Publishing your raid combat logs

by Tachyon on Mon. 30. August 2010, 18:52

Filed under: raids, addons, combatlog

Publishing your combat logs is a great instrument to analyze your and your comrades-in-arms performance. If done properly, it helps a lot in analyzing mistakes and improving your performance.

Unfortunately I'm the only one in the guild that cares about recording and uploading the combat logs, so when I don't participate in a raid, there's no logs at all.

So lets get you (and hopefully also some members of my raid team) started in combat log publishing, I'm confident you like it!

Enabling combat logging

Enabling the combat log is quite easy, just type the following command in the chat to enable/disable logging:
/combatlogWhen the combat log is enabled, events will be logged to ${wowdir}/logs/WoWCombatLog.txt.
Hint: there's also chatlog option, use /chatlog to have chat output written to ${wowdir}/logs/WoWChatLog.txt.

Manually enabling/disabling the combat log is very cumbersome, but good news is that there is an excellent addon for that: LoggerHead. Loggerhead allows to automatically enable the combat log for selected zones. When you first enter a zone, Loggerhead will ask you if you want to enable logging for this zone. It remembers your decision, and automatically enables/disables the log when you enter/leave a zone afterwards.

Publishing the combat log

My favourite site to upload the logs is worldoflogs.com. It has become the de-facto standard for combat logs, as almost all serious raiding guilds use it.
To be able to upload your logs, you need an account. Once your registered yourself, you can either create a new group for your guild, or apply to join your guild group if it already exists. Once your guild is created (or your application is accepted), you can start to upload logs.

Logs are uploaded using a Java client that gets started with Java WebStart when you click at the 'Client' link on the page. The client allows to load a log file, chose the time segment to upload, and submit it to the server. Once uploaded, delete or archive the WoWCombatLog.txt, otherwise it will bloat and become unnecessary large (slows down parsing, or causes the log to be rejected if its time span is too large).

Feature highlights
Some features and highlights of worldoflogs.com:
  • Combat log analysis - overview, segmentation (by time, boss etc), drill down by player, target, spell, effect etc, it's incredibly powerful. Check your spell mix, for how much you hit and crit, how often which effect procced, how much damage you took, who healed you, the possibilities are endless
  • Guild features - calendar view for raids, participation list for members. Also a great way to check how good a guild performs before you apply (or vice versa: check how good the applicant performed in his or her old guild)
  • Highscores - check the top performances by boss/class/spec

If your guild doesn't yet record their combat logs, I hope you give it a try, it's not a lot of work and certainly worth doing anytime. Remember: it's not a tool to blame others, but to help you and your raid perform better.
And if someone from my guild reads this: I could need someone who records the raid logs when I'm not there, just drop me a note!

Vroooooom!

by Tachyon on Sun. 29. August 2010, 23:34

Filed under: icecrown, raiding, achievement, mount


Hell yes! I'm sitting on my first 310% speed mount, and I'm loving it!
We reached the (infamous) 11/12 ICC 25 HC state by end of July, and started doing the achievements for the Glory of the Icecrown Raider meta achievement. Our raid leader, Xester, does an excellent job (thanks dude!) tracking the achievement progress for our raid members, so all raid member gets a chance to obtain the mount.



Now only two bosses remain before we can claim to have the raid content clear: the Lich King in 25 HC, and Halion the Twilight Destroyer in 25 HC. As we're doing the meta achievement right now for half of the raid nights, we decided to attempt Halion first. Hope we manage to slay them both before the Cataclysm, that would be the first time I have the content clear when the next expansion hits.

No news from the theorycrafting/simulation front though, as I still have no beta key, and even then the talents and spell mechanics seem to change on a weekly base, it's way to early to conclude something; all we can do is wait for the 4.0 patch, and enjoy our last months of Northrend raiding.

Simulation: verifying results

by Tachyon on Fri. 09. July 2010, 19:31

Filed under: casting, simulation

Hi folks, sorry for the lack of posts lately. I have two articles in the pipe that address the damage problems some mages save, and tips for beginners and pros on how to improve the damage output, but they're not yet finished.

