So Augmentation has been kind of a clusterfuck, yeah?

Prior to their launch, I noted that I was kind of excited for the idea of a WoW support spec, even if it was DPS. Augmentation sounded like a cool idea, and I think it still is. However, it’s created something of a monster. WoW players are, overall, quite keen on number-go-up gameplay, and while Blizzard has made combat logging support Augmentation credit for their contribution to other player’s DPS, meters in-game haven’t quite gotten there yet. Details is working on a real-time module, and Warcraft Logs is taking a stab at an overlay that will parse in real-time to get the math for Augmentation DPS proper, but in the meantime, it’s tough. For the first few days, this mattered, and it was a community meme that Augmentation sucked because they did bad DPS on meters. Most DPS players won’t own that they do less on average, so they’d claim that what the meter showed, buffed by the Augmentation Evoker, was the “real” damage they do and that the Evoker wasn’t pulling weight.

And then people realized that keys were much easier with Augmentation Evokers, because they smooth out a lot of the rough patches of current gameplay in Dragonflight – healing being tail-chasing in dungeons with lots of rapid spikes and fluctuations being a key one. Augmentation keys were just noticeably smoother than anything else, and thus Augmentation became the only Evoker spec worth playing in the eyes of some, and as other metagame choices solidified before our eyes, the dungeon “god comp” was born. Augmentation Evokers are now, for better and for worse, a critical and pivotal part of Mythic Plus gameplay. In raids, Augmentation is less exciting, barring some insanely funny stacking strategies that have been rapidly nerfed by Blizzard (well, one that was, one that is pending as of this writing), but Augmentation is still really good in raid and most raids should have one, ideally, if you want to play at the top end.

Augmentation has been a shit-show, in some interesting and predictable ways. One thing it has done, that I want to turn to today, is create an interesting thought experiment – should World of Warcraft have rDPS as a measure of performance for everyone? Let’s explore.

rDPS?

If your first instinct was to tilt your head inquisitively at the seemingly-weird abbreviation rDPS, well, let me explain.

In FFXIV, with the addition of Dancer in Shadowbringers but even earlier with how job balance has traditionally been handled in that game, tracking normal damage done is simply not a correct measure of what a player brings to a raid. Many jobs in FFXIV offer party buffs, targeted buffs, and these all offer benefits that should be credited to the job and not the players benefitting. FFXIV is built with this in mind – the unfiltered damage output of a Samurai or Black Mage is higher than a Dragoon or Summoner because the former category offers no raid utility and no buffs, where the latter offer buffs to the raid that increase DPS – including that of the player offering the buff, but the balancing of jobs assumes that a Dragoon should do less damage than a Samurai, because when you account for the Dragoon’s buffs to the party, they end up, roughly, equal. (There’s a lot of theory here and assumptions being made that aren’t always 100% true, but the game generally gets this balancing act pretty well handled, surprisingly.)

FF Logs, made by the same team behind Warcraft Logs, wanted to ensure that players could see this idea represented in parses and logs for the game, so they found the math to make it work correctly – to unpack the damage contribution of buffs from other players and take that damage value back to the buffer, packing it into the raw damage dealt by that player. This created the measure rDPS – raid-contributing damage per second. When you look at a log in FF Logs, you can see the standard DPS, the rDPS, and a few other measures designed to try and unpack player performance from a few different angles. This has become the gold-standard DPS measure for players in FFXIV – because it gives the buffing jobs credit for those buffs that a raid otherwise wouldn’t have – damage that wouldn’t exist without them.

This is done for every buff in the game, so players get full credit for their buffs, and because of how FFXIV’s combat math works generally, this is something that can be done with some elbow grease. The FF Logs development staff have a white paper on their site explaining the math, and it is very complex, but solved and verified, and the results it produces are community-accepted as the standard measure of performance. You can play Dancer, a job known for offering a ton of buffs and lower personal DPS as a result, and know that the standard you will be held to for performance will account for these buffs as a part of the total package you offer the group. Likewise, “selfish” DPS jobs like Samurai, Black Mage, and Machinist get to do a ton of damage without getting credit for damage they otherwise wouldn’t do, as rDPS removes the portion of their damage attributed to buffs, since it has to be moved to the buffer for the numbers to balance.

Augmentation Evokers have spawned some level of argument here, because for them, yeah, rDPS is the measure you really want, but at the same time…is WoW ready for that?

