Casual Raid Leader

For the longest time I was a big time fan of stats.  It was fun to stare at.  I mean who doesn’t like seeing massive numbers?  But the deeper I got into leading raids the more skewed I began to see the statistics.  We had a fury warrior in our 25 man raids who always topped the damage charts.  And yet the raid leaders seemed to all agree that while his numbers were impressive, they came at the expense of true focus and benefit of the raid.

So what are the appropriate methods of using stats?  Should we be publishing the stats in general or should we keep them private?

The Devil In the Details

In a lot of cases, stats are used improperly.  I know… I’ve done it too… we all have.  We pull up our handy dandy Recount (or whatever your favorite program is) and go…. “aren’t I cool?  Look at that… 700DPS.  I have more damage than anyone.”  Or “OMG… I did 45% of the healing and we have 3 healers.  I must be good!!!”  Said Recount is then posted to all of the guild so people can oo and aaah.

The reality is that those numbers are nice… but they don’t mean anything.  Fight to fight you’re role may differ.  A rogue assigned to kicking duty for the night will have lower DPS than a Warlock assigned to AOE duty in Mt. Hyjal.  Both serve a valuable role, but you can’t judge yourself top of the heap due to a fight that’s custom built for you. 

Another important point is that certain numbers have no meaning when evaluated individually.  DPS…. sorry but DPS does not = damage done.  If you look at a tool like Recount or Web Stats, you’ll find some interesting discrepancies that can be hard to spot initially.  First you look at DPS numbers.  You’ll see the average, 400, 500, 650, 1000, 3000 etc.  However then if you look you’ll also see total damage done.  Very frequently you’ll see a person on top of the chart with 1000, or 1500 DPS.  Also in the top five will be someone who does 600-800.  They aren’t in that exclusive four digit club, but they did some very nice numbers. 

How Did they accomplish this feat of strength?  Did they cheat?  Did they skew the numbers?

No… what they did, is they had a lot more of what I like to call ToT.  ToT stands for Time on Target.  I’ll take an average person with a very nice and consistent ToT over an idiot who can do 1000DPS, but hits the wrong target… or dies in a horrific blaze of glory after they top 1200 DPS and get two or three other people killed in the process.  High DPS doesn’t mean you’re doing what you need to be doing.

The Teaching Tool

Ok so we’ve seen is the horror side of these tools.  Lets move on to some better ways to look at these tools. 

The nice thing about most stats tools is that it lets you look at a running average as well as specific key fights.  So for instance lets say you have two similarly geared hunters in your raid.  Both are using stock standard Beastmaster builds.  One has higher DPS and the other always has very consistent damage.  In this scenario, you can use a tool like Recount to help train up both hunters.

Odds are high if you look at the breakdown of where both of them did their damage, you’ll most likely see a difference in how their damage is spread.  One may have a very distinctive steady shot/auto shot rotation.  The other person may have a very erratic shot rotation.  Either way, you can use the tool to examine their damage abilities to see what they are getting the most milage out of.  The great part is that you don’t have to know the fine details of the rotation.  You can quickly tell though that the two differ by the abilities they use and perhaps how often one applied Scorpid Sting vs. Serpents sting.  If one shows 6 applications of a freezing trap and the other shows none, then you may figure out the dps difference right there.

The trick is with these tools that you have look at the fights individually as well as an average.  If a warlock walks into Gruul and gets assigned “Doggied” duty, their DPS and damage numbers for the night will be horrible compared with the warlock who got to just blast away.  You need to evaluate the whole of what a person is casting and what they are doing from fight to fight to get a picture of if things are working as advertised.

For raid leaders its very nice to use these types of tools in raid to determine what went horribly wrong.  By reviewing things like the death log, you can see the last 20-30 seconds of a person’s life.  You can figure out if they died in a void effect or if it was just plain unlucky positioning.  You can also see how the healing went on the last 20-30 seconds of one person’s life.

All of these pieces of information are invaluable for a raid leader to make sure that people are doing what they are supposed to be doing, doing appropriate ability rotations, avoiding damage and working on the right target.  The trick is as a raid leader to realize not to use them for ePeen.  Damage is nice.  Damage is good, but damage doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t killing the mob/boss.

Not Beating Oneself Up

One of the hardest things you need to learn when looking at these tools is to look at them objectively.  We had a rogue in our alliance that was getting extremely upset with herself in Mt. Hyjal over her DPS.  She kept beating herself up over and over again trying to figure out what was going wrong.  It took a while, but one of the raid leaders finally pointed out that she’d been assigned to “kick duty” on some caster mobs.  She wasn’t taking this into account and was beating herself up over her DPS when she was providing valuable savings of damage to the raid by interrupting caster mobs.  Its hard to see the forest from the trees, but if presented with some stats, always try to put them in context. 

Don’t be mad at yourself for not being in the top 10 DPS if all of the trash pulls are AOE pulls and you don’t have an AOE effect.  Don’t be mad at yourself for having crappy DPS on a boss that’s immune to your standard spell/ability rotation. 

Do review the stats to see what abilities you are using are getting you the best bang for the buck.  Do look at the stats to see if you were taking damage you shouldn’t have been.  Do look at the stats to see if someone else who plays your class is putting their damage somewhere else and having it be more effective.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 10:40 am and is filed under Raid Leading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.