I know that with the advent of Deadly and BigWigs, homebrew bossmodding is becoming a lost art. But I've always found it kind of interesting, so I still do it for my guild (and by extension, for all RDX users).

I want to ask other people who know about bossmodding about accurate detection of mob abilities. For example, this is a log our last Gruul kill (bugged, only one Shatter):
http://www.sigilguild.net/hamlet/Log...218-hamlet.zip
My combat log range is huge, and was clearly picking up everything that raid members were doing (as is evident from the associated WWS report).
Conspicuously absent from the log are the lines
"Gruul the Dragonkiller begins to cast Ground Slam"
"Gruul the Dragonkiller begins to cast Shatter"

I've noticed similar things at other fights, where timers that are triggered by simple combat event occasionally just don't fire. This is annoying, because imperfect combat logging hinders not only bossmodding, but also accurate record-keeping with things like WWS.


So, does anyone know what's going on? Are events like CHAT_MSG_SPELL_CREATURE_VS_CREATURE_DAMAGE and CHAT_MSG_SPELL_PERIODIC_CREATURE_BUFFS sometimes just not firing? Can the combat log be "overloaded" and just skip certain events? Any other general information about how to make UI that accurately detects mob ability usage?

It's funny, before LV gained it's popularity, I would try to make simple timers for bosses and sometimes get stuck on that, where I had a hard time finding the exact text of the boss ability when they used it. I also sometimes had my mod not trigger when the text that was supposed to trigger it was clearly visible in my combat log.

Not quite sure what causes it tho. I suppose mods like BW and LV get around it by synching, if several people have the mod, one of them is bound to pick up the message and transmit it to the rest.

I can say with some certainty that your log has a definite buffer that can be overflowed on incoming events, additional events simply don't appear to be written.

I've lost all sorts of stuff during a particularly hectic moment for say c'thun or gothik. As the modding I do for bossmods is pretty minimal these days (since we're not pushing into cutting edge stuff atm) I haven't gone looking for the exact rate at which data must accumulate before you start losing events. As a side note, this might be a hidden reason for smaller raids. The client certainly seems to behave better with less people in range of any user (which of course makes sense, less to do)

You sure you have all the log ranges increased?

Here's the function that I use personally to set it.

But there is a few different ways I do it depending on the event and syncing though can be done but I don't really see it as being necessary in most cases and can cause issues if done incorrectly.


Anyways here's a list of common ways to detect mob abilitys

1. Look for the begin to cast message
2. Look for damage/afflictions occuring on players
3. Look for the boss changing targets or losing their target completely (example when the lurker below does spout he has no target).
4. Read the emotes/yells
5. Did the boss just vanish off everyone's targets (well this normally more often involve phase changes)

When I'm looking at trying to get the timing of an encounter down for some form of boss "mod", I've noticed that range is quite significant. You, too, play a mage, and I can say with certainty that the combat log's range is not all that far, and for a class that typically tries to stay as far away from the Big Bad as possible, getting a timer down is tricky stuff.

I wrote an independent mod for the Anubisath Guardians in AQ40, and it was coded such that when raid leaders/assists noticed a combat event ("casts Meteor") it would propagate that over the addon message channel. That way as long as a few key people had the mod -- some melee and the hunter that pulled -- the chances were good that everyone would see the warning (one assistant could turn on "do raid warnings).

For RDX, most of the encounter timers I write or use only look for debuffs or attacks against the player -- that is, none of the FRIENDLY or PARTY events -- and announces that information via an RDX RPC. This requires that everyone in the raid has RDX, but that's not that hard. I've found that this method, so far, has been the most reliable.

Even with my logs set to maximum I've noticed ability clip. Mostly, as I said, in hectic stuff like say c'thun or gothik. I think the first time I noticed was when I went looking through my logs for when our warriors hit recklessness (I was trying to talk about the benefits of using reck before executes to get to the higher dps execute stage faster) and couldn't find it on a c'thun kill where we'd barely scraped through the 2nd weaken to the kill (literally killed just as he went back to invuln) because of how much moonfire et al was going on.

Sometimes the log clips, I'm not sure of the actual point at which it clips, or blizzard's code-reason for the clipping, but I can confirm that you do in fact lose combat events if there's a lot of chatter. It's not related to range, or facing, or phase of the moon - it's related to activity. I haven't gone looking to see if it's client chatter or just log chatter.

See, this is annoying, because of the effect on the reliability of things as simple as damagemeters.

Gothik is actually a special case.

The server never sends you messages on the other side of the gate amusingly enough. Bugged me that you couldn't even see messages of the people healing on the other side.

Edit: Anyways that was the sole fight I found I actually had to sync messages for though you couldn't see void zone messages from thanes corner the way we did 4H either but didn't really matter since you don't care about those messages over there.

Sounds to me like the way to ensure events aren't missed is to set your log range SHORT, and have a number of people syncing.

A short log range should reduce each individual "log-spam" and reduce the occasions of clipping. If everyone has log set to 200, everyone is likely to get clipping at the same time, and even syncing may not work.

Anyone who has written a boss event timer is painfully aware of the limitations of the combat log, and how grossly inaccurate meters are. Before syncing was more common, I think everyone was almost always at the top of their personal meter.

I found damage meter gaming to be the cause of many wipes (woo! look at my e-peen!) that I seriously considered a meter randomizer that would inject bogus data into the various sync protocols. I dropped the idea after just dropping the raiders who couldn't understand how aggro works.

On the topic of boss timers: the WoW server will cut you off if you stream too much data. The addon message channel does not have the anti-spam delay that the regular channels have, but it does not have any sort of quenching; blow past and you get DC'd immediately. It is very easy to make a simple mistake that will DC your entire raid, if you do something like have everyone who detects an ability spam it into the addon channel at the same time (that is, detect it on another player, not just the current player), and also repeat the notification when you get a notification.

Yeah, I've done a bunch of mods with RDX RPC's before. Usually, even if you code it sloppily, the worst thing that will happen is that 40 people simultaneously flash the same RPC when the boss uses an ability. Any of Venificus's RPC-using mods have his nice setup where you only propagate if you detect it yourself and are not already locked out.

The self-clearing mutex is so commonly used in RDX that I'm surprised he hasn't abstracted it out yet.

I did that before but I don't think anyone even noticed the extra randomness though they did notice the priest being on top of the damage meters whose healing I was sending messages as damage.