Read class discord and guides for current information and tips. This will help you to get the basics down. But, understand that these will only have general information and will not be be personally catered to you since they are intended for a broad audience. For example, guides can provide your class’ stat weights. However, for your own stat weights, you have to always “sim yourself”.
If you feel you have mastered the basics and want more improvement, you have to learn to read logs, and compare your logs to other people who parsed higher in a similar setting. This takes time, but it is very helpful. Logs will tell you useful information such as are you using the ideal gear (maybe you should try to farm certain trinkets), are you using cds at correct timings (note “correct” timing will heavily depend on raid team), are you using right talents, and so on. If logs show that you are pressing your buttons pretty much like a higher parser in a similar situation, but your average damage per hit is lower than them, then you know it is just a gear issue. Unholy set bonus is especially huge.
Experiment from time to time and understand what works best for you and your raid team setting. This means trying out different trinkets, using cds at different timings, etc.
Even after doing all of the above, it might still be difficult for you to parse significantly higher due to various factors.
Normal and heroic parses tend to be skewed due to mythic raiders stomping through them with superior gear and skill. Also, you are playing arms warrior, which is currently a meta class. This means more competitors, more people you have to do better than to parse higher.
You might be missing some significant advantages compared to the competition such as wind totem (huge for arms warrior), power infusion, etc.
Your raid team’s dps will affect your parse. Generally speaking, it tends to be easier to parse higher if the fight is shorter. But, to have shorter fights, your raid team needs to have high overall dps. Also, depending on your raid team’s dps, the fight may end on a bad timing for you personally (ex. boss dies when your big cds are about to come up).
While parsing is an important metric, it is not everything. I would take into consideration how you are doing relative to your team since everyone is in a different situation. Are you the top dps or bottom dps in your team? If you are generally on top, you are probably doing fine even if your parse is not high. Keep in perspective the boss you are on, and your own personal assignment. For example, arms should be near top on The Nine. But, if you are assigned to Kelthuzad phylactery, you will not be top dps and that is OK.
Trying to raise your parse takes time and effort. Don’t lose hope even if you don’t see an immediate improvement. Good luck.
Adding on to this…
1st-24th percentile is grey
25th-49th percentile is green
50th-74th percentile is blue
75th-95th percentile is purple
96th-98th percentile is orange
99th percentile is pink
100th percentile is gold
This sort of thing is extremely class dependent. In classes with a large degree of skill variance (the best player outputs MUCH higher damage than the worst player) then it will be easier to parse higher. Additionally, it’s generally easier to parse higher on less popular classes as the best players tend to play the best specs, which in turn makes those specs more popular.
Early in a tier you might also get sunk by gear. Not necessarily by ilvl, though if you look at your ilvl parse and it’s good while your overall parse is bad that’s probably it. But gear optimization matters too. Good example for this tier is the domination shard set bonus. That set bonus is a MASSIVE DPS boost and if you complete that late, your parse will be brought down below those who get it early.
Remember that parse just describes what percentage of people did more damage than you. But a 20th percentile parse doesn’t mean you’re only 20% as good as the best Arms Warrior. Don’t just look at the parse, take a look at your raw damage number compared to the blue parsers. If it’s only a couple hundred DPS off, then you’re probably fine and Arms is just really competitive. If he gap is large then there’s something going on there, but it would be difficult to say what without seeing your logs.
Be sure to remember that parses aren’t the be all, end all!
They are a great tool for learning and seeing about where you should be performance wise but you need to watch out for things too, like folks being fed or just god like comps/kill times.
I don’t know about your class either but for some covenants make a huge difference too so make sure you are looking at the same covs if there is a lot of variation.
Its nice now that PI is marked on parses, so you can spy if someone was getting spoiled or not but there are other things too that aren’t marked. If you are melee was the other guy in a windfury group and you weren’t? Did they have a warrior and you didn’t that night? Lots of variables!
Greys though you usually know exactly what went wrong, unless your spec is just hyper competitive, you can see how many logs per spec are up as well.
Oh! One more thing I forgot to add. Are your fight lengths overly long? Roundabout way of asking if you’re the best player in a bad guild. The reason this matters is because when the fight is shorter, you spend a greater proportion of the fight under Bloodlust. Imagine a fight that you killed in exactly 45 seconds. You got to spend the entire fight under Bloodlust. Someone who took twice as long would have an average DPS much lower. So try to only compare to fights of similar length. On a slightly smaller scale, specs with a feast or famine damage profile will parse much better if the fight ended during their feast than if it ended during their famine. That’s all random chance and will have a greater effect on short fights. Specs with relatively flat damage profiles (like my own Feral) don’t have that problem nearly as much.
