[Cowmonster]

dps = damage/time

It varies from meter-to-meter as to how they measure time.

Being 30k dps for the first 20 seconds of a 10 minute fight and then being another corpse on the ground is of course bad, but total damage is not the important number. Sustained DPS is what maters most. If you can do enough damage to kill the boss, wonderful, but if you can't do it before the enrage timer or the healers go oom then that's bad.

Damage done, dps, number of CCs, number of dispells and threat management are all to be considered. If a person is having to devote a lot of time to dispells (IE the mage is the other person who can get rid of the curse that gets applied frequently, so he's spending his time removing curses instead of damage). Time = damage done/dps, so we can determine how much of a person's time is devoted to actually doing damage. This is helpful in determining if someone is slacking by determining if they only spent 20% of their time in the boss fight doing damage then was the rest of the time spend on something important? Were they dispelling or were they forced to wait for a tank with slow threat gen? Ultimately if they spend 99% of their time during the fight causing damage then their sustained dps through the fight is what matters.

This is just my two cents on the subject anyway.