Everyone should know, at this point, that parsing has no correlation with progression. It is an indication of how fast the best guilds in the game can clear a raid, often times with multiple unholy death knights and no specs which arent S tier. Progression requires execution of mechanics and a good raid comp during new content.
There are more reasons why nobody should take parsing serious and see it as more than a side hobby.
Adds during boss encounters do not count towards the parse and for NO reason. If the adds are part of a boss encounter they should count towards your parse. That is the true indication of how any class performs. Right now a lot of adds dont count at all which is very biased and favors single target.
Inconsistency in regards to what buffs count on your logs. Why is tricks of the trade allowed to be used on warlocks to snap shot corruption but unholy frenzy does not? It seems like certain playstyles are cherry picked by whoever decides what counts towards a parse. If a player has a damage modifier to press, and uses that on another player, it should count towards a parse. Either ALL player buffs are okay, or none of them are.
Parsing based on damage only is not an indication of performance. Gargoyles and corruption carry the 2 highest dps classes. If you stacked 10 unholy dks who do 12k dps during gargoyle and army you could button mash and still get 99s. If parsing was to be taken seriously as a competitive factor to be seen as an indicator of performance than it should be based off of actual performance. How much damage did you take. How many mechanics did you execute successfuly? How many web wraps did you dps? What was your uptime on debuffs? What was your rotations like? Parsing right now is just strictly damage. Damage is not an indicator of progression it is a symptom of your raid out gearing the content and class stacking.
I personally dont care at all if i parse high or low because of the reasons above.
That’s… what 90% of people already do… But some people take their “side hobbies” more seriously than others. I’ve got a buddy who’s wife is gonna divorce him if he doesn’t stop spending thousands on disc golf lol… But people like their hobbies.
The damage parse is only one of the things tracked. Try looking up execution which dose take into account dmaage taken for example. It really seams like you have no idea what you’re talking about when you say parsing only tricks damage. It dosent. Your dmaage parse dose but that is a damage parae as it should.
Also adds are often counted to your parse. The rule is simple for the most part if the add is meant to die as per the normal encounter it is tracked. If it is not it is not. As that is pad. Eg kt phase 3 adds are not tracked as they never die and should not die. As such any dps on there dose exactly nothing to help anyone. As such it dosent count to not promote bad play.
While some entire phases do not count eg phase 1 kt this is the case when there is no good way to parse it that dose not lead to pull the entire room being the “correct” way as such would lead to bad play. Gothic same basic case where it would boil down to who can click faster dosent give any usefull info.
Bufs have clear reason also and are consistent within the rules also. You should inform yourself before ranting about something.
Also parsing dose correlate with progression. It’s not a direct correlation but it most def is an indirect. A group of players with a avg higher parse tossed together will have greater odds to progress further than a group with a lower avg parse. The greater the gap the greater the diff. This is an indirect correlation. While it’s not a direct correlation that makes it so the group with a high parse will always progress further it dose directly correlate with there odds to progress further and a such indirectly with how far they did progress. There are other factors at play also which is why it only directly correlates with the odds to progress not progression itself.
If you treat parses are solely a leaderboard, then you are correct in their uselessness.
Personally, given that I have a butt cam for the strong majority of my raids, I get very little information if something goes wrong outside of my control in the fight. Logs come in very handy to see what happened, and other peoples logs can serve as a great help in seeing how to fix it in the future.
But my specific crew is extremely casual and we don’t put much care in parsing high. Our primary concern is enjoying the game together, and clearing content at a pace that works for us.
Doesn’t stop us from sometimes getting weirdly high parses in our runs from time to time, that of course we brag about when we “beat” the more hardcore guildies.
It would be funny if warcraft logs started to consider mechanics such as dps to web wraps or decurses/dispels, etc. Otherwise it just rewards people for ignoring those mechanics and hoping somebody else does it for them lol.
I have seen pugs wipe on the easiest boss of all (Noth) just because nobody decurses, because muh parses.
I like adds not counting to prevent padding. But some kind of score bases on dps combined with doing mechanics, and how much avoidable dmg you avoided would be neato. Never gonna happen though.
Im happy with my logs for p1 so im just chilling till ulduar
Adds count if they are relevant to actually killing the boss. Random adds that just join the fight and are practically ignored because they do nothing and just die to cleave are not any indicator of performance, they just serve as damage sponges to pad numbers. Nobody cares if Faerlina’s tiny adds that do nothing die or not therefore they are not tracked.
As far as I know tricks is separated in logs and does not have any effect on parsing. Maybe corruption snapshot bypasses this, but for literally everything else it is separated into its own damage category and ignored. Regardless, the logs are absolutely consistent in what they are attempting to show and pretty much any of these “failures” to be consistent are due to limitations in the tools rather than conscious decisions to cherry pick what is fine and what isn’t.
People vastly overrate the value of “doing mechanics” and “providing utility”. If a mechanic doesn’t do anything to prevent you from completing the encounter and doing your job (damage) then it isn’t relevant. More damage taken is just more damage to heal. If your healers are capable of dealing with it and you gain damage from ignoring the mechanic then it is objectively just better to ignore the mechanic. Other things like uptime on debuffs and doing a proper rotation show themselves in raw damage parses pretty clearly and is why even the most parse obsessed warriors will press sunder armor.
The difference between an 85 parse and a 99 parse can be a ton of things. Raid comp and kill speed are important, but so are doing a proper rotation, have good gear, being specced properly, playing around the fight well, and just getting good rng.
Someone who gets a 99 once isn’t necessarily better than someone who got an 85, but someone who consistently is parsing 98+ is definitely just performing better than someone who consistently gets 85s unless there is some massive difference in kill times or gear level. 95+ is definitely doable with pug level kill times at least.
i hate that when i play Blood DPS my unholy frenzy didn’t count even though it’s my own ability to increase my dps that felt so dumb however i still parsed 99% because that fail logs web considered me a tank with +5k dps.
if they think they’re smart by removing certain dps gain why not eliminate all type of consumables and the certain items that can be abused for dps gain during encounters.
parsing is good idea but the way warcraft logs do it is so stupid, if they wanted it to show pure performance then it would’ve been based only on the % dps with your item level, i know that can be sorted in there but they’re not using the parse points based on %dps of the item level, they just use the over all dps among everyone else, so if someone now have very low gear even if they play 1000% better than others he/she will not have good parsing even if he/she performer 100% Of their item level while the geared people parsed higher but with lower performing for their item level.
ALso note that Current parsing is all about maxed gear and then how you can rush kill the boss within your highest peak of dps due bloodlust/cd’s, so anyway the current parsing prove nothing when it comes to performance or skills.
The higher the dps your raid has the easier it has. This content isnt new either. So there isnt going to be any suprises unless you are 100% new to this content.
They already have a method of sorting by ilvl, but that is not used too often because ilvl can be deceiving and ultimately absolute numbers are just more useful.
The reason things like unholy frenzy and tricks are not included is specifically to dissuade absolutely degenerate parsing metas from appearing where it is required to have your raid set up a tricks rotation on you to get a 99+ parse.