DPS vs Damage DoneFollow

Hey guys hows it going? Well for me it's going pretty well except that I am in a heated discussion/debate with my guild over dps and damage done.

It started a month or two ago with my hunter friend. He is one of the few hunters you will find with half a brain or more, anyways I linked the damage meter (Current DPS) in the raid chat because someone requested it. At which point I was laying the smackdown on everyone because I was number 1 and he (my hunter friend) was trailing by a hundred points. He then replies, "Well post the one that matters, show me that damage done son!" On ventrilo. At which point I posted it and he was ahead by 0.5%~1%. Now I know why he said that and he knows why he said that. The way he has his markmens hunter setup he has really really slow crappy dps at the beginning of the fight then like 20 seconds in he starts getting his big huge hits which damages his average dps.

Ever since alot of the guildies have picked up the philosophy that damage done is the only thing that matters. I debate that it is very inaccurate and can only be count on for certain classes and situations. The general argument that everyone voices at me is that you are a good dps by how much damage you do and that is why damage done is the only thing that matters.

I say it matters but you can't only look at it because it is inaccurate and current dps is equally if not more important because of its accuracy provided you have the right meter. I have several examples that I have been using to prove my point such as these three:

1. I am leveling my mage in the outlands solo. Then one of my guildies is leveling her ret pally in the outlands to solo. We go on for about 40 minutes by ourselves then decide to quest together. After about a half hour of leveling, I say, "Wow my mage does so much damage! Look at these numbers." I post the dps chart. She says, "Thats a lie, your not doing that well at all." and proceeds to post her damage done which she is on top by about 5%. I inform her that it is inaccurate because she's been leveling alone before and has inflated her damage. She says well dps doesn't matter.

2. I have been running people through instances and my times have been: Scholo 35 mins full clear, ZF 18 mins full clear, and SM cath 6 mins full clear. I do it repeatedly and repeatedly for easy leveling. So one of our guildies picks up the trend and starts running himself through scholo over and over with his dad's toon (with his permission of course). After a couple hours he says on vent, "Hey Die, this is sooo much better, I am about to hit 8 million damage done." I say, "Whats your dps?" he replies with 1.7k while I was peaking 2.4k. He was doing runs in about 50 mins to an hour. To which I told him Damage done is not a good meter, because a level one can do 8 mill if you give him enough time. Instead judge it by how long it takes you to do it. He got offended and left the channel.

3. We are in 10 man malygos. I was assigned the job of dropping and stacking the sparks because we don';t have any death knights geared for the place so I don't dps well until phase 2. Halfway through phase 2 i get my pet up and start fighting again. and it is near the end all the dps goes down except for me and an veteran warrior. They're are two stacks of engulf in flames (EIF) on maly when he dies, one at 24 and the other at 19. The warrior says, "Did you guys see my 24 stacks? Thats how you are suppose to do it." I whisper him and tell him, I know my interface those were my 24 stacks. He says, "Naaa man, check ya damage done, I am number 1 they had to be mine." I was 3% behind him, I tell him, "You're not using your brain, learn about your meter. I didn't dps the first half of the fight, split up you and your pets because the drake is counted as a pet, then look at our drakes statistics and you'll see my damage is ahead of yours." He doesn't say anything.

I believe damage done and dps are equally important if you take an intelligent look at each individually. It can all be summed up in two ways. If you do 7k dps but can only do it for 30 seconds GTFO of my raid, and if you can do 8 million damage but can't do it in a quick and speedy time limit GTFO of my raid.

Any comments or opinions on the meter, I mean matter? :P

Edited, Sep 6th 2009 2:08pm by potsoriginal

I never thought of it like that, that's good!!! I might steal this idea.... muwahahaha

Your examples all suck. Simply put, Damage Done should be roughly equal to your DPS multiplied by your time spent on-target. That's all. Exactly what and how you read into that depends on the individual and the numbers in question.

