My DPS is Bigger than Yours

Everyone who plays WoW and has reached raiding level at least will have encountered people like this. These are the people that report Recount at every single opportunity so they can say “Hey, Look I win on DPS!” even though everyone either has their own recount damage meter so they can see perfectly well what the DPS is like, or they simply don’t care what the DPS is at all. If you have Recount yourself remember these few guidelines on using Recount:

1. Never Report Recount during a raid. This is considered recount spam and disrupts the raid.
2. Only report recount if someone asks for it. If they ask during a raid, whisper it to them do not use the party or raid to report it.
3. Never report recount just top show off your own DPS, it only serves to annoy others in your party.

Unfortunately, there is always one player in every instance that feels the need to show off their own DPS and this is also true of some healers who like to show off their HPS to the group. Even if they were not the top of the charts for most of the instance, you can guarantee the moment they climb to the top they will report the recount information and fill up your chat screen with it and then expect you to bestow favourable words to them in exchange.

This is largely due to the fact that many players in the World of Warcraft today are obsessing over individual DPS as the solitary key element to any DPS class. This can be a huge mistake in some cases, if you have ever wondered why a PuG failed when everyone had high DPS, you can blame this mentality for it.

High DPS does not necessarily mean they are a good player. There are also many different reasons why a player can reach that amount of DPS in a certain situation but they may not always be able to produce that amount of DPS when it matters. For example, a mage may be able to produce extremely high DPS when using an AOE ability such as Blizzard on the Whelps in Onyxia pushing their DPS up to 12k. They may feel impressed with themselves naturally, but that doesn’t mean they help the raid on the boss at all if their single target damage is something more like 2k DPS. Different classes are more suitable to different situations and some classes gain certain benefits from raid buffs where others do not.

This is where you will need to also consider “Effective DPS” in a raid which many people no longer take into consideration. Raid diversity is a key element which is nowadays overlooked without just cause. In a choice between two players, a raid will often choose the player with the highest individual DPS without taking into account the effective DPS they can provide to others in the raids. Certain classes can provide damage bonuses to other people in the raid or other buffs such as the replenishment ability provided by frost mages. Even though their own DPS may not be as great on its own, players can provide unique abilities and buffs to the raid which improves overall raid DPS much more greatly.

In addition to this, many raid situations actually require some classes to sacrifice some of their DPS for the greater good of the raid. For example, a rogue may switch out Deadly Poison for Anaesthetic Poison on one of their weapons to quickly and effectively dispel enrages on mobs during a boss fight. This reduces the overall strain on the raid by reducing the amount of DPS required or reducing the strain on healers and tanks. However, doing this requires the rogue to sacrifice some of their DPS to allow the raid to successfully complete the encounter. Obviously if someone manages to overtake this rogue and then goes on to flaunt the recount damage meter afterwards you can imagine how this makes that player feel. Many people are now avoiding such sacrifices in order to solidify their place on the recount meter and avoid being embarrassed or pointed out as a low DPS player even though this can hinder the raid progress.

Unfortunately many raid leaders are now promoting the flawed mentality that if a raid is unsuccessful it is because the raid does not have enough DPS when in fact the raid encounter could be resolved by sacrificing DPS in favour of more dispels, interrupts, stuns and other time and DPS consuming abilities. It’s important to remember that recount is not supposed to be used to determine good players, but is just a tool to help people improve in general and to record encounter information. Just because you are top of the damage meter, does not mean you are the best player in the raid, don’t forget the other people who helped you get there too.

When you are ready to step up your game and become a better WoW player, head over to Zygor’s Guides.  He has everything you need to rule in World of Warcraft.