Murder Row

Arbiter scores each player on axes, and drops any axis where nothing happened rather than scoring it 100. In this key survival and mechanics (damage a comparable player did not take) dropped out for all five — nobody died, nobody stood in anything a peer avoided. What is left for a DPS is `damage`, which is a rank against the other damage dealers in this run; `interrupts`, a count of stops against how many the cooldown allowed; and `activity`, the share of combat spent doing something. Those are relative measures, and by construction the middle player scores in the mid-70s. A B- on this sheet says "you were one of three good damage dealers", not "you were held back".

Two axes deserve a caveat printed next to them. Resto Shaman's `interrupts 15` is 7 stops against 42 the tool thinks a Wind Shear cooldown could have produced. The registry has Resto's Wind Shear at 38.7 s (13 presses in this key, gaps of 34 s to 6 min), the group stopped 197 of 197 reachable casts, and a healer's Wind Shear is the last kick the group should be relying on. Read that 15 as "not the healer's job here", which is what the group line already says. And Resto Shaman's `throughput 81` carries the tool's own flag: this key asked 164,313 healing per second, past the 130,287 that was the 95th percentile of the 55 keys the scale was cut on. Coverage stops being a fair measure once demand outruns anything the tool has seen a healer produce, so 81 is a floor. Zero deaths is the honest reading of the healing.

Four Murder Row +15 attempts in three days, from the archive:

  09-12 17:50   abandoned   13 deaths   Hyporock 185k dps   Veng DH / Holy Priest
  09-12 18:44   abandoned    3 deaths   Hyporock 219k dps   Blood DK / Holy Priest
  09-12 20:46   depleted    10 deaths   Hyporock 229k dps   Blood DK / Resto Shaman
  09-15 22:14   timed +2     0 deaths   Hyporock 259k dps   Prot Warrior / Resto Shaman

His damage climbs across all four, partly gear (item level 321 tonight) and partly that a key where nobody dies has no walks back from the entrance. His grade did not move much — B-, C, C+, B — because the axes that could have moved it (survival, mechanics) were never his problem in any of them; the 09-12 survival scores of 28 were deaths to Delivery! crates and Warehouse Workers, both written up in the dungeon notes.

What changed is the other four seats. Tonight's tank had a defensive up 92% of the time and covered 88% of the worst damage windows, which is the number Saturday's groups did not have. And in the two Saturday groups that ran a Holy Priest, Heartstop Poison had exactly one dispeller — the paladin. Tonight the Resto Shaman's Poison Cleansing Totem removed it four times on its own.

Two things that were being watched, both checked against the raw log rather than the report.

The Wings-into-Expurgation cue, the TollPips "OK" text that went live on 09-14: Avenging Wrath was pressed 20 times, and on the 19 where the log names a target, Expurgation was ticking on it 19 of 19. Before the cue that number was about half. Second key, same result; it works.

Melee uptime, the one thing the 09-13 rotation audit left standing: 34,090 of his own damage events across 27 minutes, with six gaps between three and twenty-five seconds and only two over ten. Sixty-four seconds of the whole key not hitting something. That is not the lever anymore either.

Holy Power overcapped 25% — that is the build, the sim wastes 22% on it, and it is not coached here.

What is left: Heartstop Poison landed on Prot Warrior seven times. The totem took four, one was gone inside two seconds, and two sat for 8.3 and 11.0 seconds — 1.4 million damage over 19 seconds on the tank, the only debuff in the key left up. Cleanse Toxins was never cast and never refused; the button was available both times. In a key with a Holy Priest, this is the paladin's whole dispel job (see the 09-12 notes); with a Shaman it is a backstop, but it is a free global and the two it would have caught were the two that hurt.

Felfire Burst leaked 337 of 435 casts — a leaked cast is one that was interruptible and finished. It was 28 million damage, 8% of everything the party took, and it is the Wild Imps that Lithiel's Fingers of Gul'dan spawns plus the imp packs on trash. 562 casts were kickable in this key against five interrupt buttons; the group stopped every one a kick was ready for. The rest is not a kick problem, it is an imp-count problem, and the answer is the AoE stops — Shockwave, Leg Sweep, Hammer of Justice on a caster — and killing imps before the second volley. Nothing in this key died to it, so it is a note for the next level up, not a fault in this one.