Can someone explain what parsing is and how it works?
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Being a ultratryhard
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I’d say Logs and parsing is the bare Minimum.
Ultra tryhard would be starting the fight with a high crit weapon and firestone and then switching to your proper weapon after you applied a high crit corruption.
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Parsing is typing /combatlog ingame and then uploading the combatlog to a 3rd party website (warcraftlogs) which shows you exactly everything that happened during the fight and shows you how you performed compared to other people playing your class/spec.
Its literally your irl resume except its for WoW
Logging is great and can/will help you improve your own gameplay if you allow it to.
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Someone in raid has to have addon to generate logs from your raid.
These logs are uploaded to warcraftlogs.
Logs contain almost every action happening during the raid: casts, damage, healing, buffs, debuffs, resource gain/loss etc.
Warcraftlogs analyze your logs and display your dps (dps and tank) and hps (healers) during given encounters.
Your dps/hps is compared to other players of your class and spec and parses are percentage of players you are better than.
For example, if you parsed 80% on Razorscale as fire mage - it means you did more dps than 80% fire mages on Razorscale.
Hard Modes in Ulduar complicates stuff a little, because if you did 10k dps on XT 25 normal and there’s mage who did 8k dps on XT 25 hard mode he will be higher on parses.
Usually player should aim for 90-97%, because the closer it is to 100% the more that means someone had luck, was boosted by PIs or UF or Innervate, or entire raid was playing to that person to get logs or in case of healers - there were less healers than usual or people were messing up mechanics so much there was more healing needed than default.
Oh, and damage done is very often excluded from your dps if it was done to some trivial adds (so called padding).
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Parsing = comparing your relative performance to other players of your spec based on ilvl and asigning percentage value to it.
In short, the higher the score the better you perform on your spec compared to other players of same spec and same ilv
So if you check warcraf logs classic and find your character there will be score from 1 to 100 assigned to you.
Lets take razorscale for example: if your score is 50 for razorscale that means you are doing more damage on that boss than 50% of players of your class and similar ilvl. If your score is 20, that means you are beating only 20% of players from your spec. Meaning 80% of players playing your spec are doing more dmg with similar ilvl
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Thank you - funny you can’t get an explanation when you google it 
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False, no addon is needed. You just need to enable logging in your WoW settings and type the right slash command in chat. The game itself will generate a .log file in your World of Warcraft directory.
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Remember that killing adds and doing additional stuff improve your parses. You can check guides on Youtube.
No, its more of an IQ test, that only shows how good can you do IQ tests.
Your parse only shows how good can you execute warcraftlogs set rules and nothing to do with how useful you are for raid. For example standing in mechanics and stressing out healers to get higher parse, or not killing roots and trees on Freya makes your parse better but in actual raid you are making things worse for everyone
id rather take a 95+ parser over a green parser doing mechanics correctly
I only imagine parsing meaning people living off of welfare who play wow all day tbh
Maybe in Vanilla, but in WotLK you can reach high logs even as a raidlogger
Take XT for example. High parsing rets manages to squeeze sacred shield as well as few flashes of light during each tantrum Green parsers dont even know they have these skills.
Same XT and warlocks. Good parsing locks manage to multi dot stars, green parsers dont know they can tab to switch tatget dot him, and tab back to the boss.
High parsing players are on average better players all around. I’ve done 10m OS3D zerg with 95+ parsers on week 3 of wotlk launch. People fail to zerg it in ulduar gear even now…
Thats only because sparks count towards parse, if they didnt, parser would rely on others to kill it or thats globals wasted.
It is thanks to the logs that I improved. I simply would go to each fight and compare my dps and spells used with other top players of the same class. This helped me to realize that I was doing wrong rotation or missing certain stats. I went from 82 to 95 parse just by doing this.
On the other side, it kinda sucks to feel the pressure of it in every fight, knowing that you need to do perfect GCD or have good rng with procs to overcome your best parses.
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You indirectly stated that parses actually motivate you to do things properly.
The best example is the Iron Council. Parses exclude damage to bosses that got healed to full. This motivates you to focus your dmg where it is needed rather than just inflate your parses via multitarget dmg. It feels so satisfying hearing someone cry that he was first in Recount, but last in WClogs.
This is why parses are a better metric then the damage and healing details recount.
They still don’t tell the whole story, but they allow you to make snap judgements about someone’s ability to not grief the raid and be useful.
Using just parses to judge your raiders is reductive but if you need a pug or run a pug then it’s your best bet to judge.
Gear has become pretty useless as a metric of success, since someone could have just bought theirs. But parses at least give a limited overview of how well someone performs.
Parsing does have it’s own ruleset on Warcraftlogs, but that ruleset is entirely based around encouraging people to NOT cheese dps, to not focus on the recount damage, but instead weighted, valuable damage. They don’t necessarily always get this completely right, but it’s a landslide victory compared to just counting all damage dealt, as you see it on your damage meter.
Parsing is also a group activity, your personal parses are largely tied to the strategy you use, the raid comp you use, the distribution of damage, the overall gear and skill level of the raid and the resulting overall kill time. So it’s not a metric of pure skill in any sense, but by and large you will always find players consistently able to parse in the 95% range have a very strong grasp on their chosen spec with some level of consistency and deeper understanding.
Parsing does encourage players sometimes to take risks or liberties in the name of higher damage, but the reality is those risks are often conscious decisions, not a lack of awareness, and awareness is perhaps the most important skill for a raider, one that lower skilled players often lack.
Ppl dont know how to read logs though, not even the overview. ”You parse blue”. Ye ofc i parsed blue its 1 logged kill and i was top 3 dps as arms, imagine what kind of raid i was in.
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