp, we stop doing our large shots but our dots keep ticking whereas a mage just stops dps completely and therefore recount stops calculating their dps so it will stay at the point where they stopped dpsing. This is just a theory anyway, I hadnt really thought about this before, ill have to check it out next 25man.
I have an arcane mage in my regular 25 raid and although his dps is sometimes higher then mine, my damage done is almost always higher.
i have also noticed this with mages lately, although only with really well geared mages with 4 pieces of t9+245 trinks. recount shows them almost 2k dps over the rest of us on most fights. 10 hodir hard mode recently mage at 16k dps, rest ~12k, sarth3d 10 man zerg, mage hits 8k+, rest of us at 5k-6k. although in both cases such a huge gap in damage done is not seen.
The Mage just goes and takes a cup of tea, then comes back and goes on with his DPSing.
Best to also look in recount at Activity, tanks and good hunters are very high there.
Honestly, when you die, you’re contributing nothing to the fight, and thus I think that damage done is still a fair comparison for people who have died.
“You did really crappy damage on this fight.”
“Well, I died.”
“Well, don’t die next time.”
Especially on a fight like beasts, if you die, it’s because you’re screwing up. Own up to it.
Survival isn’t a priority higher than DPS; it’s a necessary part of DPS.
Recount isn’t perfect–darn thing won’t show my pet’s damage half the time–but it’s only doing what it’s programmed to do. Maybe he stopped dps’ing: on other side of room away from worms, didn’t dps Icehowl except when he crashed, e.g. Maybe he got lucky: right next to Icehowl when he crashes then hit Mirror Images and Arcane Power, popped a Wild Magic pot, and crit a bunch of times in a row. Tis quite possible the mage broke 7k dps without Recount bonking. Instead of hating on Recount, use Recount to see what’s going on. What was his damage on each of the targets? What was his time on the target? Also, ask him what he did differently on this fight versus previous fights. Maybe he respecced. Maybe he read about a way to max dps on this fight.
Sorry, this post sounds like QQ. Instead of figuring out why the mage beat you, you blame Recount. Could be the culprit. Could be the mage outplayed you. Could be both.
<– Mage noob
Does "Mirror Image" affect the Recount numbers at all?
Whenever I see our badass mage's numbers THAT high, I just assume it's due to AoE…same with a Boomkin…
I have read that Recount uses total damage (hunter+pet) to calculate damage done, but uses personal DPS (hunter, NO pet) to calculate DPS.
YMMV. Check (damage done/activity time), see what DPS that gives you with and without your pet. Alternatively save your combat log, upload to worldoflogs, win.
I find recount to be nice during fights as a rought gauge, but that one needs to branch out for more useful tracking.
In my guild we’ve been using worldoflogs for a little while now, and the DPS charts that pumps out are very useful indeed for analysing fights by segment after the fact.
I was actually thinking about just this the other day and the conclusion I came to is that recount must be performing some kind of real time averaging, rather than basing it on (the seemingly logical) Damage dealt/time in combat. Because Mages are quite bursty they will have spikes where they are doing tremendous dps and then return to whatever their base line is or even stop dpsing all together to innervate. It seems almost as though recount is storing dps as a separate value and it averages that, rather than calculating it in real time based on damage done/time.
I can see the advantage of this approach, though. For a class that has a lot of burst damage, knowing what you can or did burst to can be helpful in deciding how effectively you are using your cooldowns. Personally I think that it would be much more useful if you could get both calculations of DPS, or possibly have the “real dps” that is calculated as damage/time displayed by default and have burst dps in the details.
Of course, it could just be that he was attacking for less time, but had higher dps when he did (waiting longer when the worms come back up to let the tanks grab aggro, for example). Just playing devil’s advocate here, but maybe it was just an awesome fight for your friend, or he scales well with buffs, etc. etc.
