Raid Performance - Facts, not Fiction

After the extensive discussions last week, we reviewed the data - sticking with the old saying of "In God we trust, all others bring data." It confirmed what we believed. Let's step through the bad, the good, and then step off doing the things that clearly will get us from where we are to fully clearing tier 14 content as a guild. There is some frank, and data-based honesty that follows - weather through that to get to the sunshine on the other side.

(first the ugly and the bad):

• the guild group was assembled of guildies as requested by some members (9 were supposed to show up and one tank was a trial to see if he was joining the guild, however only 7 showed up, we pugged in 2 people, and they were the best dps performers in the group and actually were the best performers for the last two months including the iRaid) 
• neither group was stacked (other than guildies in one and the # of guildies that didn't fit into the other) and in fact, the data shows that overall and over time both groups were pretty much evenly matched and distributed - which is what we had based it on before we ran the raids that night and saw the outcomes (we only had the info on hand for prior performance which was evenly matched)
• performance on the other hand, was completely different and pretty much everyone except the guildies in the guildies group performed evenly - guildies were all over the map
• some of those with the loudest outcries were the lowest performers - the steady performers shrugged it off and simply looked forward to hitting the instance again next week

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aupln3XuJnjZdE5ueElkTUF6b0xTYjFIV1ZJcFRCX3c

(next, the good):

• the guild group has the gear to clear and there is a high degree of confidence by those asked that if the group can work together for a week or so more, that they can get into a groove together and clear the content - all we need for that to work is for people to show up reliably
• we have a strong bench in the iRaid that can help fill gaps week to week in the guild group until the guild group has a full and reliable roster - guild can accelerate this by everyone helping to recruit (if you didn't help at all this week after so many posted requests, don't complain)
• the changes that could be made to significantly improve performance are simple. e.g. the fire mage (level 488) doing less damage done than the 468 mage could switch back to arcane (which they prefer anyways), raiders could focus on individual performance and not the race to beat the enrage timer - you'll beat it just fine with your gearing if you just perform individually
• the healers in the guild group are solid and if the raid can both pay attention to taking less unnecessary damage and do more damage to shorten the fights, the group will be able to clear MSV based on the pure healing numbers and the damage taken numbers by the tanks

We used Feng as the means to baseline performance across the board week to week because it does not favor ranged over melee, nor multi-target over single-target, it has fewer mechanics that would skew comparability (e.g. Gara'jal's buffs, Stone Guards' jasper chains, pinning arrow in Spirit Kings), it is early enough that each group absolutely gets it down right now.

We looked at both average and best damage done. We looked at ilevel. We looked at performance of similar ilevel characters on a myriad of servers and what their performance is in a raid log (e.g. compare Dyasis in The Blood Legion on the Mal'Ganis server to our mages Novastorm, Toxi, and Mazius -- Dyasis is under our top two geared mages and doing well over 150% our damage done).

Last but not least, rather than take a personal opinion on whether raiders in the guild group are geared enough to clear MSV 10m, we looked them up on wow heroes. According to that standard, everyone is geared for heroic MSV 10m to be challenging (yellow) and normal MSV 10m is green or 'easy' for them.

It's not the gear. It's not the class. It's not the roster. It's something much simpler to improve: personal performance.

This isn't to drop the hammer - it is because we are not going to improve the problems if we won't identify/admit first that those are the ones we need to improve.

Perform better and at least match peers' performance. Recruit a few more people. Golden.

Keep in mind that ALL raid log parses world-wide for the past two months (including all of the raiders that have significantly worse gear than we do - e.g. we are in the top ten or top 20 of our classes on our server) show that on Feng no one in our group should be under 60k dps except for a boomkin or warrior: