A recurring theme on WoW forums that I’ve seen since the days of Molten Core, is uninformed raiders complaining about Damage Meter mods and how they hurt the raid.  The truth is that damage meters are a tool, much like a hammer.  When used properly, a hammer can help you build some very cool stuff that you never could’ve built with your bare hands.  Or when used irresponsibly, a hammer can smash your thumbs or poke your eye out.

The most popular damage meter addon is probably Recount.  Another option which I’m told is much less CPU intensive is Skada.  I would consider it essential to run one of these mods (or something similar) while raiding, but this is especially true if you have any hand in the raid leadership, or even if you just want to be able to discuss fight strategies and analyze what happened on the previous attempt without accidentally making a fool of yourself.  However, you will learn very little from simply looking at, say, the Damage Done meter, without analyzing the context in which those numbers were obtained.  The true usefulness of these addons is dependent on digging a little deeper than what you immediately see on the surface.  Here I’ll discuss some examples of how I use Recount for the first 7 bosses in Icecrown Citadel (i.e. Storming the Citadel and Plagueworks sections), emphasizing only DPS classes and ignoring Tanks/Healers.

Lord Marrowgar

- Marrowgar is a pretty straightforward fight, and is a decent boss for judging the strength of each DPS player based on the Damage Done meter.  However, the one extra detail you must examine a little closer is Damage Done to Bone Spikes.  Anyone who has very little damage done to Bone Spikes (or no damage whatsoever) is not pulling their weight in the raid, regardless of how much DPS they did to Marrowgar.  However, the cutoff for “very little damage” will depend on many factors.  For example, if you position your raid right behind Marrowgar then melee should have much more Bone Spike damage than casters – but if you spread out all over the room then melee/casters should all be contributing evenly to Bone Spike damage.  Also, if this fight is farm content and the spikes are blowing up in under 5 seconds then it’s acceptable for casters to not help with Bone Spikes, but if this fight is still challenging or if spikes are staying up for 10+ seconds, then you should really consider sitting any DPS out who are not pulling their weight on the spikes.

- As far as analyzing failures on this fight, Recount isn’t all that necessary since basically anything you die to on this fight as a DPS is your own fault (with the exception of dying to a 10+ second Bone Spike, but this would be so obvious that you shouldn’t need to analyze the Death meter to notice it)

Lady Deathwhisper

- Lady Deathwhisper is one of the few cases where the “Damage Meters are useless!” crowd would actually have a good point.  Anyone DPSing the boss in Phase 1 will have much higher DPS, even though P1 boss damage is probably the least important aspect of the fight.  So the total Damage Done is pretty meaningless unless you are only comparing two people who had the exact same job in phase 1.  Even comparing just the Damage Done to Cult Fanatics/Adherants isn’t necessarily useful, except for spotting people who are  ignoring their particular assignment.  Probably the only way to get any relevant information about DPS players’ performance on this fight is to reset the meter for Phase 2 only, but even then you need to also check the Interrupt meter and realize that people handling the frostbolt interrupts will be lower on the Damage Done meter thru no fault of their own.

- Other uses of Recount on this fight include a) the Dispels meter to find out which people are not decursing, and slap them on the noggin, b) Interrupts meter in Phase 2, or c) Death meter to analyze why people died (there are many possible sources of death on this fight which are completely not your fault – but if you died to Death and Decay, a Vengeful Blast from the Ghosts, or an aggro pull on the boss, then these are your own fault)

Gunship Battle

- I don’t really care what you do on this fight as long as you don’t go AFK inside the cabin where you still take damage but can’t get healed (lookin at you, Asgeroth!).  Analyzing Recount on this fight would be like analyzing the Chess Event in Karazhan, no one cares.

Deathbringer Saurfang

- Saurfang is an excellent fight for judging DPS players’ performance.  Melee classes can be judged strictly by the Damage Done meter on this fight.  For Ranged classes (including Hunters plus the Caster DPS), the relevant metric for judging their performance is mostly the Damage Done to Blood Beasts.  If you really needed to judge the strength of a particular Ranged DPS player (like say an applicant on a farm content trial run), you might consider instructing them to ignore Blood Beasts and only nuke the boss, so that you can compare apples to apples when you review the logs later.

- One of the main causes of wipes on this fight is if melee DPS or the tanks get aggro on Blood Beasts and give Saurfang a ton of energy.  In cases like this, I switch Recount to the Damage Taken meter, and start checking each melee/tank to see how much damage they took from Blood Beasts.  Then when you find out who the culprit is, you can switch back to the Damage Done meter, click on that person, and check out the breakdown of their damage done to Blood Beasts, to tell them which ability they need to make sure to not use when the adds spawn.  The most common culprits are Hammer of the Righteous from Prot Paladins, Maul from Feral Druids, Consecrate/Divine Storm from Ret Paladins while using Avenging Wrath, and Whirlwind crits from Fury Warriors leaving Deep Wounds.

