Chapter 6 Parsing

6.1 Intro to Parses

People are drawn to raiding for many reasons - many see it as a social activity and are happy to just raid with friends and slowly see their character get stronger and progress. Others want a more hardcore experience - these include either speedrunning, or trying to be at the very top of their class. These players generally track these stats through Warcraft Logs, a website dedicated to compiling raid statistics such as time to completion for a specific raid, or damage and healing leaderboards for a specific classes from combat logs updated to the website. When we refer to parsing on this guide, from now on, these leaderboards are what we’ll be referring to.

A parse is a measure of your DPS on a specifict fight (or over the course of a raid) versus all of the logs that have been uploaded to the website for that particular encounter or raid, and come in two forms - historic or current. Historic logs compare your current stats to all of logs updated for that encounter or raid, while current logs compare your stats to the logs updated in the latest week’s raid lockout.

An important point to make is that since the website can only compare your statistics to other logs that have been uploaded, it significantly underestimates your performance relative to the entire population. This is because players in more social guilds, which do not care for performance or competition, are much less likely to upload their logs to the website. In turn, the distributions presented by the website are skewed to the right, meaning that a player’s 90th percentile parse on Warcraft Logs is actually higher when compared to the entire Classic population.

6.2 Factors Affecting Parses

6.2.1 World Buffs

If you want to parse high, you need world buffs: the stat contribution given by Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer, Dire Maul Tribute, Songflower, and Spirit of Zandalar usually amounts to more than your entire gear. This means losing any of these will severely impact your damage and thus your ability to compete with other players.

1. List obtainbale world buffs
2. Lay out the value you get from them
3. World buffs are essential if you want to parse highly.

6.2.2 Kill Time & Raid DPS

1. Your guild is the most important factor in whether you’ll parse well or not.
2. Your guild DPS severely impact your parses i. High guild DPS is essential ii. Fitting a boss kill within a Reck/DW window.

6.3 “What did I do wrong?”

1. Importance of critical self evaluation
2. How to look at your own parses and evaluate your performance a. BT casts per minute and interval between BTs b. Boss uptime and the importance of Charge and Intercept c. Cooldown timings