If you’re doing your rotation correctly then cooldown and consumable usage would be the next thing to look at. Particularly with fights where you don’t hero right at the start there’s a big difference between a Bloodlust where you use all your cooldowns and consumables and one where you don’t. Proper cooldown management matters. Rule of thumb, if it’s worth popping it’s worth stacking. If you’re not paying attention to that and just popping everything as it comes off CD your parse may be lower. (Again, class dependent. I don’t know how much this would affect Arms.)
The other thing I’d do is paste your logs into WoWAnalyzer (an online 3rd party site). They have a suggestions page which you should take with a grain of salt as it’s very hit or miss, but it will tell you if you’re making MAJOR errors like leaving a DoT off forever or letting a cooldown sit for too long. That’s not what we’re here for though. Once you plug into WoWAnalyzer go to the character tab. There you can see what the most popular talents, legendaries, and soulbinds are for your spec for that fight. If you see that 96% of other Arms Warriors are using a different build than you then there’s probably a reason for that and you should find out what that reason is.
Details! measures effective DPS while I believe Recount measures active DPS by default. (I’m pretty sure you can change both addons in their respective settings.)
With active DPS the meter will try to filter out downtime, only looking at times you were in active combat. So it will freeze DPS if you die or if something weird happens to cause massive forced downtime. This one tends to be affected by someone joining the fight slightly late as well.
Details! measures effective DPS, doesn’t filter out any of the fight time. Unlike Recount, it uses a hidden channel to talk with all your other group members using Details! so that it can sync up the fight times. Details! tends to be closer to what WoWLogs uses so you’ll see more familiar information with Details! than with Recount. The use of that hidden channel though means that Details! will be more accurate even if you swap it to measure active DPS like Recount does.
It’s not always about pushing your buttons, but knowing when to push what. Are you stacking your cooldowns? Are you saving key abilities for key moments in fights? Are you dying prematurely? Are you playing it too safe? How are you doing relative to your own guild?
I’m sorry, but without looking at your character and your actual parses, there’s not much anyone’s gonna be able to do for you.
Right now there’s a big gap between people that have their domination bonuses and/or have gotten 252 weapons from their vaults. That’s another factor.
That said, part of your problem can be explained by just reading this snippet:
Never assume you’re doing everything correctly, specially in the face of data that seems to suggest otherwise. Not being critical of yourself will hold you back.
I’m still at work, but wanted to check in on my thread.
So many great replies thank you all so much! I understand logs are needed for more feedback but I needed to start somewhere.
This is fair. But being critical of myself is entirely what this thread is about.
The assumption about knowing my rotation is mainly that it’s not that hard (it’s not as simple as “just press Condemn” that some people think it is, but even still, it’s not that hard). The hardest thing about it is that Arms is horribly rage-starved and… there isn’t much you can do about that. We have ONE ability that gives us Rage, and I’m already Charge-weaving to eek out that extra little bit.
But I feel very solid on the rotation and how best to maximize output potential for ST/AoE, keeping a steady stream of Rage coming, etc.
OHH-- I have to run but-- BIGGEST thing that I know I face is that I am now the “wrong” Covn. I’m Venthyr and NF would be a HUGE boost. And I’m sorry but, I’m not switching. I won’t cave to Blizzard’s bad design/FOTM failure just to do more damage. I shouldn’t have to. So yes-- that will also be a MAJOR factor in why my overall DPS is low, but I don’t think that is what’s separating me from a NINE parse and an 85.
I’ll review this thread some more later tonight. Thanks again to everyone.
Personally I think the community oversells how much covenant matters. I don’t think you’d need to swap either.
I’m looking at the sims and it looks like a NF Arms Warrior has about a 2.5% DPS lead over a Venthyr Arms Warrior. With BiS 252 gear that’s a difference of a little more than 200 DPS when both are simming in the neighborhood of 11k. I’m going to make a wild assumtion that you are not in fact decked out in full Mythic gear so that delta will be smaller for you.
When I pop over to WoW logs to check the practical effect it’s more difficult to measure since there’s a ton of NF parses and very few Venthyr parses. There it’s showing a much more significant 20% difference between the median Venthyr and median NF, but the Venthyr data is also incredibly variable in part due to how few parses there are. Given how far removed the Venthyr data is from its sims while the NF data, not so much, I’m thinking that the lack of popularity is causing some strangeness there. The upper quartile of Venthyr is competitive with the median NF so if you’re an above average Venthyr, you shouldn’t be parsing grey. Green in the worst case.