The gap in dps-to-percent does seem fishy, though I haven’t seen this happen enough to call it an identifiable trend. I’ll certainly be watching now. Well-geared mages *do* crush me on Jaraxxus, but not without reason (the spell steal dmg. buff). But not on Beasts.
We know recount can be off (try comparing maybe 4 different meters on each boss fight for a raid and you’ll see some surprisingly large differences at least once or twice). So I’m inclined to believe your suspicion, but only tentatively.
Just further proof that recount sucks and people are placing too much of an emphasis on who is doing the most damage. As long as your raid group bands together and is downing bosses and tackling progression, who cares who has the most dps? Recount is a fun tool if you like looking at graphs and it’s certainly useful to track your dps improvement on bosses this week vs last week, but seriously people….it isn’t the end all be all of who’s doing the most dps.
The theory goes like this. Everyone is on the boss fight for the same amount of time. Since damage per second is total damage/time=dps, and everyone has the same time on a boss, if your dps is higher, your damage done should be higher by the same ratio, which we do NOT see here. I see it all the time, and it is really frustrating as a hunter, when so often people look at dps meters, congratulating the mage, while I’m sitting on top of the damage done.
Frost, I actually had a mage come out to see me while at the target dummies the other day, and I asked him this SAME question. He sat there and said “Watch your recount” and cast a spell. Then he stopped…and recount stopped. Then he cast another spell, and when the spell launched, recount went higher…then stopped. So the problem with recount is that it isn’t using the encounter time, as it should, it instead seems to be using some strange internal clock for casters, particularly shown in regards to mages, and others with longer cast times. I’ve noticed it on destro locks, and ele shamans sometimes too. It is frustrating to be sure…so every time a mage links their recount, I make sure to link damage done to put them in their place…maybe 4th or 5th. Hope that cleared some of it up
Mensan of Saurfang
I mostly tank so I usually only look to Recount to see the Death meter. The only reason I look at the dps is to see if we have enough to conquer the the target we are going after. I also have a disc priest so I have a natural distaste for the meter watchers :>.
Can anyone explain the discrepancy for being in or out of range. An easy example is recount in a BG, obviously your own dps and damage are wayy higher than other people in your raid, what is the range of recount or how does that work?
I have a mage alt and though he’s not as geared as my hunters i have seen numbers to this scale. I have done some crazy DPS on my mage based on his gear. Atleast thats what recount was telling me.
Here’s all I can really provide. A Mage’s rotation, arcane atleast which i assume your mage in the post is, goes as follows:
Arcane Blast x4, Each blast puts a debuff on the mage, up to 4, with each stack the attack uses more mana but also deals more damage, with my mage (who is a combo of heroic/ulduar10 geared) once you hit the 3rd and 4th stack these are critting around 12-13k each and they crit very often. This is the arcane mages main attack, to put it in a hunter perspective this would be like shooting Kill Shot crits (mine are 16k-17k) every 2.2 seconds. It hits like a brick.
Now once you hit 4 stacks of the debuff if Missile Barrage procs then you use Arcane Missles these hit for around 4-6k each and there’s 5 hits per channel. If Missile Barrage doesn’t proc you continue on doing Arcane Blast with its 12k crits until it does proc.
So these are some pretty big hits and some pretty short amount of time. Now if you add into this Presence of Mind (turning anything under a 10sec cast into an instant spell, usually used with ABlast), and a Arcane Power and Icy Veins Combo (20% more dmg + 20% more manacost and haste increased by 20% respectively) the mages hits harder and even faster. Throw Mirror Image on top for increased dmg and aggro is no problem.
If your arcane mage put points into Incanter’s Absorption, which not everyone does but I do, This turns any absorbed dmg into pure spellpower. So any fight like Koralon or Hodir that uses fire or frost dmg, pretty much means a constant spell power increase. On the Twins in TOC this is a constant increase because your always absorbing the damage from the opposite val’kyr.
this doesn’t include a single AoE spell.
