Magery... who knew?

So last night after being fussed at for the umpteenth time about out-DPSing the mage, I pulled up her gear, fed it into Rawr, and began researching what might be necessary to make that gear better. Ignoring everything else in the interface (including the page full of various buffs that can be turned off and on for the simulator) I went straight to eyeballing each piece of her gear in detail.

Problem #1, a lot of missing enchants. You can see this pretty easily in Rawr because each item that is enchantable is in a frame with space under it saying "No Enchant". Clicking on this brings up a list of possible enchants, sorted by what you've selected ("Overall" by default). The little bar under the enchant name illustrates their relation to each other in power contribution.

The only issue with using this is that it'll show you enchants that you might not be able to apply unless you're an enchanter or a leatherworker or whoever else has those self-applicable armor boosters. You must pay a bit of attention to the viability of your selection or dig more deeply into configuring Rawr not to show you these things (but mostly more information is better than having something filtered out, see below).

Problem #2, several items were very, very far from the "best in slot" items at the top of the list on the right. Generally this is a sign that you can go pillage the auction house and add more DPS for mere gold. What else are you planning on doing with this money? At 80, everything else is cheap so you don't really need a dragon's hoard of gold (mekgineer's choppers notwithstanding). Seriously, if you can't see both the gear you're wearing and the top of the list at the same time in the pane on the right, carefully scrutinize each and every item in between using the right-click "Open in Wowhead" option to see if it's a world-drop you can score from the Auction House, a quest reward you probably misjudged (or haven't gotten to yet... W00-h00!) or something a player crafter can make. Do not ignore the player-crafted epics, they are your friend and just about everyone has at least one best-in-slot item that's player-craftable.

Some of the items in the released database don't properly list where they come from. If you see Rawr not mentioning the origin of an item when you mouse over it, or that origin looks wrong, right click on it and select Update from Armory/WoWHead to have Rawr try to get better information. One or the other usually works, although you may have to manually edit the item anyway to re-set it's socket bonus.

Problem #3, I'm an idiot. On the upper part of the right-hand pane you can turn on and off filters that will make Rawr not show (or consider) items that you can't (or won't) obtain. Since I'm not a jewelcrafter, I had BoP Jewelcrafting items disabled and Leatherworking stuff still on (which I'd rightly ignored). This is what I meant above by more information is better than less. Once that was fixed a new trinket and a couple of prismatic gems appear in the list. Suddenly the Twilight Serpent with it's two gem slots steps up and looks absolutely delicious.

Problem #4, I'm still an idiot. The 2.2.0 beta of Rawr has a slightly different approach to gemming than the patched (for Hunters) version of 2.1.9 I'm using, and for my version (equivalent to the stable 2.1.9 release in every way for all other classes) gemmings are handled by simply creating duplicates of the socketable item in Rawr's database of gear, and gemming each one manually. Getting around this is much easier than you might think. While you're ogling..er..browsing the list of gear on the right, look around and below the piece of gear you're wearing for items which have sockets. Right-click them, select Edit, and you see the list of all the permutations of that item (if any). There's a nice Duplicate button at the bottom that will let you clone an item as it's ungemmed form, and then you can simply click on the gem sockets to bring up a list of gems, sorted by their power contribution, to socket it. Everything in my database had been regemmed for Hunters, and attack power isn't what Mages really need. Doh!

Creating the socketed duplicates doesn't require you to make dozens of duplicates--nine permutations on gemming would probably be as many as you'd need because by now you should know what you're trying to gem for and won't be caring about the dinky green gems for the level 60 people. Once I'd regemmed a few things, suddenly Hat of Wintry Doom pops up as best-in-slot. W00t! MOAR DPS! The Twilight Serpent Figurine looked tons better, too.

WARNING! Rawr still has a bunch of gems from the upcoming 3.1 patch in the database it comes with. You will probably just want to delete them from the list for now because they do not exist in the game yet. I will leave how to do this as an exercise to the reader but most people will probably spot it easily.


Now... There is an optimizer in Rawr that can, in theory, produce a list of gear that you should wear based on what you've told it you have so if you have a collection of gear you weren't certain about, it might be able to hook you up with a list. To do this, in the right hand pane you will see a little diamond outline next to each item. Click this to mark that item as something you have or can easily get. Using the left-hand dropdown on the right-hand gear list pane you can select which slot you want to see shown, and do this for every slot, including gems and meta-gems. Once you've marked a pile of these the optimizer will hopefully show you a rating for your current gear and a higher rating for a gear combination you might not have thought of. I say hopefully because although the Rawr.Mage module is supposed to be working, it didn't immediately show me a useful list--only a less powerful set than what I'd fiddled in myself because I'd not marked everything properly yet (another "I'm an idiot" moment). On the theory that what I'd picked based on DPS-contribution was likely better anyway, I spent a few more gold (~700 in total) and snatched the last few pieces from the Auction House and made her take them to the test dummy.

