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While it’s a bad idea to link your damage meters over a common chat channel, it’s a very bad idea to link your damage report if you’re a damage dealer and you’re that one dps’er who consistently does less damage than the tank. What you’re trying to say is that you outperform the healer at doing damage, but what you’re really saying is:

“The healer’s good enough to keep everyone alive and also do 30% of the damage that I’m doing.”

The healer’s damage is basically like the rock bottom of damage performance in a raid. Healing does zero damage. You are also saying that you don’t understand groups enough to know what the different roles do, but you aren’t going to let that slow your spamming down. This is a chain of thought that will immediately lead others to group with you less, because veterans will sense that this is probably the tip of the iceberg:

• you roll for gear that doesn’t apply to you and then throw a fit when someone tries to tell you how your character works
• you don’t understand or don’t care about crowd control
• you cry and blame someone every time you die
• you go afk without warning
• you complain about repair costs
• you never have elixirs/poisons/food buffs
• you use curse words in a way that’s not interesting, relevant, or funny

Not everyone is all of these, but usually these character flaws don’t come in single servings. Most people went to the all you can eat Buffet of Broken.

And yes, this was all that a single damage meter post said. And incidentally, this person lived up to many of the above-listed predictions.

I healed through Magister’s Terrace this weekend to get a couple of friendly guildies ready for MrT heroic. My wife, in the next room, said “What’s wrong?” I hadn’t even realized I sighed. “This new recruit just spammed his damage meters after our first wipe.”

I had forgotten about this little slice of the game. Of course, now my blissful ignorance has been shattered, but it’s a good topic of discussion.

The following quote has no definite attribution, but it’s good advice in general:

“It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

In World of Warcraft, this applies to damage meter reporting. Every raid diagnostic addon has a whisper/party/raid/guild broadcast feature. Whoever first thought of that should be killed! Despite that, these raid diagnostics and their ability to broadcast will exist forevermore and so: better to educate.

What came about very shortly after damagemeters-broadcast was invented was an eternal epeen contest between the dps’ers in raids.

“Who can top the damage meters?! Let’s export the results to raid chat after every boss attempt! After every wipe! Every raid!”

This damagemeter wanking was so strong in my guild’s Molten Core days that some characters would willfully skip the kill order just to have a longer uninterrupted damage stream on a target. Lunacy! Kill orders are critical in grouping. I’ll write more about it another time, but basically everything goes better when the damage dealers coordinate efforts. However, every class loses damage output while switching targets: melee has to run between targets, casters have to build up debuffs or whatever. It’s part of the game. But people were so wrapped up in epeen that they were actually trying to win at that stupid meter more than they were trying to win at the events. They’d push damage so hard that they’d pull aggro and wipe the raid, over and over, just to stay on top of the epeen meter. (Not multiple times in one raid, but once per raid) It wasn’t just one person; most of the damage dealers had been infected by damagemeter epeen madness.

I know that this wasn’t local to my guild, either. Every dps recruit had damagemeters, and they jumped right into the epeen contest.

It took us months to stamp that out. (Actually, most of those people left once TBC hit to form a hardcore raiding guild, which then naturally imploded after six months and then scattered to the winds. Real-life friends were on non-speaking terms with each other. Yay hardcore raiding! Later, I receive a tell, “lol you’re still on Aran?” “Yes, but I didn’t have to leave the server, and my friends are still my friends, and we still laugh with each other most every raid.”)

Anyway, I’ll speak for every healer and tank out there: nobody cares about your dps diagnostics. I mean, you wouldn’t want to see the following wipe out your chat box every few minutes, right?

Recount PANTS ranking:
1) Tank: PANTS
2) DPS1: PANTS
3) DPS2: PANTS
4) DPS3: NO PANTS
5) Healer: NO PANTS

Healing is best done with no pants, but I can’t speak for dps’ing. Would you want this spammed over your chat window? Your answer is what healers, tanks, and progression-minded dps think every time someone posts their epeen.

Virtually every raiding guild had to suffer through this. Most of the ones that I know realized that epeen and progression were counterproductive, and have some kind of policy on epeen spam.

I’m not picking on dps’ers, but I’ve only seen one healer ever spam healing numbers, and the rest of us whispered him so quickly that he couldn’t respond individually. “/ra Sorry!” Also, I’ve never seen a tank spam a damage breakdown. Maybe it’s something about the team-oriented mindset that tanks and healers must cultivate.

Also, this is nothing against raid diagnostics. I love them! Install them. Learn what they’re telling you. Use that information to improve your character. Discuss what you find with your peers. It’s even useful to challenge other players outside of a raid setting, “Warlocks, the mages/hunters/rogues are outdamaging each of you by 40% per person, and yet you have equivalent gear. What’s going on?” This can all be useful. You might help someone play better and have more fun! I personally use Recount and Recap every raid.

But have mercy. Keep your damn epeen out of my chat window.