For my mage on a fight like Koralon I’ll start the fight as follows:
Fire Ward, to turn fire dmg into spellpower. Mirror Image so I dont have to worry about that initial aggro pull + more dps. Presence of Mind to start my rotation off with an instant spell. Plus Arcane Power + Icy Veins Combo.
All of these will easily be off cooldown multiple times throughout the fight so i’m not wasting CDs just to start off great.
Add a Bloodlust and a Haste Potion into this equation and you have one DPS monster.
So yeah when my mage finally hit 80 I was blown away by the DPS he was doing with the gear he had. But when I thought of all the spells I was using that increase my DPS it didn’t ever occur to me that recount might of been messed up.
the rotation alone would be like using 4 Kill shots in a row, then either a couple more kill shots or 4 other instant shots, then back to 4 kill shots. Assuming KS don’t have a CD other then the GCD.
Sorry for the long post.
recount abuse is one of my biggest pet peeves with this game.
an example: a wipe on anub. tanks die, healer goes down, leader calls for a wipe. i stop shooting and try to die. however, recount doesnt realize this, and keeps ticking. every second im not nuking makes my dps (an average) look worse and worse.
we get back to anub, raid leader says “pick up the dps, the numbers look terrible.” *that* is why i think recount should require an IQ test to install.
onto the topic in the post, i have no idea, i dont run with many mages. i see what youre saying though.
yeah overall DPS is also a problem because of just that, Wipes when your still in combat but stop DPSing or whenever there is multiple adds to AoE.
For me that takes place in Ony, Killing the adds up to her I hit over 5k 10man DPS, for me thats pretty good, everyone else is a few hundred lower then me. We get to Ony and guess who gets to stay on her during Air Phase. I Do. So while everyone else is AoEing the whelps down and getting ridiculous DPS, mine looks horrible in comparison because I was single target DPSing Ony
Oh and for those saying recount stops between casts for mages for whatever reason. I hopped on my mage to check but my DPS on recount will start to tick down if I clear target and stop DPSing and will also start ticking down in between casts.
So as far as I know Mages don’t have any advantage as far as the time Recount actually tracks, but I’ve always looked at the DPS not the dmg done. So not sure about that weird ratio
Did you check the Activity count on this mage? It should have been somewhat low. Arcane mages roll without any damage over time abilities. And yes dps/damage done looks somewhat flawed at times. In addition, Arcane mages also have much more downtime due to managing mana than other specs/classes. Eh, just my 2 cents on this topic. Fire mages FTW.
Thats another thing. My Arcane mage doesn’t have the mana issues I expected from hearing stories about arcane mages.
As I said earlier I pop pretty much everything at the beginning of the fight and once all those procs wear off my Mana is pretty much gone and i’ll innervate, but from that point on I don’t have any mana problems, and normally don’t innervate anymore during that fight.
And Back to the original topic, I did some basic math with the Damage done and the DPS and everyones is basically telling me that fight lasted 500-510 seconds. Your mage on the other hand came out as the fight lasting 415 seconds. So either your mage was AFK and somehow out of combat for 100 seconds or something was fishy with recount.
Recount is correct in its reporting,. It is just reportings omething different than most expect (and what actually makes sense).
Lets take a hypothetical situation, where two persons both dps a target. One does A dps constant. The second does 2A dps for a second, tehn one second zero dps. On the end of the fight you’ll see the second person as 2A dps listed.
This also explains that who is on top of damage is not always on top of dps.
You’ll also see it when we target the dummy. I often do runs like I guess most of us to see dps changes in gear, rotation tacts, etc. When you are done, but the sting is still on, it is listing the time as active dps time, butbecause your sting is the only thing doing damage, the average is going down.
Another example, is when – and it happended to me
– I fired a few good shots, trinkets procced, nice cooldown and then … I died. I got insane dps those first seconds. The rest of the fight I did zero dps, but I’m still on top of recount.
This last example also shows that is is hard to do it differently. People who died early would do hardly no dps, which makes the statistics for them useless, because you cannot see if they did a good job (other than dying).
