Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Progress Meter


(while pure dps meters don't always tell the full story, you can learn a lot from them)

I'm a really big fan of DPS meters. I usually run recount and also post wow webstats after every major raid or instance.

A lot of people think I do this in the spirit of competition or some way to flaunt status of certain characters. However, my main reason for keeping track of meters is to check progress and also current ability of toons.

If you constantly play without meters then you have now to gauge progress or loss of progress or no change. Also, meters can help you understand what's going on with a certain toon as well. Like if a mage has a lot of epic gear but is constantly dipping below 1000dps perhaps they're not spec'd right or they simply don't have enough crit and hit rating.

One example where meters really helped is with a hunter friend of mine. We were doing our ZA bear runs and I noticed his DPS dipped 100-200 points below 1000 damage per second. SO I talked to him about it. It turned out that while he had "upgrade" epic gear from 25 mans and BOJs, it all actually hurt his DPS a lot because it had little hit rating. Once he switched back to his old gear, his DPS spiked.

"Just play for fun" - yeah. I agree. I do. I've heard that argument before and I 100% agree with it but it's all about perspective. Some people LOVE just hanging out and they don't care if they wipe a million times or if they don't finish an instance. My hunter friend said that on his last server, they had fun wiping on animal boss over and over again in Karazhan.

If people enjoy their play style, that's good. My play style however is maximizing everyone to the best of their ability and in my experience, if you don't push people to be better and challenge them, they'll never know how good they can be. And excelling and maximizing efficiency in the game is what really gets my jollies. :)

I usually try to help people out with improving their character. However, if they start to get easily offended or don't show interest in pushing or simply say it's impossible, I usually let it go. Pushing people's buttons is something I only reserve for my real friends. hehehee.

Just ask Flipmax and Felix how much crap I give them when I think they're DPS is slipping. lol. JUST KIDDING!

My recommended DPS mod (also shows a lot of other great data) is Recount.

4 comments:

Mercot said...

Having attended a few low-end casual raids with my Hunter, I've been wondering how people could find an actual number for their DPS. Not wanting to sound like a dumba$$ (feel better sounding like one here), I didn't ask. Thanks for the Recount tip :)

celticlucas said...

One wonders... what is the "standard" DPS for each class, say, in entry level raiding gear. I've always been confused by DPS numbers as there are a lot of variables that can effect them, but it's always good to know about the starting point to work from on my own.

Alachia said...

if you continue to use meters throughout your gameplay, you can generally get a good idea of starting dps avg and end game.

maxdps.com and other sights like that also help people maximize their dps. it allows you to compare spec/gear/talents to maximum damage output.

it also stayed pretty current in TBC as to where you could upgrade.

also depending on your class and spec, you may run into things like high DPS but low DPM (dmg per mana)and once again, if you keep track of meters most of the time, you'll start to gauge where one class will excel above other at what time. it will also allow you to tend to see patterns of symbiosis among certain class types.

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