sederix wrote:
I tend to out DPS people in 5-man groups, but did not do the most damage. This suggests that haste matters more than critical hit in some cases.
Actually, that doesn't suggest anything about stats. It's a caveat in Recounts DPS tracking.
Recount doesn't start tracking DPS until you physically participate in a fight. In other words the fight could have begun, if you cast a spell with a 3 second cast time, or a channeled spell or dot that doesn't hit the mob until 2 seconds into the fight, your DPS won't start recording until that spell hits the mob.
As an example of a recount reading.
Class - overall damage(dps)
Hunter - 12,000(1,950)
Warlock - 11,000(1,980)
Rogue - 10,500(2,200)
In this example, the hunter had the highest overall damage done, but the lowest DPS. He was able to attack from the very start of the fight, in fact he had a hit in before the tank(misdirect). The warlock started the fight off with a shadowbolt, which didn't land until 2 second after the hunter had already started the fight. The rogue started, quite a few second after them, because he was stealthed he had to slowly head to where the mob was being tanked.
When you are first to engage a mob in a fight, given a short enough fight, you could be lowest on DPS and still top the overall damage meter, and/or because you are in the fight the longest your DPS is more likely to plateau out, and be less subject to a lucky string of crits that could inflate your DPS, basically, the longer you are in a fight, the more true your recorded dps will be.
The exact opposite could be true when you are the last to engage a mob. Given a short enough fight, you are more likely to be the lowest in overall damage and could still be the highest DPS. Also you are more subject to inflated dps because of the shorter sample size.
My example shows, that assuming their dps isn't inflated by a lucky string of crits, given a long enough fight the rogue would eventually have caught and surpassed both the warlock and the hunter on overall DPS, but because the fight was so short, the delay in actually engaging the mob cost you some overall damage.
Basically, you want to go with what gives you the best DPS, and not worry so much about overall damage, because given a long enough fight(like a 6 minute raid boss), the person with the highest dps will surpass those lower. The increase in DPS is there to make up for the lost time from not technically engaging the mob due to class mechanics such as having to stealth to a mob or wait for a DoT to tick.
Whether crit or haste is a better increase in DPS is another matter, I just wanted to clear up on misinterpreting recount Overall Damage/DPS readings.