@pixel
Not a guild wars player but I do have some levels on DS. Can you brief me what you need?

@S_H_K so, different fights have different windows of opportunity for DPS, and builds that can consolidate their damage into super tight windows are "burstier" and tend to fare better in content where you really need to do damage in short windows. I was going to do some work to figure out how to compare data for DPS done on a benchmark (i.e., in a vacuum) and find ways to plug that in to some approximation of a "burst window" -- whatever seems like the most accurate way to represent that. If that makes sense

@pixel
Alright I have a rough Idea of the game (MMO it seems) I'll have to check more about how is the game but there's some questions.
1)Is there some element system that gives bonus damage or penalty to damage?
2) Is there animation cancel in the game
3) You want to explore the possibilities of combo routes or just compare general stacked damage?

@pixel
I found the charts and Damn my eyes are still spinning with all that data dump although I'm still unsure how to interpret that thing they seems to call dps to the damage output maybe I misunderstood that. Anyway going back to the questions.
1) We would have a time axis and a damage axis for sure don't ya?
2) If we are only working with one build "the third axis" is the different encounters.
3) I see there are factors like quickness and some other things they use interactive elements to show how they influence we would use a best case scenario or represent a rough delta of what's the DPS for the build? Or you want it to be interactive?

@S_H_K all boons and such can be assumed to have 100% uptime, most endgame play is maximized around that. basically I'm trying to solve two questions
1) how long is the average "burst window" across fights, which can be discerned theoretically by parsing logs from fights to see when they are and are not able to do damage
2) how much damage can each build do during that time
3) since DPS is really calculating "Damage (dealt so far) per second (of total time in combat)," are there better ways to display that data than "damage per second" -- is time to x amount of damage better? measuring burst as a function of time specifically?

@pixel
Oh dear I got a little lost Clarify me something
A)Builds one or many?
B)Encounters one or many?
C)We will be working with logs? Hope they aren't a mess
Looping back to the threaded conversation:
1) We'll have to define the burst window.
2) Ah so it's not DPS per se in this case
3) Yeah well if we define a burst window in time we can look at how much damage a build puts in that time though different encounters.
If we define the burst window as an amount of damage we can look at how much time it takes to reach it, and how reliable is to reach it.

@S_H_K im trying to design a framework to check any build, given a benchmark, against an approximation/model of most encounters' and how much burst they often expect. we would be workign with logs, but programatically sorting through them isn't my strong suit. I do know some friends that have worked with the log files and they're not horrible afaik, but I'm not sure how robust the documentation is

@pixel @S_H_K log parsing is more on the state machine side of things than data science, yeah? It really sounds like you're trying to track the state of the encounter and make certain calculations when the state machine says to

@neatchee @S_H_K no (i dont think), i want to find a way to create a model that's sort of an approximation of what a fight might look like SHOULD it expect burst, and then find a way to compare a benchmark's log against the expectations that a "burst window" would have and compare builds against each other under that context. if that makes sense

@pixel @S_H_K right but I'm talking about how you reach that point; how you achieve the goal of determining that model