I was a little horrified at the hit rating being so high, because I didn't know mages had a different miss percentage for their spells. A quick check of the Elitist Jerks forum and WoWWiki showed me otherwise. Hunters have it comparatively easy and can reach the hit cap at 262 without straining because their miss chance is only 8%. It's almost twice that for ranged casters... who knew?

Testing the old gear (including a few extra enchants) against the test dummy (three set of full-to-empty blasting) Recount reported ~1500DPS. The test was repeated with the new gear amid cries of "Oh my crit is so looooow!" with a hit rating a mere two points under the cap (she might miss against a boss mob once a week or two) and blasted out ~1800dps.

Don't anyone get excited about that not being 4,000 DPS against the test dummy. Using your own buffs only and no special buff foods/drinks makes your numbers against the test dummy more consistent and more accurate with respect to what your gear is contributing. Unless you're a warrior drinking spell penetration elixirs, it should be a given that any buffs you get in a raid or from elixirs/flasks are always going to be straight up MOAR DPS so they don't really have to be scrutinized as much. ...but feel free to use all those cooldowns, elementals, mirror images, and heck, even the peasants from Scholomance if you think they'll work against a raid boss. There was an initial problem with the testing of only using Frostbolt--which isn't the way you fight a boss--so the numbers really sucked.

700g ~= 300 MOAR DPS. This isn't that bad. I spent about 4,000g tuning up my toon, but that started practically the moment I'd hit 80 and before I'd gotten any serious loot from any bosses anywhere.

Gold. Spend it. Seven hundred gold isn't all that much money to spend at level 80 if you've got two gathering skills or one crafting skill you've been actively working on for money.

Rational DPS Measurement

Okay, so we've all seen them... The guys who are wearing so-so gear and haven't even gotten the player-crafted epics on their new level 80 toon claiming insanely high DPS numbers. You ask them when they measured this and they say "Last night in Heroic Naxx".

Well, that's all well and good for the makeup of that particular raid which generally includes a helping of AoE damage as well, but it doesn't really represent a realistic or rational measurement. That same toon might well be barely able to outdamage your pet in a 5-man run with only one or two buffs available. This is why you need a sane baseline method for DPS measurement. Period.

How you get a sane baseline for DPS measurement is actually pretty simple thanks to an addition Blizzard put in in last fall's content patch--specifically, the target dummies. You can find them in every major city with multiple types available. There's level 60 dummies, level 70 dummies, level 80 dummies, and usually one Heroic Target Dummy. This is basically the one you want to be shooting at if you're trying to come up with a useful DPS measurement for heroics and raids.

How do we go about it? Well, there's got to be some rules first, just to eliminate the things that can cause wild disparities in damage. What would a "wild disparity" be you ask? It's easy... Anything that's going to skew results by a third or more. One thing that really leaps out would be the duration of the fight In theory with a good group makeup this can vary a great deal with Replenishment and Hunting Party going. because mana == healing == life and we all know when the healer runs out of mana, things go south fast. This won't really affect classes with no mana bar, but for the ones who do use mana it means it'll take longer to get a good read on your DPS. You're going to want to start attacking and go like crazy until your mana runs out and then you stop and drink back to full. The saner cooldowns should be ready again now (anything longer than 5 minutes, just forget about) so you'll do it again, and then one more time for a total of three passes. Then you check Recount. Everyone else, just go hog wild for 2-5 minutes (time it, based on the paragraph below and then stop).

The length of the fight matters with respect to abilities with long cooldowns, because if someone's got a couple of cooldowns at 2 minutes, and they attack for 2 minutes and 30 seconds, those abilities will be disproportionately represented in the resulting damage totals. Each cooldown should be considered to be of two parts... the time the ability runs, and the time the ability can't be used. So... if your longest cooldown cycle in question is 20 seconds on, 120 seconds (two minutes) off, you'll want to attack for a multiple of that time meaning 140 seconds or 280 seconds.

Buffs are a hard issue. On the one hand you want to measure the effect of your own buffs. On the other hand, you don't want to go overboard and have other people's buffs, or buffs based on money (like food and potions) so they're out--don't use them. You also have to keep a close eye on the Heroic Target Dummy and make sure some other class that puts a debuff on the target that say, increases crits by 3% or increases damage taken by 5% or reduces armor doesn't come along and slap a few of those down because those will screw up your measurement. By the same token, damage-increasing buffs cast by the well-meaning among us as they pass you at the target dummies are also out of the question. Click them off and start the phase over again or just be patient until they wear off.

This should cover most of the bases and give people a solid baseline for measuring their DPS without artificial epeen enhancement being involved. If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. I'll see if I can come up with rational answers.