FIrst official 3.1 preview

[TheDragoon]

This is no buffs outside his own and he pulled off the equivalent 5k raid DPS (which normally takes full raid buffs).

I imagine that 5k dps over a short burst isn't too far out of the realm of possibilities for a lot of classes. Just get a nice string of crits combined with dumping a full set of cooldown abilities and this sort of thing could probably happen with almost any player from a relatively bursty class who is geared up and knows what they are doing, they just have to get lucky. So what ends up happening is that people get totally blown away in one instance and then don't have near as much trouble in the next. And, of course, with anecdotal accounts like this people will fixate on the first rather than the second even if it happens rarely.

Talking about "damage per second" over 8 seconds and then comparing it to raid dps output is comparing apples and oranges since raid dps output is averaged over some relatively long time interval (like one boss fight or an entire instance). When you get down into a really short time interval, it's not too horribly surprising to see a large deviation.

Of course, none of this is to say that there isn't something that should be done, I just think that people exaggerate these sorts of things because they stick in their mind a lot more than what happens most of the time. :)