Editors note: Please welcome the illustrious Zeherah, creator of www.femaledwarf.com! She has awesomely agreed to write up the occasional post when she can think of something that would benefit us! Today, it’s about how to learn from logs.
Step 1: Create a Log and Post It
Note: If your guild already posts logs to the web, you won’t need to create your own so you can skip this step, for those who don’t here’s how to do it.
- Use the /combatlog command to start your combat log when your raid begins. Use it again when you want to stop logging (typcially at the end of the raid). If you have to relog you’ll have to start logging again. There are mods to do this for you automatically if you like.
- When you are finished raiding, close WoW (to make sure the log buffer gets written out to the file) then go to the Logs folder in your World of Warcraft folder to find your log. The log file will be named WoWCombatLog.txt (if you like you can rename it so you can store it for future reference).
- Create a free account on a web log site. I recommend World of Logs (http://www.worldoflogs.com/) but there are other options if you prefer them. Download the client (which is usually a Java applet) and launch it.
- Select your log via the client and use the option to upload it to the server. When it’s finished, your log should be posted (and most likely it will be loaded into your browser automatically).
Step 2: Analyze Your Performance
There are a lot of things you can learn about your performance from a log. Here are some things you’ll want to look at. Keep in mind that you’ll get the most effective data looking at specific fights, not at the entire raid.
Note: the details about where to find things here are based on World of Logs. There are other log sites with similar features but you’ll have to sort out the navigation of those yourself.
Sections of Interest:
Navigation Menu – At the top of your report, there’s a menu in a little blue bar. It’ll list your guild name, then the date of the report, after that there’s 4 submenus:
- Dashboard – If you mouse over this you’ll find the different sections of your log report. For a hunter the most useful section will be Damage Done, but there may be other sections of interest to you, including the Log Browser which lets you search for specific details in the report, and the Analyze section which can enable you to compare performance on subsections of a fight
- Full Report - If you mouse over this you’ll find a list of all the parts of the raid. You can select Kills for example to limit the report display to only boss kills, or select a specific kill or wipe from the submenu. This is extremely useful since studying performance on specific fights is far more useful typically than comparing performance over an entire night including trash
- Players – If you mouse over this you’ll find a list of all the players in the raid, sorted by class. If you want to look at details for a specific player this is where you can select them (note you can also get to the player specific reports by clicking on their name in the Damage Done report)
- Creatures – If you mouse over this you’ll find a list of all the creatures encountered in the raid, including bosses. Generally this section is not extremely useful, but sometimes if you are trying to track specific details like what the uptime of a debuff such as sunder armor was on a boss, this would be a good way to find it.
Player/Creature Specific Details – You access these by selecting a player or creature from the top menu or the damage done section. The second list of tabs displayed is where you’ll find the details of importance:
- Graph – This will show a graph of your damage done, healing done, damage taken and healing taken over the course of the fight
- Damage by Spell – This will give you a breakdown of all damage done and taken by the type. It’s a useful section because it’ll give you an idea of if your attack breakdown matches what should be expected and if you’re taking damage you shouldn’t be during a fight
- Healing by Spell – Shows what healing you did and took, generally not significant for hunters
- Damage by Actor - Shows what damage you did and took from each target (note this doesn’t include pets and will include friendly fire such as spore damage on Festergut)
- Healing by Actor – Same as damage by actor but for healing
- Buffs Gained - Shows all the buffs/debuffs and power gains (typically mana regen) you received over the course of the fight. This includes buffs from others and your pets. You can see the uptime of the buffs as well. If you use the # next to the uptime display it will show the uptime in a graph at the top. You can stack multiple uptime displays on the graph to see how your various buffs/debuffs overlapped
- Buffs Cast - Same as buffs gained but only includes ones cast by you. Generally this is more useful if you’re trying to find things like your own buff uptimes, but keep in mind buffs cast by your pet such as Call of the Wild will not show up here
- Deaths – will show a report of your deaths and the events leading up to them
Damage Done/Healing Done Sections - You can select a section of the graph with your mouse and right click and use the “Set page to selection” option in order to study only a portion of the fight. This is extremely useful when trying to track performance on important sections of a fight, such as phase 3 on Putricide.