Recount could then keep track of when you die and have the dps calculations stop then, but what when you get batle res?
And what if there are long paused between fights. May bosses have stages in which you need to walk, switch targets, worms submerge, etc. recount should then also keep track of these pauses compared to normal pauses, etc.
The reality is Frist, the mage actually did more average dps than you at the moments he fought. Yes, that hurst perhaps
, but if you did more damage overal, this also simply means he was fighting lesser of the time than you were.
Recount is not off, it is just measureing something different then many of us are using it for.
This is why I personaly dislike the obsession with dps, because most hunters don’t realise this. So they have effectively an obsession with measurred dps. There are many more examples. using kill-shot glyph for bosses where there are no phases, using multishot on emalon’s adds are two more examples of getting your dps higher, while you’re not nessesairly doing the best for the raid.
Recount is a good tool, but it should be used just as that, a tool. And no tool is perfect.
So I agree with your statement ‘Damage Done’ is often a better measure to see how well you did. (But even that has its flaws).
Maybe he out dpsed you
Of course he out-dpsed me
That’s not the discussion here. My ego is not hurt by being oud dpsed by badass mage. He’s badass after all. And I went half the fight without buffs, a guaranteed way to lose the top stop anyway.
But I do not think he out dpsed me by 1,700 dps. I think he out dpsed me by about 300 dps. Especially considering I was dead for a good chunk of the yeti phase, the difference in damage done between someone 0.5% lower than me and 0.5% higher than me is clearly wrong.
It’s probably calculated based on (damage done / player active time) as opposed to (damage done / fight duration).
I think hes jealous he didn’t get top DPS. =\
Well, try it on a dummy. DPS is fine. Stop fighting, call in pet and Serpent Sting keeps ticking, making your dps look quite a lot lower then it actually is, as for the last few seconds while the Sting ticks out, recount will still count it as damage/time. I just did heroic 10 man beasts and our mage had the same amount of damage within a few thousand of me, we both were alive the same amount of time and yet his dps reads as around 800 higher. It’s just odd and it doesn’t bother me much in a guild run. However, it does bug me in a PuG, when the morons come out with “Lol, your dps was only X”. “Yep, but I have the second highest damage total.” “Lol, yes, but the Boomkin there did Y dps. Pwned.” And unfortunately, sometimes you meet that moron in a different PuG and the first thing he’ll do is /raid Lol, his dps is crap. That would be were I get indeed pissed off. Maybe, as suggested, Recount or Skada should only be handed out if your IQ beats that of a cuttlefish, starting with the question: Can you put together a sentence that does not contain Lol, pwned or QQ?
Aaron, right on target. That’s how recount works. And as explained, that is also how it should be IMHO. So with 0,5% less damage you can have indeed 1700 more dps.
The avarage dps when that mage was active was indeed 1700 dps higher than Frosts dps the time he was active. Not 300, but really 1700. It was not wrong, it is just how dps is defined. Perhaps this isn’t what you or Frost wanted to know, but that is not recounts fault
However, if you would look at the recount screen that shows active time, you’d see Frost was a lot more active. So it shows the mage was slacking hugely
and could perhaps have done even more damage … Probably he was walking a lot in between his bursts. His bursts however were actually that huge.
Probably if he was actually walking less, he’d problely have lower dps, as he’d used his instants. In that case, the damage difference with Frost would actuallty have gone up compared to the 0,5% now, but teh dps difference down from teh 1700.
However if you do it per fight duration you get other problems with the calculations. You’d see that during mobile fights all dps from all players goes down seriously. It would make e.g. it harder to show if you actually have a good rotation as delta’s are lower.
It certainly looks like a flaw in activity time. Regarding mobile fights — that time always counts against hunters anyway — our dots and pets are always ticking away, highly mobile fights show massive drop in dps for most classes… but mages are different. And I can assure you Badass Mage isn’t wasting movement time he doesn’t have to. It just seems like recount stops activity time during long casts and ennervates and such.
