How to read a Scenario Scoreboard

Most people, when presented with any kind of scoreboard, treat it as a competition. Who won?

The scenario scoreboard does show who won, but it also gives an idea of roughly what the players were doing during that scenario. Who was defending a flag vs who was following the zerg? Who was healing vs who was nuking? Who was sitting in the starting area afk?

Looking at the values of xp and renown awarded to players, we can also see what kinds of behaviours the scoring algorithm tends to reward. Below is a copy of part of the scoreboard from a close match in Nordenwatch, to illustrate this. I was third from the top in this one.

I always order the scores by healing done because I’m a healer and it makes me look better, and you can do this by clicking on the little + healing icon. Also, I’m most interested in comparing my play with the other healers to see how I can improve.

You could probably guess the classes here even if I didn’t tell you. The top healer was a Runepriest, you can see that he was healing exclusively by comparing his damage total to his healing. Only 1 death — that’s runepriests for you. Then two Archmages; from the numbers you can see that we were throwing out more dps than the other healers, but we also were higher rank which partly explains it.

Next down is a Zealot, and if he’d been healing more and nuking less Destruction would probably have won this match. The last 4 healers are all lower level Warrior Priests. The guy who healed the most of them was a rank 2. So rank does help a lot with putting out high healing and damage numbers, but it’s not the only important factor.

The scorecard isn’t purely dependent on healing/damage totals, and you can see that here. The renown/xp awarded depends on all the factors displayed here, and on who won the scenario. (I’m not sure that the solo kills or deathblows are worth much renown,  they may just show that for bragging rights). So I earned more renown from this particular scenario because I was nearer to the fighting for longer than the other healers (29 kills recorded in range compared with 24 for the runepriest). With the number of order Healers in this run, we probably should all have been playing a bit more aggressively. But hey, the scoreboard shows that we won in the end.

I did get a solo kill on this run which is something I usually try to avoid because it takes awhile and as a support class, that’s time when I should really be supporting my group. But just for the record, I think it was a DoK.

If you want good renown as a healer, follow the fighting. Throw out damage whenever you don’t absolutely need to heal. Whenever you absolutely do need to heal, HEAL. Stay alive. Don’t stress over the scoreboards, it’s more important to apply damage/healing to the right person at the right time than just to pad out the numbers, and the renown/xp reflects that.

Flaws with the Scoring

There are some things the scoreboard doesn’t show that I wish it did:

1. Resses. As a healer, I’d like people to see how many resses I successfully cast during a scenario.

2. Time spent defending a flag. I am not convinced that holding an objective scores as highly as following the fighting. This is easier to see in Khaine’s Embrace. I think this is the single biggest issue with renown scores in scenarios. You’ll get more renown from following the fighting than from going to solo ninja a scenario objective or from staying on your own to guard a flag, even though the latter might win the game for your side.