WoW, Parsing, Meters, and the Culture

WoW as a game is known for having meter maids. More than perhaps any other MMORPG with damage meters or available in-game performance metrics, if a WoW player can measure their performance and see how they hold up, they likely are. This is the major reason why Augmentation needed to have attribution of buffs – because otherwise, they’re just shitty-looking DPS. For most organized groups, logs telling you after the fact are fine, but in the moment, a lot of PUGs and randoms demand that instantaneous feedback. Hell, in that environment, I think Augmentation Evokers need it too, for themselves.

If the game’s community didn’t kind of figure it out early enough, Augmentation was in for a rocky road under current circumstances, but people wised up fast enough and those day 1, 2, and 3 memes about low DPS Evokers getting the boot quickly gave way for insta-invites for Aug Evokers. In the long term, as patches change their balance and the meta shifts, the community will want those faster answers in-game, and the developer community around addons is working to give it to them.

But let’s consider this for a second – should WoW have true rDPS measurement? Is such a thing even possible?

WoW’s combat math is very complicated, to the point that we have tools like SimulationCraft, Raidbots, and more that don’t just run the numbers, but simulate it through a number of iterations to find the truth. It takes this rigor because elements of WoW’s combat math are highly complex. One thing that most players will see, but might not often process, is that a lot of buffs in WoW are multiplicative, meaning that as you have more buffs to a given stat or value, subsequent buffs will have a higher value. The easiest example is health – buffing with a Priest’s Power Word: Fortitude gives a 5% buff to health, and if a Warrior then uses Rallying Cry, which also grants 15% more health, the health from Rallying Cry is higher with the Priest buff than it would have been without, and higher than if the health bonus of both buffs was added together (an additive increase) – you end up getting 20.75% more health in total instead of a flat 20%.

WoW is also vastly more complicated in party and raid structure and makeup and the nature of the buffs offered. WoW has more passive, baseline buffs, more casted party/raid buffs that just persist as an effect after the initial use, and it has party and raid sizes and composition flexibility that allows a group to have multiple players with the same class and spec. This is critical, because in FFXIV, high-end content is a tight 8 players and you gain more Limit Break for having each of those 8 be a unique job, where in WoW, no such benefit exists, so you try to cover the gamut of buffs and debuffs and then stack the rest as you want.

So let’s talk about rDPS in WoW, now.

Could WoW Even Have rDPS? – Some Thought Experiments

Let’s say we want to fully add rDPS as a measure of player competency and performance to WoW. Fair enough, so where do we start?

Well, let’s look at this first case – castable, passive buffs. If you’re a Mage, and you give Arcane Intellect to your raid, it follows that in an rDPS model, you should gain the DPS credit that the 5% intellect offers the raid’s players – including credit for the healing and damage benefits. With one Mage, we can sort of unpack this, but what if there are two Mages? Do you split the contribution of AI between them, or do you credit only the Mage whose buff is actually live on the raid? If someone recasts it mid-combat, do you reattribute the value of it to the new caster? If we live in the old world where Intellect also increased spell critical strike, that is another variable to unpack! Then we also have to account for how that 5% might actually contribute on the player end with crits and Versatility buffs, where that 5% might stack a smidge higher because of nudges from these two stats. If you have one Mage, fine, this is a math problem and a complicated one at that, but it could, maybe, be unpacked. With two mages, now attribution is a mess and any method is bound to make someone unhappy, because it means the rDPS of both Mages is lower than it would have been with just one, and while that is mathematically correct, it feels bad emotionally and there’s a gut instinct to maybe bristle against that – either to attribute the full 5% Intellect to both (which now inflates the total raid DPS and is mathematically incorrect) or to attribute the 5% to the caster only (which is more correct, perhaps, but then also creates an incentive structure for a Mage to overwrite the other’s AI buff in-combat or before the fight in order to get the full contribution credit for themselves). A similar conundrum applies for debuff-centered effects like Monk’s Mystic Touch or Demon Hunter’s Chaos Brand – flat damage increases to a type of damage, but the second you have more that one of these classes, how do you attribute the damage benefit (and that’s without haggling over how much of the original damage dealt is buffed by other effects at the player-level like AI or Battle Shout!)?