I certainly wish recount would calculate dps based on damage per encounter or damage until dead — that would be a far more accurate metric of your damage contribution to a fight than turning the clock on and off mid-fight.
Meh. Upload it to worldoflogs or something and check the DPS (e) which does (dmg / fight duration) and all is well for moving fights.
I also agree that it should be Dmg Done looked at and not DPS at the end of a boss fight. In analogy, DPS is the potential energy output and Dmg Done is the kinetic energy output. You also need to take into consideration Time on Boss.
This makes meters pretty much RNG for some bosses however. For example, if you get Legion Flame enough times on LJ then your Dmg Done is screwed especially if you are melee.
I did Ony 10 yesterday with a nice group so it went along nice and smoothly. One of the big reasons for the easy ride, apart from good tanking and healing and all for once knowed what to do (got the “She deep breaths more” achievement), was 4 competing DPS’rs. As soon as the fight was over all 4 ppl reported Damage done and as it turned out, none of the meters coincided.
Mine and another hunter’s report was fairly close but differed on at least plus-minus a 100 dps, while the shadow priest was way of my numbers.
According to his meter my dps was 5050 and his 5300, according to my meter my dps was 5500 and his 4900. The strange thing is that both of us got the other hunter to be around 6050 (his gear score was much higher than mine and he also did more whelp damage than me, othervise…).
Also the lock’s report differed away from the rest on the balance of plus-minus a couple of hundred dps.
We discussed the differences and as far as we could tell; we all had the same settings and we all reseted the meters when we entered the instance and no other time during the fight.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark…
recount, imo, succeeds at damage done because it is a static number. if im top dmg done with 500k then i die, as the fight goes on i will become lower because dead people cant do damage.
but dps stops averaging in seconds once you croak. ive seen it where i start the fight and pop every CD, and for those moments that goes on, i clear top dps spot by a large margin. if i die, it locks that high dps number in so by the end of the fight, im still 2k higher than all else though i died 25 seconds in.
i think dps portion of recount should also show how many seconds the average was for per person. if i die 25 sec into a 220 sec fight, you cant compare me dps to someone whose number averages over the full 220 seconds. damage done is fine because its static and not an average. but dps is a different goose when the S indps varies from person to person. thats misleading. if its gonna display averages for active time instead of holding everyone against entire durarion of combat (dead or alive) then it needs to show the P in dps as ell as the D. if it held people to full fight durarion, dead peoples dps would wain as it should. every second a fight goes on that im dead and doing 0 damage per second, it should be averaged in as well. ive seen bad players get dps praise because they lucked out and died during a crit streak or whatever.
imo of course. and please forgive typos, this was sent from phone.
I think what I don’t like most about the Recount addon is that fact that all DOTS continue to tick for a few secs after the fight has ended. I don’t normally look at my Recount as I’m fighting so I don’t know what I peak out at. There might be a way for Recount to show what you top out at and if there is, I Don’t Know It. For example, I’ll be working on my rotation, gear, gems, enchants, speed, etc. at the Target Dummy. I’ll be watching my cooldowns almost exclusivly and have someone in my party just watching Recount. They will tell me what I topped out at but as soon as I run out of mana I stop everything as fast as I can, I look at my Recount and the numbers continue to drop because of the ticking of my DOTS even if I click off the target. It hurts to see, so I almost stop looking at Recounts DPS and just look at how much Damage I can inflict in one long winded mana burn.
What I havent seen yet (granted this was TLDR), but people need to take in to account how recount factors in dps. 2 things are needed to note here.
1. Recount only shows what your computer saw on the damage tab. If the dpser is too far away in the fight (i.e. mobile fights), this is where people get varying recount listings. Keep in mind ALL of your damage is shown in your own combat tab, regardless how far away the mob/boss is. So on your recount, your dps is probably more accurate then other people’s recount (please see the next reason though).
