Back in original Wrath, doing good damage was nice, but people often sought skill in executing mechanics more.
Nowadays, it seems both “doing good damage” and “executing mechanics” are so trivial neither matter in the face of doing absurdly great damage or parsing super high
Now let me additionally define “not skilled at parsing”. I basically define this as not being in the 95+ region on every boss like some really good parsers are.
Let me explain the origin of my question here a bit. I’m not great at parsing. I do good damage, but that ability some people have to squeeze dps from a rock, I don’t seem to have. Perfect timing using cooldowns, exact timing, etc. I don’t think I have it. I don’t know if it’s because it takes so much effort and I’m lazy, or I just lack the skill entirely.
However, I do have mechanic execution ability. I mean that’s not really impressive considering how easy these mechanics are, but hey at least I don’t screw up in that regard.
So basically, am I “without skill” if I’m not great at parsing?
Disclaimer: I’d also like to add that I’m not a hater of parsing. Y’all do what you like to do. I also think parses are not useless. They are a helpful data point.
I will freely admit parsing leads to foolish game play often enough.I’ve heard some sweatier player PoV on the subject and i agree to a point basically if you can stand in fire and your healers are gamer enough than you can do more damage and end the fight faster and the healers get to parse. If you asked a dad guild if it was alright to stand in the fire their gonna say dead dps deals no dps. Finding that line is what matters i guess and it really depends on the raid enviroment. Many guilds run splits so they have a very very geared main raid and they all likely have larger health pools and do alot of damage. It depends.
Yes. If you haven’t taken the time to learn your rotation and at least time your cooldowns then you’re not very skilled at all. Any raid group with good healing can do mechanics and dance all day until some sort of enraged mechanic is introduced. That doesn’t mean you’re good, it just means your group out heals the incoming raid dps.
Parsing is not this mysterious thing. The number you get is how you match up overall against your peers playing the same class. Think of it like a test. The grade you get is reflective of how well you know your class in this encounter. You probably perform well on some encounters and worse on others because you didn’t do your homework.
Folks parsing high study logs, replays, and watch videos to stay up to date on any news that comes out. They play around with simulators and ultimately memorize the best possible outcome from those simulators similarly to a grand master chess player who memorized openers.
Your parses largely depend on your raid as a whole. Kill times hugely impact parses and a few mediocre DPS just phoning it in or dying to bad will drag down your parses as well.
People really need to stop treating doing mechanics and parsing well as being mutually exclusive. Most people parsing 95+ are also doing most mechanics with the few exceptions of maybe not killing web wraps or being the dedicated decurse bot.
At probably the purple parsing range you are about as skilled as the parse would suggest unless you are in a particularly weak raid with horrendous kill times and bad raid comp. Everyone in that area is more often than not doing perfectly fine on all mechanics and at that point your skill level is about where your parses are percentage-wise. The illusory line of “skilled at pve” is whatever percentile you want it to be.
This also absolutely applies to Heigan especially. With the platform trick if you kill him before the dance even happens there’s 0 downtime. Wheras if dps is too slow and you see the dance (maybe even twice) your downtime goes up quite a bit, which means your dps goes down quite a bit.
I think the dissconnect is the general view of mechanics.
There is risk vs reward when choosing to do anything in a raid encounter. Its nice to your healers to avoid extra damage taken at the cost of dps if theyre being pressured, but what about when theyre not? Just standing and eating a mechanic is not inherently a negative if that mechanic can be eaten and healed through, especially if its during a lust or execute period. The fights are really short. Just being out for 5 to 10 seconds for most fights can easily be ~10% uptime loss. It doesnt sound that drastic but whem every second of damage is being counted, its a good chunk to lose and for what? You lost it so your healers end at still not oom when the fights over? Its a loss for nothing.
Avoiding mechanics that kill you is good. Avoiding mechanics that are by design only relevant if the healers are bad is not good when your healers can handle it.
Theres just more nuance in choice of action than just “dodge mechanics” when youre looking to put out as much damage as you can.
I didnt understand for a few weeks why my sapp parses were perma blue. I then saw other melee just stay in, so i did the same, and relied more on my own personals if I got too low, and relied on my mobility more during the air phase, trying to push as much damage as i can as the bomb is dropping. I have yet to die to blizzard or the bomb while doing this, which only proves me being safe before was a loss for nothing.
In the end, parsing is not ignoring mechanics. Its a choice made on specific mechanics that can be ignored as doing them rewards the raid with nothing.