Rankings – You can go to the front page of World of Logs and go under the Rankings menu to find dps rankings for a specific fight. Then you can click on the icon for someone in the ranking list for your class/spec combination to see a display of the top rankings for your class/spec on a particular fight. This can be helpful when you’re trying to improve performance and are trying to compare things such as shot breakdown with others who are performing better on the fight. Keep in mind that when comparing to top players that their gear, spec and glyphs may not exactly match yours, and this may lead to some differences in expected shot breakdowns.
What To Look For:
- Damage Ranking – How much damage did you do relative to other players, especially ones of your own class/spec. You can use the expand arrow to see details about how much damage your pet contributed (by default it gets included in your total). You can also check the top ranked players on the fight for your class/spec by going to the rankings section. Comparing your dps from week to week will also help you track your progress.
- Damage Breakdown – Select your character and look at the damage by spell section. What kind of damage did you do? How many times did you use each shot? It’s especially useful to compare your breakdown to other people with the same spec (either in your raid or from another log) to see if people doing more damage than you had a similar breakdown, which might indicate if you’re mistiming your shots, using a bad shot priority, not making good use of instants while moving, etc. If your pet is especially low perhaps you’ve not managing them well or not making sure they’ve been properly buffed. Keep in mind when comparing yourself to another hunter in a report that if their gear/talents are significantly different from yours that could affect their breakdown (i.e. an MM hunter gemmed for ArPen is going to have a lot more heavy physical damage compared to one gemmed for agility)
- Cooldown Management - are you using all the cooldowns you have available to you and timing them well? On your character selection go under the Buffs Gained section. You can see a list of all buffs you gained over the course of the fight. You can also select the # sign next to each buff to see a graph of when it was applied. Displaying the graph for multiple buffs (such as rapid fire and call of the wild) will help you see if you’re stacking them together and whether you’re timing them well. You may also want to look at your trinket buffs, heroism/bloodlust, kill command, etc. You should also take a look at whether you’re managing other buffs such as Sniper Training properly, the uptime should give you an idea of how often they’re up for.
- What Happened? – You can also look under Buffs Gained to see what debuffs were applied to you and how long they were active. This can be useful on some fights to take into account things that may have reduced your dps (such as Vile Gas on Festergut) or whether you’re making sure debuffs aren’t getting too high (such as Chilled to the Bone or Mystic Buffet on Sindragosa). You can display these on a graph using the # so you can see if they occurred during your cooldowns or even how high they stacked. You can also look under the Power Gains section if you want to try to figure out how much mana regeneration you have coming in if you’re having mana issues during a fight. If you died on a fight you can also take a look at the Deaths tab to get the details of what happened before you died, which may help you avoid death in the future or help the raid leader figure out what’s killing people on a fight.
Dig Deeper
If you want to know even more detail about a fight you can utilize the Log Browser to search for specific things during the course of a fight. For example, let’s say you’re MM and you have the 2pc T10 bonus. You want to make sure that you refreshed your serpent sting while the bonus was procced, then didn’t allow it to drop off afterward. You would bring up the Log Browser, then remove the “show all events” query. Now you want to add 2 queries. Both should have the Source set to your character name. The first one should also set the Spell to Exploit Weakness, which is the name of the 2pc T10 bonus. The second one should set the Spell to Serpent Sting and check off the Spell Cast event type. Then use the Run button to run the queries and you’ll get a report of when your serpent sting casts were and when your exploit weakness was applied and faded, so you can tell if you timed things properly.
Just a small note, log browser is being deprecated and likely won’t be improved and all further development goes into expression editor that gives far higher flexibility and power.
Also, you should have talked a bit more about the analysis pages. Seeing custom charts made from expression queries and seeing who heals/damages who and when is extremely valuable.
