We put a lot more faith in actual numbers generated on the PTR. We have no way of knowing what assumptions or errors third party tools may make, and we can't really spend our development time debugging someone else's project. Usually the player base itself eventually knocks the bugs out of those things and they become accepted over time as reasonable or rejected. So until a lot of you start to say that a given tool accurately represents the numbers you can generate on the PTR or live, we take them with a grain of salt. You probably should too.

If someone wants to post PTR comparisons of say mages and druids, that would give this thread something more meaningful to discuss.

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Q u o t e:
I can see a tool like this being embraced and contributed to by the community, so I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly. It seems like an excellent idea and can serve the purpose of proving balance to the players and also keeping the developers honest (from the player view, if you know what I am getting at).

Will it be perfect? Never. Will it show a general comparison? That is quite possible.

I could see it possibly importing gear stats from wowhead and drawing up a map of expected dps, or simply putting your own stats in the UI to import.

One could also say the need for such a tool was born from distrust, so I would shy away from "grain of salt" statements. It would be much better to either share your own data (such a mystery it is to all of us) or at least support the use of these tools and correct any misinformation.

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It would be awesome if this or any tool was embraced by the community. We don't inherently distrust it, but it's not our product, so I don't feel qualified to comment on it. These guys seem like they are doing a good job of taking it seriously and getting the kinks knocked out of it. That's inspiring to see. If we reach a point where the community in general seems to accept that the numbers accurately represent the numbers in the game, then everyone including us will probably take the output seriously. I don't think we are there yet.

What you are doing in this thread is posting the output of a third party app and expecting us to balance the game around it. If you want to demonstrate that your dps is low or someone else's is high, there are two ways to do that: 1) Theorycraft it out, but we'll want to see your math, or 2) Show us parses from the PTR that other players generally accept as being legit.

If you want to bring up other aspects of your class, I wouldn't try to cover them all in this thread. I'm also not going to promise to respond to any thread or topic. (I don't promise *anything* anymore.) But if you post it, we'll read it.

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Q u o t e:
All mages want from Blizz is for an aknowledgement that will not get left in the scaling basement again. With essentially zero information available on mage changes in 3.1 is it really any wonder mages want to make sure Blizz doesnt make us the most useless class for a second expac????

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Mages will not get left behind again. We made several changes to prevent the "scaling basement" and we changed buffs to make sure other classes didn't stack so well. Our intent is still for mages to be equal to rogues, hunters and warlocks all things being equal.

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Q u o t e:
GC, mages are dangerously far behind in dps on the PTR.

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Nobody in this thread has provided any evidence of that except for parses that they saw but won't link or the simulation output.

Until you can provide data and not handwaving, there isn't much more I can contribute to this thread.

Thank you for the data. We have seen the Premonition ones, but that is still the kind of thing that will help make your case.

I will ask again please don't turn this thread into a dumping ground for all topics just because I am posting here. The topic is "Is PvE mage dps too low in 3.1?"

Thank you for getting some data analysis into this thread.

There have been some really good posts on the last few pages.

Because this thread has gotten long and is still covering a few different topics, I am going to try kicking off a new thread solely devoted to PTR dps parses. We'll see how that goes.