The biggest example that already exists as a very difficult math problem is Power Infusion for Priests and similar Haste buffs for everyone. While Haste feels like a simple stat (I go fast now), the math behind it is anything but. PI in Warcraft Logs is already a thing where the team threw their hands up and just marked it as a thing a player received with no math to the value of it, so that a top-ranked log with PI can be compared only against other logs with that same benefit. Why are Haste buffs so hard? Easy (sort of) – they increase a lot of different things at once. You get a GCD shortening, an attack speed and cast speed benefit, Energy-based specs get a resource-regen boost, and all of these together require a lot of separate math to find the combined and total benefit. You can argue easily that mathing a few of these components individually is simple – how many more spells/attacks/GCDs get crammed into the PI window, and what damage/healing events result from that – but the resource component and the way buffs in WoW do not snapshot means that the total contribution is a lot murkier. This is even the case for Blizzard themselves – they have stated this is the reason that Augmentation Evokers don’t buff Haste! Likewise, some specs can actually suffer for more Haste, at least in some ways – Windwalker and Brewmaster Monks both famously kind of hate the stat because it can lead to forced downtime in their rotation, where they have an open GCD but no resources to spend on any ability to fill that space because of the scaling of Energy regen and GCD reduction from Haste don’t quite map neatly to each other to avoid this, so while PI is still a damage increase for them, it can be problematic in its own right (and a lower overall benefit in terms of total increase). Mathing PI, much less something like Bloodlust, is very, very hard to do, to the point that even Warcraft Logs, with the resources and understanding of systems to do it, won’t, and even Blizzard themselves cowers at the idea of trying to do so, dodging the stat for Augmentation Evokers to buff on others in favor of far more straightforward stats like Crit and Vers (outside of their existing Bloodlust at the class level, of course). So theoretically, sure, a Priest should get PI credit and Shaman/Evokers/Hunters/Mages should get Bloodlust credit, but getting the actual raw number to tack on is a daunting task that no one has been up to just yet.

Then we can talk about silly and WoW-centric edge cases. Monks have Touch of Death, which deals damage to a target based on the Monk’s maximum health. Should Priests get the damage value of the added health from Power Word Fortitude, or Warriors from Rallying Cry, or Restoration Shaman for Ancestral Vigor? If all of these effects are on a Monk at once when they Touch of Death, how do you untangle the value of damage offered by each of these accurately, knowing that the buffs likely stacked multiplicatively? If the raid is buffed by a Retribution Paladin’s Retribution Aura to do more damage, does the buff get attributed to the Paladin, or to the enemy that triggered it, since that damage taken was a necessity for the damage bonus to be granted? I’m being silly on that one a little bit (it’s obviously the Paladin that offered the buff), but there’s a slice of genuine interest in there because it is a chicken and egg problem in that way! You could even get way into the weeds and argue that Evoker’s Blessing of the Bronze, in situations where melee uptime is hard to maintain, is a DPS increase, and then try to math out how much of the melee DPS should be reattributed to an Evoker for that, on top of then also running into the issue of castable buffs and attribution from above!

WoW would also, arguably, be hurt by a true rDPS metric, because the game is very much not balanced around that idea at the moment. The game’s balance is around raw player DPS (and Augmentation balanced around attribution plus their own damage), and unpacking rDPS would create some fascinating scenarios. Obviously, Bloodlust is powerful, and we already know that, but the benefit it offers scales crazy high based on group size, which means balancing any spec with it is a hot mess. The same goes for Mages and AI, Warriors and Battle Shout, and even Monks and DHs with their debuffs applied to the targets. Even if we take into consideration a group size and lock our comparisons to, say, a 5-player dungeon group, the rDPS comparison would hurt classes and specs that bring no such buffs. Hunters can look good when we compare raw DPS, but they bring no group utility outside of the edge case of a Bloodlust pet, and if we assume that’s covered elsewhere and start unpacking rDPS to the originating buffers, we end up in a situation where a Hunter is going to be very deflated on the average log with nothing to save them. Even specs with some buffs might suffer – like both DPS Druid specs can look good with buffs, and offer Mark of the Wild, but if we peel back rDPS, they don’t offer as much as a Mage that brings AI and Bloodlust alongside equivalent damage. Warlocks offer good damage but no damage buffs to the raid, which means they likewise suffer for rDPS chipping down their damage, although then you’d probably give them credit for healing done by Healthstones, so they could be a high HPS…damage dealer?

