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!

• Permalink
• 10 Comments

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.

• Permalink
• 2 Comments

Subscribe to Articles:
Subscribe to Comments: