Please address lack of balance between DPS specs

Yes, really. It's a judgment call. I hear it loud and clear that you draw the line of "carrying" at 5%. Different people draw the line about "carrying'" at different percentages. Some at 3%, some at 5%, some at 10%, some at 20%. We can make a separate poll and ask about it if you are interested. There will be a spread of opinions. Right?

But those parses on Tor Head, Ask Mr Robot and those other sites do not take into account the human factor.

This is exactly the kind of things parses show.

Here is a link to the highest DPS posting on torparse for the Writhing Horror encounter. It's a sniper. When you click on damage done it tell us: his exact damage breakdown over 324 seconds. We can see based on his abilities that he is lethality/engineer hybrid spec'd and we can see by his damage breakdown that he has 40-45% crit-- which would imply to us that his gear is either BiS or just short of. You can see his rotation down at "Damage Dealt Broken Down by Time". It breaks his abilities down to when he used them by the second.

It's easy to discern what is going on based on this data. We have mountains of this data.

Just for the record, and to bump the thread. I have no doubt the disparity is there. However, I do not judge it to be important. Most guilds will still take competent players of any class to raids, and will not consider the disparity of 10-20 percent "carrying" - just like top guilds don't consider 2-5% disparity "carrying".

Still, I am very much interested in seeing what devs think about their goals for balance! Please respond!

This statement is so completely absurd that it has to be called out. Parses, by definition, take the human factor into account. They are real world data on what is actually being achieved by players. If you want to take the human factor out of the equation you can look at the simulation data and see what classes are capable of when skill gaps are removed. Both of those sets of data agree.

This is what people denying the data need to understand. We have 2 kinds of data to look at. One kind of data looks just at the math and what classes are capable of achieving given perfect circumstances. The other set of data looks at the real world results of what players are actually achieving in those specs. Both kinds of data agree that this disparity exists and that it is around the 10%-12% range. That qualifies as incontrovertible proof. All of the data says this is a problem.

Stop responding to these facts with assumption and supposition. If you have data (parses or simulations) that conflict with what we currently see on sites like torparse and simC then please please let us see it.

Otherwise, you are 100% wrong and the data is 100% right.

Ok, this goes back to my point that different encounters favor different classes, and that part of the fun of learning new encounters is figuring out how to best use your spec to maximize your damage. The fight in question, the Writhing Horror, is totally and completely in a sniper's wheelhouse for one reason, and one reason alone: Orbital Strike. I know because I play a lethality sniper and myself and the other sniper in our guild top the parser every time on that encounter. You leave some DOTs ticking on the jealous male and set up an OS over the pheromones and bing, bang, boom, DPS is off the charts. There are so many of those little adds, and there is no limit on the amount of targets it hits, it's actually pretty ridiculous. At one position, you can even place OS in such a way that it strikes the boss at the same time.

If a sniper did not have the top parse on this fight, I would be worried. See those jumps on the damage graph every, oh, 60 seconds? Guess what the CD on OS is. Looks like he even laid down an OS at the end when the endless stream of adds spawn to pull some crazy numbers at the end.

Anyway, my point is that all fights are not like this. Some fights are more difficult for snipers. Some fights are more difficult for marauders. I didn't look, but I'd wager that some of the other top parses on this encounter come from sorcs and bounty hunters for the same reason that snipers do so well -- AoE. If you look at the DPS he did on the Writhing Horror itself -- which is all the really matters in determining whether they hit enrage -- he only did 1385. Nothing to write home about. The problem with these parse lists is not, as some have asserted, that it does not take into account the human element. Of course it does. The problem is that the numbers don't necessarily reflect the damage being done to the boss as a single target. You can argue all you want about how "multitudes" of "incontrovertible" statistics back up your assertions. But as evidence goes, it's shaky at best.

If you pulled up the parse from an operative/scoundrel who did that same fight, you'd probably see pretty similar DPS on the boss. Anyone want to find one?

No.

It's a numbers game entirely. The only time its possible to carry someone 20% behind is if your other 3 (assuming 8 man for this) are doing enough DPS to beat the enrage timers. If they aren't then it's physically not possible to defeat the content.

Assuming a required 7000 DPS over 300 seconds (5 minutes)(2 tanks at 500ish and 4 dps at 1500ish for ease of numbers)
Tank 1 - 500 DSS
Tank 2 - 500 DPS
DPS 1 - 1600 DPS
DPS 2 - 1400 DPS
DPS 3 - 1500 DPS
DPS 4 - 1200 DPS

That puts you 90,000 damage short at the 300 second mark. Assuming 2.1m health (Writhing Horror has 1.8 so again we're just using nice round numbers here, but its a close comparison) that puts you 13 and a half seconds short of the enrage. You can't survive 13 and a half seconds of enrage.

In this scenario everyone would have to up their DPS by an average of 100 (1700, 1500, 1600) to compensate.

It should never be a situation where one class can't go unless the other DPS (by design, not by skill) have to carry.

Ok, I also just took a deeper look into these pages upon pages of parses on all these sites that some of you are referencing as gospel. Aaaand...you might want to slow your roll there.

I started at torparse, thanks to the link provided earlier. There are really not that many pares there. I took a look at the TFB final boss fight, and under 16M HM there are only 22 and 16 parses posted for DPS and HPS, respectively. Switching over to 8M, there is indeed a Top 50. However, the difference between the top (legitimate) parse and the 50th is 264 DPS (1711 - 1447). Obviously, with values so spread out, this is the Top 50 of not so many.

Switching to an older fight that I figured would have more data, like Kephess in EC, I was surprised to find even fewer submissions! 16M HM one again had only 18 entries in its Top 50, only four of which were even over 1000 DPS (the top was 1124 DPS, entries 9 - 18 had less than 600 DPS, and the 18th was a whopping 81 DPS). 8M was not much better: top parse was 1455 DPS, only entries 1 - 20 were over 1000 DPS, and No. 50 was 419 DPS). Clearly, we're not looking at the cream of the crop here.

So where can the cream of the crop be found? I headed on over to askmrrobot in hopes of finding it. Instead, I found more sparsely filled lists. There are zero (0) parses uploaded for 16M HM TFB. On 8M, the first 25 entries for Writhing Horror range from 1866 DPS (about 600 lower than our top parse on that fight from torparse) down to 1590 DPS. On EC's Kephess, more of the same huge variation between the top spot and the 25th spot.

TL;DR please don't go taking things as given that you have either heard from someone else, seen yourself through rose-colored lenses, or are flat-out lying about. More importantly, don't shove them in other peoples' faces to make them feel stupid for holding the opinions you do, like you have some scientific foundation upon which you're basing your views and they are just idiots. In my opinion, the jury is still out on just how far apart the DPS specs are. We really don't know. Anyone pointing to these parse dumps as the be-all, end-all is doing so with an agenda.

The parse list for TFB and EV is bugged, but you can search the parses yourself to get around this. I have. Search by advanced class and look at the results.