I was having a discussion with a friend over lunch about Earth Day and the amount of attention the environment is picking up in the last year or two by retailers. At some point, we started to discuss our “carbon footprints“. There’s a lot of talk these days about carbon footprints. In a nutshell, that’s the amount of carbon dioxide you and I and everyone else on the planet produces through our daily activities. The carbon footprint is actually a combined total determined by our primary footprint (directly caused) and our secondary footprint (indirectly caused).

Why am I bringing this up on a site dedicated to gaming?

As we our discussion naturally turned to gaming (as it almost always does), we began to try to discuss the contributions support classes make to groups and raids that is often unquantified by most players. We started to talk about parsers and running some controlled experiments on the Everquest II Test Server to verify exactly how much of a boost some debuffs really produced. As we dug into the math, I started to realize how little most players really understand the impact they have on overall damage totals.

In short, we’d started talking about our DPS Footprints.
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