One of the things that was particularly interesting to me with the transition from Burning Crusade dungeons through to the new ones in Northrend was the whole transition from acceptable DPS in a BC Heroic to acceptable DPS in a Northrend Heroic.

Back in the Burning Crusade days, through the personal experience of running many heroics and seeing many pass and many fail, I came to the conclusion that – at least until the 3.0.2 patch nerf which changed many factors – 450 DPS was required at a minimum from each DPSer to get through the beginning Heroics of Ramparts and Slave Pens.

Of course, this was my own conclusion, based on experience in gearing my own Frost Mage for Heroics, and probably reading around on the ‘net for other people’s opinions and experiences as well, and may not be completely accurate.

What this means is that in looking at my Recount damage meters on the DPS (instead of Damage Dealt) page, each DPSer in the party needed to be able to sustain 450 “damage per second” when they were doing their damage.

And of course, they also needed to be doing steady TOTAL damage throughout the fight as well, which is shown on the Damage Dealt screen that Recount defaults to.

Heroics In Northrend

In Northrend, the numbers are all different. Add another 10 levels of power and gearing to a player, and there has to be another 10 levels of percentage of improvement in other areas as well, to be successful in the content.

Figuring out the base DPS requirements was harder this time around, however, because I wasn’t gearing a DPS character… I’ve got a healer this time around. And while I know I was adequately geared for Heroics before I hopped into them, I knew that a lot of my fellow PUG party mates were far from it.

A fair number of people “grew up” through Heroics and Raids after the 3.0.2 patch which most people will agree made BC Heroics ridiculously easy, and with the release of the highly powerful Death Knight, I’m sure a lot of people thought Northrend Heroics would be a breeze.

Ha ha ha.

At any rate, after a month of doing Heroics with PUGs and guildies and friends alike, I’ve come to recognize that successful runs are done with people can maintain more than 1000 DPS in a Heroic dungeon instance.

Any PUG stranger who can’t reach that DPS barrier gets a mark down in my Karma (addon) player tracker as a potentially poor player to watch out for in the future. If I come across them again and they’ve been able to improve their DPS past 1500, I’ll remove that note.

Sadly, most never do.

Happily, most drop out of the Heroics PUG circuit on their own and don’t whisper me asking to heal for a Heroic for which I’ll have to turn them down.

And thankfully, I have open-minded friends who are cool with being told that they need to improve things before progressing in Heroics with the rest of us, and since Friends help Friends, it isn’t long before the balance is restored.