Why do people parse their fights? Is there a prize for the top parses? I understand you can use it to figure out whats going wrong with a fight to make corrections, but why are parses necessary in Classic?
It’s become too difficult to find a guild that isn’t trying to parse their hardest. Please help me understand!
If your guild uses loot council, the parse is a way to see who the top performer is and thus reward gear to the individuals carrying the raid’s damage performance.
Overall, game culture hasn’t changed much. In Vanilla, my guild used damage meters to see who could be considered ‘the best’; now there is logs
This is bleed-over from mythic raiding and mythic + dungeons in retail. Some folks feel that the only way to play a game is to have top numbers. If you don’t have top numbers, you must not know what you’re doing.
Competition is fun.
There’s a reason every single multiplayer game has some sort of leaderboards now.
I personally enjoy improving at games that I play. Parsing is a way to look at what I am doing better/worse than others and use that information to improve my game-play.
I personally use it as a way to gauge my performance while also looking for room to improve. It’s my first time playing a healer in WoW or really any other MMO, so it’s been a useful tool to see what I’m doing wrong on certain fights.
Yeah, actually.
I run with a group that rewards people who perform well with gold incentives. Honestly, it really does motivate some people who push a little harder than they might have before. Even if the top performers squeeze out a few more DPS, that helps the raid. So why not reward people who put in the effort?
Believe it or not some people actually enjoy competition. Crazy, I know.
Logs are a good tool to use to see if potential raiders have the skill and are willing to put in the effort to contribute to a raid. People who regularly get gray and green parses (with respect to their item level range) tend to be players who either don’t know what they’re doing or they simply aren’t trying very hard. The first can be corrected, but the latter is almost always a raider I’d rather not have. I might be in the minority on this, but I’ve always believed that when you join a raid, you’re forming a social contract with the other 39 people in that raid. You agree that you will not be wasting their time by playing poorly, and in exchange they’ll do the same and hopefully the bosses will all die. Having logs and parses is a nice tool we can use to preemptively weed out the players who will try to take advantage of that social contract and expect others to pull their weight as well.
I like these responses. It sounds like these folks are playing to enjoy the game. Using a tool for personal growth is a great thing to do.
Using the same tool to disparage someone else may not be appropriate.
Aside from the learning benefits, in a game in which actually clearing the content (up until now, and even BWL will be pug’d soon) has been completely trivial, clear times and parses are a way of adding another layer of “progression” and competition to the game.
Without it, it’s just paying half-attention to kill easymode content for useless microprogessions (since you can clear the content without them, anyway), which is about as boring as it gets.
Yes, people can be elitist and, yes, a lot of what goes into parsing high is dumb (consumes, being selfish, etc), but who cares. It’s a way for people to have fun.
Why do people do timed sprints? Why do people race? Idk man people just like to compete
If you have a dps that is falling well behind other members of same class/spec, then you know they are probably:
There are many things you can see from parsing. You can see who is using the appropriate spells, who is targeting correctly. Who is managing aggro correctly. Who is healing correctly etc.
They arent the end all be all. Just another tool in the box to help you correct errors if need be.
For some people, parsing is a mini-game in and of itself.
If you are struggling to kill bosses then parsing can help to identify problems.
If bosses are dying with extreme ease then parsing can help keep raiding interesting for anyone who enjoys competition.
I stand in fire and heal myself. 99 healing parse here I come
So the officers in the guild can talk mad crap about your playing skills after you log off.
I liked looking at parses not for the numbers, but for seeing where I was going wrong. I learned that my SnD uptime was garbage as well as a spec I was trying out was just bad. Really bad.
But it was fun to experiment and we still cleared content no problem. I don’t worry too much about the numbers themselves since almost all of that is down to consumes/buffs rather than individual skill.
Parses are great for improving individual skill, not necessarily a good determinant of individual contribution of dedication. I died losing ony buff and dropped over 5 places on the meters. Our raid leader told us to take it easy during progression/first BWL raid so I didn’t treat it as a dps race, played it safe, etc. does that make me a worse raider? Nope, it just means I was willing to take less risks. As long as the content dies? My guild is happy so not concerned.
Its a way to keep mc fun. If i am just comparing to my own raid it gets boring fast. If i am parsing against everyone, i can make every fight count. When your on 20 weeks of clearing a raid something is needed to spice it up.
I find only lazy or bad players dont like parsing. It makes them relize they are bad even though they think they are competent.
It does suck in retail when you get droped for someone who parses just a little more then you but that is how pugs work in retail.
for dps, parses are pretty straightforward. if all your mages are parsing 90s consistently, but one is parsing 75, it is clear that one mage is not pulling their weight for some reason. lack of consumables, world buffs, personal effort, whatever the case may be.
healing parses are much more complex to analyze.