2. (and I think this is where our other mage did better then you) is how recount marks dps. it used to be where recount had a 1-1.5 second timer that if you werent doing damage, it turned off the dps. They did this to try and determine when the fight was over. where this becomes a problem is especially in the case of arcane mages, who dont have dots. A hunter is going to always have serpent sting and auto shot, which causes damage even when you are moving. The only time an arcane mage is going to have damage while moving is generally when they have mirror image up, still plugging away at it.
Arcane mages main spell has a normal casting time of 2.5 seconds (assuming they dont have any haste). So you have to consider that if a mage was not moving, and not using things that will increase their haste (gear, trinkets, etc) there is 1-1.5 seconds where recount isnt counting their dps, thus ballooning their “dps” number. Personally, with my haste, my normal casting for that spell is 1.9 casting time, thus (assuming its 1.5 seconds before turning off for recount) recount stops counting my dps for .4 seconds.
This is modified by the fact that we dont always JUST cast that spell, we cast other ones like arcane missles, etc, but still.
Always, always always go by damage done. Sure, a mages damage done is going to balloon some on AoE fights like Ony, but to be honest, who cares? That damage needs to be done anyway, and the sooner those whelps are down, the sooner I am dpsing Ony again, right? It should always matter to the raid when its a boss fight, reguardless if its killing adds.
Oh yea, and to the guy that complained about keep dpsing Ony when the whelps come out causing his total damage done (or dps, I cant remember which one) to suffer? Your Raid leader should be fired. Hunters have one of the better AoE dps with Volley and they should always always always be having you do that Volley on the whelps. The sooner they are dead, the sooner EVERYONE can be dpsing Ony.
Sure, this doesnt always work with every type of fight, as a hunter has to do a bunch of other work like MD’ing and kiting and tranquil shotting, but for that specific fight, you should also be AoEing the whelps.
Tell me if I am missing something with this statement Frost.
Frost,
If you want to test this later on a target dummy or something, we can spend a hour or what ever doing so if you want.
I haven’t really noticed something like this since BC, but back then our top DPS (a warlock at the time) tested it, and, if I recall, verified it. What bearing that has on the current situation, lord only knows, but just throwing my two cents onto the craps table.
As far as people denouncing damage meters as useless, or even the people saying that they don’t matter, I beg to differ.
If you’re a DPS, your job is to DPS. Survive, do the fight as you’re supposed to, but DPS. Higher DPS is not an e-peen boost (unless your manhood is directly linked to pretty numbers on your monitor), it’s a simple measure of how well you’re doing your job. Saying DPS meters are useless, while they are one of the few ways to measure how well you’re doing what is normally your only job (with the exception of some bosses, granted), is not only incorrect, it’s almost downright silly. If you don’t like reading them, so be it, but if you’re going to do a job, do it right. Having an easy-to-read measure of just HOW WELL you’re doing it is an invaluable tool for making yourself better at said job.
Hope I got my point across, I think I lost my train of thought halfway through there.
I said job a LOT.
Went to ToC25 yesterday. 0.4% more dmg. than a mage on Beasts, yet his dps was 400 pts. higher than mine. Talked to him briefly, and he didn’t have any long lapses in attacking that would account for it.
Added to the plethora of similar circumstantial evidence, I’m convinced.
I have also been wondering a while how it is possible that I came first in damage done with 6.8k DPS, and then a mage followed second with 7.1k DPS.
I’m pretty sure recount is programmed to stop adjusting your DPS whenever you don’t have something hurting an enemy (Dots, a moron pet etc.). But in the case where for example you drop dead -because someone that is not you made a mistake- and Serpent Sting is still on the boss you see your DPS plummet by sometimes over 500.
It seems logical that mages wind up higher up in DPS as they don’t have DoTs. I’m guessing recount doesn’t see any difference between a Hunter being in FD with no DoTs and pet on the boss and a mage Cycloning himself for some mana.
