Galadriel wrote on Dec 16
th, 2015 at 2:26pm:
A flawed perspective as the person with the highest AoE burst will generally have the highest kill count. You even said it yourself in the remainder of your post.
Compare your Warlock with one of those Rangers. A Ranger has higher DPS than you until the amount of mobs being attacked by either of you becomes greater than 4, upon which, your superior AoE abilities push you ahead. This however doesn't support the idea that your DPS is actually higher in every regard.
In essence, kill count shows a rather false accounting of DPS as it holds those with great AoE abilities in favour over those that are single target specialised.
Nope. I didn't claim it is higher in every regard. I said that kill count is an indicator of who is doing the highest,
sustained DPS over a long period of time. In other words, it tends to show who did the most total damage over the course of a mission or raid after taking into account all the variables one encounters in it.
DPS by the very definition of the phrase = damage dealt per second. It's basic math and it is class/build/method agnostic. It doesn't matter if you deal the damage by AEing 20 mobs at once, meleeing them down one at a time, or insta-killing them with a necro build. The real question is, which period of time do you choose when calculating DPS? To me, the important thing is how much total damage did you do over the entirety of a mission/raid? That's where kill count is a reasonably accurate indicator and why it matters.
A single-target, 60s boss fight is not indicative of how the majority of time is spent in missions but if you want to cherry pick your fight to make sure all the stars are aligned while you hop on one foot with your left eye closed with all your boosts running to get that one big number on a 60s boss fight video and that makes you happy, more power to you. I prefer to look at the performance of a build across the entirety of many missions.
For example, assume the following:
A mission has 100 monsters with 10k HPs each.
Build A puts out 3k DPS vs a single target.
Build B puts out 10k DPS vs a single target.
Build A kills all 100 monsters in 5 minutes by pulling red alert, AE'ing them down, rinsing and repeating.
Build B kills all 100 monsters in 6 minutes by fighting 1-4 monsters at a time.
The math is:
Min damage to make all monsters dead = 100 monsters * 10000 HPs = 1,000,000 HPs.
DPS = 1,000,000 HPs / (number of seconds to make all mobs dead).
Build A = 1,000,000 dmg / 5mins / 60s = 3333.33 DPS.
Build B = 1,000,000 dmg / 6mins / 60s = 2777.78 DPS.