When I look at a mob's health bar, I see hitpoints, not a timer. Another way to look at it is that it's the damage you do that downs a boss, not how fast you do it. (I'm specifically excluding enrage timers from this for simplicity).

DPS is an indicator of potential and is highly circumstantial. It can mean a lot or it can mean nothing. Damage done is the real number translation of a player's contribution to killing things. The ideal situation would be the one where everyone is bright enough to be able to look at a full Recount report (you know, the one that you get when you click on the player's bar in Recount) or an external parse and be able to look at what matters. High dps on AoE trash is nifty...and totally useless when it turns into crap single target dps on a boss. All other things being equal, no at-a-glance reading of a person's dps or damage done means a whole lot of anything since there are so few fights that are a straight up dps race from start to finish.

Here's the problem with a lot of the examples that have been given in this thread so far:

Comparing damage done for old dungeon runs: completely pointless, all this really says is how many mobs you killed.

Comparing DPS for old dungeon runs: also completely pointless because this does not scale accurately to raid situations.

Comparing DPS on a boss fight: Nearly worthless, because it does not show your overall contribution during the fight.

Comparing damage done between two members of the same raid on the same fight: the best comparison, because it will show you exactly what it says. Who did the most damage to that boss. This is because in this situation, the boss starts at alive, and ends at dead, so it's a matter of what you can produce during that time frame. If your DPS is high, but your overall damage is lower, it means you were not giving constant DPS, or you were AFK at the start and started late. It also gets rid of the cases where someone's DPS is high, but then they die.

DPS does have its moments where it's important, so it's not a cut and dry black and white thing, but in most cases, damage done shows who contributed the most (aside from special roles, such as tanks, healers, offtanks, kiters, etc)

Exactly

As people have said, it all depends. On a Patchwerk fight Damage Done is more important. If you get 5K DPS on Patch but you're lower on Damage Done than another player with 4K DPS you've simply been slacking. On a fight like Hodir DPS is more important. If your arms warrior is throwing out 5K and your mage can keep up with that but is lower on Damage Done, then he's doing a good job because he could technically be as effective as the warrior - he just has to keep moving and can't cast well.

As a rule of thumb I usually take Damage Done over DPS in importance; in the average fight a low amount of Damage Done means the player has been slacking - he's shown he can put out high amounts of DPS but simply didn't do so for the entire fight. That said, I tend to go by DPS and only look at Damage Done if it applies or is saying something completely different than DPS.

Edited, Sep 7th 2009 1:21am by Mozared

Tell that to Hodir.

You of all people should know that there's fights on which ranged DPS will always be lower than melee DPS because they need to move, Aeth.

I do like the way of saying it you quoted from SirJac though... "DPS is your potential and damage done is your efficiency".

Neither!

You should measure how funny the player's jokes were in order to decide who has the best overall contribution.

But seriously, it's neither. And both! First of all, don't consider either for trash. Trash is going to go down. Consider them for bosses.


For that case, DPS is a measure of potential contribution. Overall damage done is a measure of actual contribution. In the end it's what really matters, how much damage you actually did. If you had 'L337 deeps' but are way down the list on actual damage done, you weren't contributing well though you had the potential and need to look how you can improve your combat.

Of course you still have to take into account class differences. Hunters are just plain going to have an easier time having more activity during a fight because they don't have to run all over, they just point and shoot. It's expected that their activity rate will be higher than a rogue, and to counter that, rogues have to have higher actual dps in order to have roughly equivalent overall contribution (what actually matters).


In conclusion, if you don't know much about a person, dps is going to be an indicator on how beneficial they will be to your raid (though sometimes even gear score is better), whereas if you're analyzing fight data to see who did well, look at overall damage done. People who have consistently high overall damage done will be more beneficial.


p.s. my username seems to have the flue, it's all green. :(

Edited, Sep 6th 2009 5:39pm by digitalcraft