This also fits with movement indeed, where Hunters are treated as standing still by recount and mages are treated as not being in the raid at all and so their DPS stops changing.
ive been having problems with recount for a while, notice that your dps does not significantly improve when lock n load procs and u slam x3 exp shot into the target and when u crit with killshot for say 17k thats 17k damage in 1 second, still the meter ‘lies’. i feel its because hunters r bound to the 1.5 second beat so damage per second is not good for our class maybe theres a way to measure ur damage in damage per 1.5 secs? or hope blizz put us on a 1sec beat like most spellcasters who can quicken their attacks with talents and haste thus reducing casting time, on dots…i have experienced the recount prob with dots on the training dummys, and its very annoying, u put everything u got into the thing and when u stop dps and passive pet thus leaving combat, the dots still tick at the low dps they do by themselves thus bringing ur average dps way down. i gave up on damage meters for dps a long time ago i do what frostheim does and go on damage done which is the best way to measure ur damage, if u still wanna calculate dps u gotta do it yourself, DBM will tell you how long the boss fight was, just divide your damage done by the seconds fought, mostly i get a different score to recount, plus if i wanna beat a mage in dps i ‘forget’ to drop imp hunters mark and md the bastard lolz only joking! all i can say about the whole dps thing is tell those who are ignorant of ur skillz that no matter what recount etc says, any raid is gimped without a hunter fullstop.
I have to laugh a the people who immeditaly rebutt what Frost has said without much thought. The comment dps meters need IQ tests to install applies to you (my opinion). Frost is close in stating that Badass mage out dpsed him by 300 dps. Very simple calculations show that the boss fight lasted in the order of 515 seconds. (It is a mystery to me why Frost’s dps indicates he was active for the full length of the fight; unless he was brez’ed before his dots were off the boss) This is the mode (a form of average from statistics) for the time dps was on the boss.
Recount has counted Badass mage as being active for 416 seconds. I am sure that he did not run around blinking during the boss fight or /sleep. Looking at what Cocky mage said (based of his haste and recount stopping for 0.4 of a sec per cast) that is approximately 250 casts averageing around 11.8k damage each. (Does this sound about right for an Arcane blast). This completely ignores arcane missiles being used during arcane barrage which would push the average damage done for arcane blast up.
If we normalise Badass mage’s dps against the time that dps was on the boss it comes out at 5687.3 which is 380 dps more than Frost NOT 1700 which is what this post is about, recount reporting wrong numbers and these are the numbers that get you into pugs alot of the time.
I have a fun way of getting a great dps reading prior to pugging on a Saturday night. Run H HoS and on the final boss burn rapid fire readiness then rapid fire again. I can break 5k dps on that boss…and I average 4k in 10 man. I then have a great link saved in recount for Ony 25man…lf ranged dps 4k+
(haven’t done it but the thought did cross my mind). There would be a simple fix for Recount and that would be only turn off dps calcs if not in combat or no damage reported in combat log for 3/4 secs. Everone would suffer a really minor dps loss because of the extra time recount records at the end of a boss fight; but the difference would be negligible compared to RNG variables in the order of 1% loss across the board for a fight of this length. For shorter boss fights the error would be more prevolent. However Badass mage’s dps has been inflated by 25%; recount needs to be fixed (even if we all have to suffer a small dps loss for it). Or we will have to upload logs to World of Logs etc and link that instead and use the equivalent dps which is what Frost would like from recount.
On a side note top ret pallies dps is too low. Normalising his dps shows him at 5090.9
“There would be a simple fix for Recount and that would be only turn off dps calcs if not in combat or no damage reported in combat log for 3/4 secs”
Recount stops dps when not in combat. It is excluded. And if Neven is right, the 3/4 not in combat log would actually make it worse with a 2,5 second delay between arcane mages:-)
In fact, the solution should – of Neven is right – be that recount only stops dps for periods of longer than 2,5 secs inactive.