This is a tricky question because your own personal skill isn’t the only factor of your parse. You could play, like an absolute robot with 0 error and still not parse well because the other members of your group played like absolute potato’s which dragged down your ranking
I would build upon that observation and say that the NF data is going to skew higher (from hardcore players switching to be the best), while Venthyr data is going to skew lower (from mediocre/average players who refuse to switch).
Are there GREAT Venthyr players? Sure. But I think when it comes to who is tracking data and being a min-maxer like that, I think MOST hardcores are going to swap, and most average players are going to not swap. So it creates the appearance that Venthyr is worse than it is.
But your first paragraph is refreshing in that I would have assumed the difference would be more like 3-4k. Certainly with how everyone carries on about it. 200dps is nothing, especially on 11k. My raid numbers tend to be in the 5-7k range (at i230-231).
I just watched a great vid on “how to analyze logs” and it made me laugh. Guy basically said “you know how everyone immediately checks DPS? Forget that, never do that. Go to DEATHS. Figure out how and why you died. THAT is what is important. Forget about DPS, it’s probably the LEAST useful thing.”
So he went on detailing how to use the Deaths tab to improve. And obviously, he touched on how the DPS tab can help (but his video was mostly about how to use the Deaths tab to improve). But I think if I can look up other good Arms data and compare what abilities they’re using, that would help-- I just don’t know how to do that.
Just as your fights are recorded and able to be viewed, as are everyone elses. You can go to rankings for your spec and look at what the top players for your spec did on each fight, you can even subdivide by ilvl if you want to try to find kills more representative of your own.
You should then look at things like kill time, cooldown timings, rotation timeline, buff uptimes, and also talents / gear builds and compare them to your own.
I occupy a sort of mentor role in my guild and a piece of advice that I’ve been giving out for years is that when you die you should ask yourself three questions:
What killed me? Literally the name of the ability that killed you, or if what killed you was just normal raid damage that killed you because you were at a sliver of health, what brought you low enough to be cherry-tapped?
What went wrong that let that ability do that? Eg. I waited too long to move out of the fire. Before the ability came out I was positioned such that I had nowhere to go. I was focusing on a different mechanic and didn’t react in time.
Why won’t it happen again? Eg. I’ve adjusted my Bigwigs/DBM so that I will notice the ability immediately when it happens. I’ve come up with a deliberate positioning strategy so that I won’t box myself in anymore.
Very few people are able to react perfectly to a raid boss the first time they see it. The best skill for a raider to have isn’t to run a boss flawlessly the first time they see it, but requiring as few runs as possible to reach their stride. Just like any other skill, this is something that can be practiced and nurtured. It’s not just a matter of “trying harder.” The motto I’ve come up with that my guild has sort of adopted is that failure is a currency. Every time you die and use that death to adjust your strategy you’ve saved a piece of currency and enough of those will buy a win. If you don’t examine your failures then you’ve left currency on the floor and gamers hate doing that. If you’re leaving currency on the floor you’ll need to farm that currency longer before you have enough to get what you want.
The less extreme version of this if you’re not dying is examining how mechanics are cutting into your DPS. When people ask me which is more important, doing peak damage or doing mechanics, the correct answer is both. True focus is a resource and doing both at once will strain that resource as you have to focus on more things. If you’re finding it difficult to do both at once, look at adjusting your UI as that is the chief factor in how much focus you need to spend on any particular task, whether it be a mechanic, your rotation, or planning for the future of the fight.
You should be able to do as close to your target dummy damage as possible without dropping mechanics. Mechanics will always necessitate some amount of compromise, but you should always look for ways to reduce that compromise. The classic example is for casters when a mechanic forces them to move. Frequently, novice casters will run much further than they need to, resulting in much more time when they can’t cast. Reduce that compromise by moving only as much as you need to. If the mechanic doesn’t do drop-off damage, then it doesn’t matter if you’re out of it by an inch or a mile. So don’t run a mile. For melee the way this normally manifests is look at how you’re using you mobility and gap closers and see if you can cut down on how long you have to disconnect from the boss if you optimize how those are used, or plan your rotation so that the disconnects don’t cut into your damage so much.
I think that’s a very different kind of analysis aimed at a different sort of audience trying to solve a different problem. It’s very true that using logs to work out why you died to certain things and how you can mitigate those issues is a great thing every raider could benefit from doing, but if you’re making this thread and asking why your parses are as low as they are, I’d like to hope you know the reason isn’t that you’re dead 80% of the time.
I’d like to hope so as well. Even if you die close to the end of the fight, dying is the fastest ticket to greysville. Generally if you parsed grey on a fight where you died, the reason for your low parse should not be a mystery. So I’m assuming that you haven’t been having troubles dying, OP.