How to read raid meters, Part 1

I’ve been posting the results of our raids to WWS, but I have not really explained just how to read them. A lot of people just look at the raw numbers on the big pretty chart and say, “Ohhhhh, big numbers! Pretty!” There’s a lot more data there if just dig a little – even if you know nothing about the run or the guild involved.

Let’s take our run into Naxxramas’ Construct wing last night. The basics are easy to see – on the first damage tab, we have the healers at the bottom, the tanks in the middle, and the DPS up at the top. We have some expected mixes in there due to gear and time present in the raid.

Now let’s dive down into it a bit more.  You see Rhaenyn in the middle with a nice chunk of the damage done, but not the highest DPS? You can also see she is a Paladin and you know this is a Naxxramas run. Those data points together tell you that she is likely the tank. A click over to the Damage In tab confirms that.

“But wait,” you say, “there are two more Paladins right below her in damage in.” Ah, yes, indeed. However, go back to the first tab and look at the DPS. While it is possible for a well geared and well played Paladin tank to crush out the DPS, it’s more likely that these two Paladins are dropping Seal of Blood. If you click on the healing tab, you can see without even going into details that Kellanon was using Seal of Light while Acree was using Seal of Wisdom. (Yes, he could have been using Seal of Command, but we’ll assume raiders know better.)

Since we’re looking at Paladins, let’s take a step further. If we go up to Browse, Raid and Mobs, and then Paladin, we can see comparison data. Let’s compare the two Retribution Paladins referenced above.

The two things we can look at first are white damage from Swing and Crusader Strike. We know the first is a factor of base damage of the weapon and that the latter is 110% of weapon damage. From this, we can determine that Acree is using a higher base damage weapon than Kellanon. The higher base weapon damage also carries over to Seal of Blood, which scales with weapon damage.

Now look at Hammer of Wrath – there is a large difference there that does not tie into the above data. What does this mean? Well, we know that the spell scales with Attack and Spell Power. We also know the spell has a higher base percentage to crit. This would indicate that Kellanon either has higher attack power (since spell power scales with attack power for Retribution Paladins), or that Kellanon’s critical strike rating is higher.

There, in less than 30 seconds, we can already determine a player’s class role, get some idea of gear differences, and see which spells are used. In the next post, we’ll cover how to read the boss fights.