So I’ve never raided seriously before, always pugged and such. Wtf are parses and why do they matter? Noob question but I see this so often.
Parses are your dps(Or heal) logs for raids. A website like warcraftlog ranks those logs in percentiles compared to other people. Using your logs you can figure out how to improve your dps based on what other people are doing. There are also some websites that tell you how many times you should have been able to use your cds/rotational abilities and explain how you’re doing your rotations wrong.
In terms of why they matter aside from being a tool to help you improve. Guilds like to look at your logs so they can decide if you’re worth taking. Ilvl isn’t particularly significant in this metric because you can see percentiles for your ilvl brackets.
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Your dps or hps for a raid encounter.
They’re called parses because the combat log is a big text log and you have to “parse” the dmg and heal numbers out of it.
It’s a quantifiable metric to judge performance, for mechanics and damage output. Generally higher parses shows that the player understands their class well enough to perform high DPS while also managing mechanics. It’s a good way to understand if you’re performing well or poorly, and a way for guilds to decide if they want to keep or remove players from their raid roster if there are no signs of improvement.
Ilvl is too inflated this day and age to be a good metric for determining player skill, sadly.
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It’s a good way to improve yourself. Look at my parses on warcraftlogs and you can see the exact moment I started using hekili lol.
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In addition to what others have said, parses frequently refer to how you stack up against players playing the same class as you based on percentiles.
So for example, if you have a 10th percentile parse, 90% of parses from the same spec did more damage than you. If you have a 100th percentile parse, you had the best parse anyone else has done.
Overall they’re tools for both comparing yourself to other players and using a detailed breakdown of how you did the fight as a tool to improve your own play.
It’s yet another external system that governs your in-game experience. It’s no doubt necessary for true high end content like cutting edge mythic raiding, but as always these systems also get used for much lower end content that it makes no sense for because everybody wants to feel like an important big boy raider even if they’re a WQ hero who occasionally does a +4.
So you would log your raids and have them uploaded to warcraft logs. From there you can see you Parse(ranking) to see how you stack up to everyone else, best to go by ilvl percent no use comparing a 400 to a 450. From there you can break down the fights of what you did right and wrong. You can also use those logs on wow analyzer to give you some help with what you need to approve.
It is a wonderful tool.