Variable group size is a big problem I want to revisit before concluding here too because it matters a lot. Augmentation Evokers are built and balanced around buffing 5 players total, themselves included. They can technically stretch one or two beyond that in a raid (5 Ebon Mights, a Blistering Scales, and a Spatial Paradox), but generally, the majority of their proper, attributed rDPS comes from Ebon Might and that caps out at 5 players including the Augvoker themselves. WoW’s buffs are a tricky problem in the rDPS scenario because they scale too well with larger group sizes – the rDPS of a Mage offering AI will increase as the raid grows larger (specifically with more casters) and there’s not, at present, a good way to unpack that. If you want to uphold the value of parsing and damage comparison, the metric has to be consistent and not scale off of gimmicks like that, but for rDPS to be accurate, currently, it would need to benefit the Mage for every player affected, and more players means more effect. In FFXIV, rDPS is a strong metric because the largest group you can buff is 8 players – targeted debuffs are party exclusive and buffs only affect your party, even in the scenario of an Alliance raid where you are grouped together with 3 total parties, so there is a fixed ceiling to the scaling and the DPS balance of FFXIV accounts for this precisely. WoW does not and cannot at present – you’d have to make every buff that affects player DPS work like an Augvoker’s Ebon Might then, which is a broader argument that is out of scope here (also, perhaps humorously, how buffs did work back around TBC era, with party-locked Bloodlust and party-target buffs for the group of 5!).

Basically, WoW has some big problems in the way of rDPS – the game simply isn’t balanced for it because of group size variability, the nature of how buffs and debuffs work within the game’s structure, the complex math that even Blizzard themselves don’t want to untangle, and the number of very-silly but absolutely valid scenarios where players might start to get into suboptimal behavior to increase rDPS under certain constraints (if AI is attributed only to the caster, then a war to be THE AI on your raid will break out for the parsebrained in order to juice their rDPS higher).

Should WoW Use rDPS?

So I think the last question I have to close out this series of thought experiments and models is this – should WoW move to a world where the game is built to accomodate rDPS and balanced around it?

Well…I don’t necessarily think so.

In FFXIV, the game is built in a way that makes it measurably easier to implement rDPS and for it to be a solid, useful measure of player competence and job balance. The game’s system design around combat, raid composition, and overall stat values is far friendlier to rDPS as a measure and it works because it specifically sidesteps the thornier issues (while FFXIV has speed stats for both spells and physical damage skills, nothing in the game’s combat design buffs them outside of gear stats and players gear to a specific speed level for a specific GCD timer to create optimal play scenarios, where a temporary increase in speed would actually harm the rotation by forcing things out of alignment with buffs and encounter mechanics). WoW’s design is, well, WoW – it remains distinct among MMOs in that it has a very chaotic approach to balance given that buffs are not accounted for in the balance of specs and instead everyone is intended to be around a baseline measure of total throughput with buffs acting like seasoning to vary up gameplay and offer group bonuses that a group crosses off the list, so there is an assumption at the top-end of play that you bring everything, the list is fully crossed off, and you proceed with that assumption making balancing the baseline DPS numbers sans buffs a much more manageable and even sensible thing to do.

Augmentation, individually, needs rDPS as a measure because the spec is built for it and it creates a scenario where you cannot have an Augvoker pumping raw DPS on their own and ALSO buffing the party/raid. It does have layers of problems, to be sure – Augvokers gain a bigger benefit if they buff meta specs that do more damage, if they buff the most competent and performant players in the group, and they can suffer in their measured throughput on logs if a player with their buff underperforms, without even getting into the logic for how buffs are applied without specific targets or the raid scenario with multiple Augvokers, and then there is how they scale on gear (or don’t, as the case may be). There are arguments to be made for certain aspects of the game needing rDPS logic applied too (Power Infusion, it’s Power Infusion, the game cannot be in a good state of balance until Power Infusion has a measured and understood DPS contribution that is factored into balance for Priests, especially Shadow spec), but the rest of the existing game? It’s murky. Could rDPS be nice in some cases? Sure – it might help discover that Monks are balanced too poorly because their own self-buff from Mystic Touch might be masking insufficient DPS (I’m not trying to buff-beg here Blizzard, but maybe?), or the same for Demon Hunters and Chaos Brand, but in the rest of the game, rDPS seems like it invites a lot of problems that WoW’s gameplay model doesn’t have good ways to deal with.

But the chaos gremlin in my heart also wants to live in the world where Warriors and Mages are shouting and casting over each other in 30-player flex raids to get the highest rDPS, Monks and DHs are racing to the boss to beat the others in the group, and where whomever casts Bloodlust first gets to do 1,000,000 rDPS because the benefit of a whole raid group is pulled into that player’s performance. It would be awful in a lot of ways and I know how WoW players would behave (not at all!) with that as the ruleset, and that is why I also kind of want it – just to see how stupid and absolutely hilarious it can get in the name of “accuracy.”