Inb4 our mage friend comes in here, he is not wrong. Just play your class well and do the fights and youll be more than fine. I have only ever pugged naxx 25 and I casually purple most fights (do not talk to me about maex web wrap please). Its not some super secret complex game breaking task to parse high, just make good choices.
If your definition of “skilled at PvE” is successfully completing all content in WoTLK, then sure. The content isn’t terribly hard, and people doing half the dps we are now cleared everything 15 years ago just fine.
If your definition of “skilled at PvE” is performing at close to a speedrunning pace, incorporating all strats involved etc then I’d say probably not.
The game is largely a sandbox when it comes to these kinds of things. The only thing that the game rewards you for is killing a boss and some achievements. It’s up to you to define what success means to you. I love performing at the highest level so I do chase after high parses, but there’s nothing wrong with not doing so.
IF this is true then basically, parsing is teaching people to just ignore mechanics. We see all this rubbish about preventing Classic from becoming retail, yet here we are introducing systems like parsing that encourages people to start mindlessly brute forcing instances.
This is the very behavior people hate about retail, the dumbing down of content, and the AoE blasting of instances. Taking all the skill out of the run and just standing there mashing buttons.
Well Parses also take into account if you stood in the bad stuff and died, so it’s a mix of both TBH.
Parses also allow you to see if you are getting better, or staying stagnant. My first week of Nax my parses were pretty low but the next week every parse was better because I was better at every fight and understood what our raid was doing with the boss during each encounter.
The idea that I know my rotation and press my buttons pretty well and avoid all the bad stuff is fine/good enough depending on the guild you chose. I ran a guild back in original WOTLK and never used parses or all this other nonsense. I did have a DPS meter but that was about it and we only ever finished 11/12 so it does help weave out whose playing poor or not.
Snark aside, you equate parsing directly with PVE skill. So a much quicker way of responding would have been “no”
If you need assistance filling the remaining 8 letters required for that response, you can surround some junk in < > marks which will cause them to disappear.
Parsing is a double-edged sword (I’m primarily speaking for DPS).
On the one hand, there is something to be said about executing your damage rotation properly. When everyone does this, fights often become much smoother because mechanics can be ignored or quickly addressed. On the other hand, as others have said, focusing too much on parsing can promote degenerate gameplay. To give myself as an example, in TBC I played a feral-cat flex tank for my guild, and hated Battle Rezzing people because it would OOM me and I couldn’t power shift. (Lol)
Anyway, to answer your question, you can certainly be a solid player without getting those purple or pink parses. At the end of the day, properly doing the mechanics and getting bosses down is the first step. Happy Hunting!
You’re asking a general question here but it’s really a case by case situation. As other said your overall raid DPS and which buffs you get (like Focus Magic / PI) will influence parses independently of individual player skill, your luck/prio on loot also matters since people that get good gear earlier in the phase will have a easier time getting a high parse (under the “historical best” setting that is default on WCL) than later in the phase where everyone is geared.
In terms of individual performance, of course your mileage may vary but in my case the biggest personal improvements were (1) avoiding rotation mistakes and not hesitating / having pauses between casts; (2) getting the most from CDs (first using as many as encounter time allows, and then timing them). A lot of that was not really “skill” as much as knowledge and setting up the proper weakauras / macros. I don’t know if that’s what most people do, but we all have cognitive limitations, so it’s better to use whatever tools are available to reduce the chance of common mistakes.
My parses are still not that high (generally purple rather than orange despite having second-BiS to BiS in most slots), but it’s a point where it feels personally like a good return on the amount of effort put into it; others in my guild are clearly more competitive and willing to do extra work to get more consistently in the high-90s.
If you are skilled in content that matters your “parses” will naturally go up. Here’s the thing: in hard content, efficiency matters - how well you’re moving, how much you can anticipate, how many mistakes you make, etc. A raid doing mythic content with a team of 90 parsers (in mythic) will progress more quickly and have faster reclears than a team of 70 parsers.
The thing is, if you take those 90 parsers and those 70 parsers and put them in Heroic mode, they will ALL parse 99 or better. The content is trivial, they overgear it and the kill times are incredibly quick. Most mythic raiders don’t bother doing that, because parsing in Heroic really doesn’t matter.
Some will. I did it in Legion - cheesed full 99+ heroic parses. That didn’t make me a good player. That made me a player that enjoys seeing numbers go up in trivial content. My guild still got our asses kicked by Argus almost 1000 times before we could kill him.
In short, while logs are useful, no, “parses” don’t matter. Not in the first tier of WoTLK, which is possibly the easiest content patch WoW has ever seen. There is no movement, there is no inefficiency to be found and no actual mistakes to be made.