However, it will be a simple test to see how that works. No pet, no sting and use instant shots with variable pauzes. It will be easy to see if there is indeed a hidden time-periode recount uses to detect non-dps.
Ina ddition to this, I haven’t foudn time to test it myself, but if this 2,5 secs timing would be an issue, we would also see very high dps with hunter autoshot, as that is usualy in teh 2,5 to 3 sec intervals as well. Also it should be possible to test with instants. A MM has 4 instants, so with 3 secods (2x GCD) delays in between we should be able to see if recount has too short timings. I doubt it, but science will show it.
Or, I could simply look at the code
My main is arcane mage and here’s the explanation:
As arcane mage you don’t have any DoTs ticking on bosses, ever.
Hunters use stings and whatever (i only have lowbie hunter alt so ^^), as well as fire mages for example. These DoTs keep their caster in combat, meaning that Recount / Skada will record the hunter/firemage continuously damaging the boss. However, as arcane mages don’t have any DoTs, Recount/Skada doesn’t count moving, going to fridge for a drink, anything between the actual damaging spells cast.
Solution: Don’t look at dps-meter at all.
Raidbosses die when their hp reaches zero. Therefore “damage done”-meter is what you want to be interested in. However keep in mind that in certain boss fights certain classes have certain “bitchduties” which have effect on their damage done.
TLDR:
Hunters have dots –>recount thinks: in combat all the time = lower dps
Arcane Mages don’t have dots –>recount thinks: not in combat all the time = high dps
I just want to point out that the ~1700 dps the mage “out-dpsed” you by has nothing to do with the 8.5% versus the 8.0% reported for your dps.
That percentage actually has nothing to do with the dps number given in that report. I’m of the opinion that dps shouldn’t be shown on the damage done chart at all.
The math works out properly when you compare the 8.5% for the mage as a percent of the damage done.
If you divide 2,928,966 by 0.085, you’ll get roughly 34,000,000 damage done. I’m rounding to the nearest million, because without the full damage done report and adding up the damage, I can’t be sure of the accuracy past 34 million. Also, the 8.5% is a rounded number anyway, without enough significant numbers to be more accurate thn that.
So to continue, what happens when you divide any number on that list by the percentage listed? You get roughly 34 million.
That pally sitting at 7.5%? 2,571,290 / 0.075 = ~34,000,000.
If you wanted to see by what percentage the ~1700 dps is higher than yours (as reported by Recount), you’d have to go the DPS chart, instead of damage done. The percentage reported there should be different. Though I’m not sure how it would calculate the percentage. Adding up the raid dps and using that as the denominator? Or just rank all of the dps below the top reported as a percentage of the max? I’m not entirely sure any sort of percentage is useful to a raid for troubleshooting.
We’ve figured this one out. Recount calculates dps by taking damage done divided by activity time. The problem is that during long casts recount will pause activity time – thus the mages look like they weren’t attacking as much, even though they were.
I definitely consider this a flaw with recount that should be fixed. If you are standing there casting non-stop, your activity time should not stop — but that’s exactly what happens now. Looks like they just need to bump the activity pause timer by a half second or so.
I play a FFB mage and this thread has intrigued me some i’m curious as to what the explination for why my dps is greatly inflated compared to most classes. If i understand correctly with arcane builds the primary factor is that there are no dots to keep u in the fight. Since FFB places a dot on evey mob it hits that is not fire immune, why am i pulling 2k 2.5k in my crappy 187 to 200 blues against hunters and rogues in 200 to 245 epics are getting about the same. while aoeing mobs i tend to do better than hunters as well but i assume this is becuase i keep flamestrike and blizzard going with living bombs sprinkle in for good mesure. i also usualy get beat in damage done overall per fight but i wait for warriors and druids to establish solid threat before i start and i notice most classes can’t wait the 5 secs that takes before unloading and the small amounts i get beat by can be attributed to that. or am i just pugged into alot of 5 mans with crappy players?
Yes there should realize the reader to RSS my feed to RSS commentary, quite simply