Festergut

- Festergut is the best fight in ICC for judging DPS players’ performance, but like Saurfang, the fight heavily favors melee DPS.  This fight is even better than Saurfang for judging melee DPS, since there is no concern about hitting Blood Beasts with AOE moves.  It is possible to completely remove the “melee bias” on this fight by having Ranged DPS stand at melee, but most guilds prefer to stick healers at melee instead since the tanks can take some large damage spikes.

- There isn’t much need for analyzing Death meters on this fight.  If you died during Pungeant Blight then that’s your fault for not getting innoculated 3 times, and if you died to anything else then you should’ve been healed thru it (exception being death by multiple people getting Vile Gas – then it’s a question of who didn’t spread out properly, which isn’t something Recount can tell you)

Rotface

- Rotface is actually one of the better fights in WoW for judging the true skill of a DPS player, since it is a single target DPS burn with tons of movement and stuff to avoid.  This fight doesn’t particularly favor melee or range, but instead mostly favors people who never have to run out with the Mutated Infection.  Unfortunately this means that you cannot draw much conclusion from a single good or a single bad DPS score, since there is so much RNG involved.  But you can learn ALOT about the DPS in your raid while wiping on this fight several times over the course of a progression night.  Your most skilled DPS will gravitate towards the top of the meters consistently, while your lesser skilled players (including “Patchwerk Pros”) will find themselves dying too often to do well on the Damage Done meters reliably.

- This fight is also one of the best examples of where the Death meter is very helpful, since there are so many ways to get yourself killed on this fight.  Sources of Avoidable Deaths that are always your fault:  Sticky Ooze/Ooze Flood, Unstable Ooze Explosion, melee hits from Rotface (all bets off if tank dies first).  Sources of death that are not really your fault:  Mutated Infection DoT damage (needs to be cleansed), melee hits from Big Oozes (need to be kited).

- Ironically, the Damage Taken meter is arguably of little use on this fight since the main sources of avoidable damage are not ALWAYS avoidable.  For example, normally any DPS player who takes a lot of damage from Slime Spray is failing horribly – but there actually are cases where you can get caught in a Slime Spray thru no fault of your own, if you have Mutated Infection and are running to the Big Ooze, or if you get sprayed on while spread out from the Ooze Explosion.  Also, it is normally the responsibility of the raid to prevent Radiating Ooze damage by avoiding the Big Ooze if it gets kited too close to the raid – but it is not uncommon to take 1-2 ticks of this damage aura if you run out with Mutated Infection and find that your Little Ooze is being stupid and not merging quickly.  Deaths to these two sources of damage generally require a closer inspection of the Death meter to really figure out what happened.

Professor Putricide

- Putricide is a very difficult fight to analyze meters for.  On one hand, the DPS requirements are steep, and squeezing every ounce of DPS out of your raid is critical, especially on the Volatile Ooze and Gas Cloud adds.  On the other hand, there is so much target switching involved that differences in class mechanics will often play a much larger role than differences in players’ skill.  Also, it is quite possible that players outputting the most DPS on adds may be positioning themselves too aggressively – which they can get away with if they don’t get targeted by the oozes, but which can cause serious problems for your raid if they do get chosen.  In my opinion, on this fight I think for the most part you just have to stack your raid with the players who generally performed the best on earlier fights which are easier to analyze than Putricide, and trust that they’ll do their jobs correctly.

- As far as analyzing the Death or Damage Taken meters, there isn’t a whole lot to find here.  One important thing to watch for is people taking too much unnecessary damage from Malleable Goo.  But beyond that, the main causes of deaths on this fight are either extremely obvious (like if you die to Gaseous Bloat/Ooze Adhesive, or if an Expunged Gas goes off on the raid), or are difficult to analyze what exactly went wrong if people died to the Volatile Ooze Eruption (which can be due to lack of DPS, or people not stacking correctly, or both)

Finally, A Word About Blame

If you’ve read this far, then you probably noticed a recurring theme of mine is analyzing who was “at fault” when people die to various sources of damage.  This is not just so you can go around pointing figures at people for making mistakes.  The point is that if you really want to judge the performance of a DPS player, then you need to take into account both how much damage they are doing on each particular fight, and also how well they keep themselves alive and avoid taking unnecessary damage.  Both of these factors are extremely important for judging DPS, as well as execution of “the little things” like damage on adds, interrupts, dispels, etc.

Finally, it is just a good habit to get into as a raider, to always analyze how you died on every fight, and to ask yourself whether the death was your fault.  If yes, then you need to figure out how you can learn from the mistake and prevent yourself from repeating it in the future.  And if not, then you want to ask yourself if there is anything you can change (either in the fight strategy or your playstyle on that fight) to make it easier on the healers/tanks who are struggling with that particular aspect of the fight – or if your death was just due to dumb luck and no adjustments are needed by anyone.

Part II for Crimson Halls and Frostwing Halls to be continued when I have more experience on these fights…