Raid Ready : Combat Logs

Anyone who’s ever raided in World of Warcraft can tell you there are about a million and one different things happening during boss fights. It’s difficult enough to focus on what you have to accomplish yourself, but the core of a raid is how well you work with anywhere from 9 to 24 other people. This information is especially important if you happen to be the raid leader (RL). The best way to do this is to look at the combat logs for the boss fights and there are few better ways to analyze your group’s performance than by utilizing World of Logs.

World of Logs is a fantastic tool that lets you upload and parse the entire raid from start to finish. In addition to the obvious advantage of being able to see who has done the most damage,healing, etc. over the course of an evening, it gives the raiders the chance to look at the performance or events during specific fights. This means we get to do things like yell (lovingly) at someone if they're using the wrong DPS rotations or if they're not using a specific ability enough or if they really need moar cowbell. They become better players and we talk less about them behind their backs. What? I did say lovingly!

Below you see the my raid team's Lich King kill. Just by looking at this you can tell we did the most DPS right at the outset mainly because we weren’t running around crazy like we are during the transitional phases. You can also see that Garryck did the most dispelling and that’s because we made him the Necrotic Plague dispeller of doom. You can also tell right when the Lich King ROFLpwns us dead before we’re revived to get all medieval on his arse at the end..... gawd, that part was satisfying!

This is only the most infinitesimal fraction of what World of Logs can show you. Anyone can upload their combat logs. Just type /combatlog at the beginning of your raid day/nite and once again when you call it. This’ll produce a file in your WoW Logs folder. Take this and upload it toWorld of Logs and voila! You’re omnipotent!

So have fun with it, tweak shtuff around, figure out in what parts of the fights you might be made of phail and everyone’s a winner!