I'm also reading all the Cataclysm information that's flooding the web, but given the change rate of features announced, cancelled or replaced (talent trees revamp being the latest), it's stupid to do any projections yet on what we get on release day, or how we will play our mages.

News from the simulation front



I'm also continuing to develop my new casting simulation in my spare time, and hope to have it finished soon enough for Cataclysm, so I can adapt it to the new stats and spells, and have a tool to compare specs, stats and stuff for upcoming articles.

The basic simulation engine is more or less done, and now I'm verifying the results I get from the simulation runs. As combing through endless lines of combat log output in the hope of finding any discrepancies is a very dull task, I started programming some visual tools which can display the output of the simulation in a more pleasant way.

One visualization is a track lane view (resembles the tracks you see in audio or video editing software, and it's already looking neat! Of course this is only the beginning, I'm planning on adding more information, such as damage numbers, proc and buff uptimes and whateveryoucanthinkofs. Hell, this would also make a great tool to visualize combat logs, what do you think?

Cataclysm NDA lifted

by Tachyon on Thu. 01. July 2010, 11:27

Filed under: cataclysm, expansion, mage, beta



The Cataclysm NDA (non-disclosure agreement) has been lifted today, so we can expect to see new information from the beta flooding the internet, yay!

MMO-Champion already published a compilation of the mage talents/spells for the upcoming expansion, and it looks fine!

Some goodies I've found:
  • Spreading Chill spreads the chill effects to 1/2 additional targets on Frostbolt crits
  • Improved Cone of Cold freezes the targets for 2/4 seconds
  • Improved Polymorph delays damage taken by the target by 1.5/3 seconds
  • Arcane Repulsion gives all of your armor buffs the ability to knock back and slow an attacker, once per minute
  • Arcane Instability increases the damage of your next spell by 20/4/60% when one of your spells is pushed back or interrupted
  • Improved Mana Gem increases your damage by 1/2/3% of your maximum mana for the next 10 seconds after using a mana gem
  • Arcane Tactics is a raid-wide buff that increases damage

Links:

Simulation: Partial Resists

by Tachyon on Sun. 13. June 2010, 03:13

Filed under: dps, simulation, theorycrafting, fire, resists

The development of the new DPS-simulation engine is progressing as planned, and requires more and more time doing research of the spell mechanics, to find out how the spell effects work in detail. It's very hard to find any fundamental information on that topic, so I had to switch back to experimental mode and find it out myself.

One particular question I wanted to have aswered today:

How much of a spell is partially resisted (absorbed) by boss targets?
Bosses have a built in resistence mechanic that lets them absorb a part of the damage. The common knowledge is that bosses count as maxlvl+3 mobs (in the WotLK version: level 83), and that they gain 5 resistence per additional level (15 overall). But I have noticed before that the resists fluctuate, sometimes more is resisted, sometimes less, and in some cases nothing is resisted at all.

Partial Resists

To test the partial resists, I unequipped any items that have a +Spelldamage proc, and casted Arcane Missiles on a Heroic Training Dummy. To record the data, I used Fraps and viewed the video in slow motion to note down the damage and absorbs for each tick.
Here's an excerpt of the collected data (in brackets: partial resists)
1099 (275), 2147 (275), 2446 (137), 1374, 1236 (137), 1374, 1236 (137), 2684, 1374, 2147 (275), 1236 (137), 1099 (275), 2415 (137) ...
The resists were either 0, 137 or 275. In relation to the damage before resists, this was exactly 0%, 10% and 20%. The spell crit modifier for Arcane Missiles (with CSD and the AM Glyph) is 1.95375, and the critical spell hits show that the resistance happens before the crit factor is applied.

Now I needed more samples to quantify how many spells have 0%, 10% and 20% resists. For that I parsed the combat log from our raid tonight with a total of 487 samples on 3 bosses. Result:
  • 257x 0% resist (~ 1/2)
  • 152x 10% resist (~ 1/3)
  • 87x 20% resist (~ 1/6)
I have yet to verify these observations with other spells, but I assume for now that all spells are affected the same by partial resists.

EDIT 2010-06-14: Interesting side note
Ingite is affected by partial resists as well. Critical fire spells get thus taxed twice (once for the spell, once for the ignite DoT). This effect is known as Double Dipping.
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