I didn’t really talk about the analysis much because that’s more useful for trying to diagnose the performance of the raid as a whole, and not as useful for diagnosing issues with individual performance, which is more what this article was oriented towards. When you’re trying to improve your raid there’s a lot of other useful things you can learn from a log, but I figure most hunters are just trying to figure out why they aren’t performing at maximum. That being said I can think of some cases where the analyze section can be applied to improving individual performance. I may do a more indepth followup to this later.
With regards to the expression editor, I haven’t really used it much myself, I find it a bit obscure compared to the log browser which has a very simple interface to use. But you’re right, it’s a lot more powerful if you take the time to learn it, and I didn’t realize it had those nice plotting graphs till I looked just now. For those curious, the example I gave with the Log Browser can be used in the expression editor with the following string (which of course you’d want to change to your character name):
sourcename=”Zeherah” and ((spell=”Serpent Sting” and type=TYPE_CAST) or (spell=”Exploit Weakness”))
I wasn’t aware the log browser was being depreciated, that’s good to know. I wonder if they’ll create an easy interface to the expression editor.
Welcome aboard Zeherah, good to have ya.
An amazing article: More please! A couple things I ran into when setting this up recently:
-The World of Logs client requires Java. If you try to run the client without installing Java, you will get errors. Visit http://www.java.com and install the software to get the client working.
-The last line of the last image – which allows you to Add Query – includes a line called Spell ID. You can identify the spell in WoWHead or Thottbot in the web site address. For example, Sniper Training is 64420, or http://thottbot.com/s64420. Spell 72458 will tell you how many people are getting hit by Malleable Goo in Putricide. You can find out almost anything with the Log Browser!
For example, I like to look at Sniper Training to determine how efficient my movement is during an encounter. If it shows a long list of:
[21:44:29.187] Bozanimal’s Sniper Training is refreshed by Bozanimal
This is good. If I see:
[21:40:26.187] Bozanimal gains Sniper Training from Bozanimal
[21:40:41.281] Bozanimal’s Sniper Training fades
[21:41:03.156] Bozanimal gains Sniper Training from Bozanimal
[21:41:18.234] Bozanimal’s Sniper Training fades
[21:41:19.156] Bozanimal gains Sniper Training from Bozanimal
That’s bad.
This is so fantastic; I hope to see more detail on using World of Logs to analyze combat in future posts. I’d like to learn to use the Expression Editor, and find out Hunter-specific tips, as well as additional general raid analysis. I’ve also never dipped into the Live Combat Log, and would like to see more on this from a Hunter perspective. Spec-specific help would be great, too. So much to learn!
I’m pretty sure the only difference with the live combat log is that the damage report gets posted to the server after every boss (or possibly every combat) so that you can look at it during the course of the raid. I’m not sure how many people have enough downtime during a raid to make use of this over just posting the raid at the end, but I suppose it could be helpful if you’re working on a progression fight since Recount doesn’t give as much useful detail.
One tip for analyzing your damage btw that I didn’t really include in the article, is that you can adjust the settings on my site to match up with the exact buffs in your raid, adjust the combat length (and kill shot range) to match up with the actual fight, and enable the debug data option to see your predicted shot breakdown. This will give you some idea of how many of each shot it was predicted you’d fire on a stand and shoot fight of that type, which can help you figure out whether you’re screwing up your shot breakdown.
Obviously no fight is as tank and spank as the site will expect, but it’ll give you a rough idea. You can also look at things like uptime of vile gas or bone spikes to figure out how much to discount your expected damage by due to fight effects.
thank you kindly Zeherah :)
time and time again, you’ve helped be become a better hunter!
/salute
/wave from the wow forum
How do you input special characters in some peoples names into the source field of the browser or in the expression editor???
like sourcename=”Zeherah” i get.. but how do you do it if the ‘a’ is ‘z′ or whatever the alt code for a funky ‘a’ would be.
I’ve searched but can’t find anything on this…
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
I just type the special character in when I do the query and it works, I haven’t been encoding it (pretty sure the browser takes care of that when you submit the search). I’m not sure if it works the same way under Windows though, have you tried just typing the character?
Generally I just copy-paste the stuff with special chars in them and it has worked so far for me
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