Greetings,

Long time reader, first time poster. I have a question for everyone who haunts this forum; specifically, those of you who analyze combat logs and draw conclusions regarding the tactics to be used in a given fight based on your findings. That is; what do you use to parse your combat logs? Is there functionality in plain-vanilla wow to do this? Would I have to install a standalone mod for this functionality?

I'm looking for something that can look at my damage dealt/taken and return various figures derived from that; percentages of physical damage and specific elemental damage as a portion of total damage, for example. To be honest, though, I'm a total noob when it comes to this.

I'm not a big fan of using canned strats and I think that learning how to effectively analyze and interpret what shows up in my combat log could go a long way toward enabling me to start to analyze some of these encounters myself. I'm thinking this could really help my (or any) guild when the expansion hits, and the strats aren't so readily available for a while.

Anyway, any help, advice, pointers or tidbits of information would be greatly appreciated.

One other thing; I just want to thank Gurg, Kaubel and everyone else who keeps this forum moderated and available. EJ forums are a wealth of great information (much the opposite of Blizz forums), and I find myself posting links here on my own guild website very often. Keep up the good work!

personally, i prefer to fraps things as opposed to try and parse through combat logs (as far as I know no one has released a "good" combat parser). Most if not all fights you really don't need to parse combat logs, just find the name of the spell being cast and look it up on thottbot if you want to know more (for example 'immenient doom' from loathab). Things like server side lag or distance fights (like the twin emps) make combat logs that much more unattractive.

You make a good point regarding distance limitations on combat logs, Max, though I don't look forward to the day IGN fucks over thottbot.

Thanks for the links, Drauk. I'd be very interested in seeing more feedback on this.

I was chatting with another guildie of mine the other day about combat log range. When I was viewing the config.wtf defaults over at http://www.wowwiki.com/Config.wtf_defaults I found:

"CombatLogRangeCreature" = "30"
"CombatLogRangeFriendlyPlayers" = "50"
"CombatLogRangeFriendlyPlayersPets" = "50"
"CombatLogRangeHostilePlayers" = "50"
"CombatLogRangeHostilePlayersPets" = "50"
"CombatLogRangeParty" = "50"
"CombatLogRangePartyPet" = "50"

Mind you, these are the default values. We were wondering if increasing the value of these would increase the range combatlogs would pick up actions. We haven't tested it extensively though. Not sure if it even works, or if it does... what the max values would be, but you would simply go to your config.wtf file and add:

SET CombatLogRangeCreature "30"
SET CombatLogRangeFriendlyPlayers "50"
SET CombatLogRangeFriendlyPlayersPets "50"
SET CombatLogRangeHostilePlayers "50"
SET CombatLogRangeHostilePlayersPets "50"
SET CombatLogRangeParty "50"
SET CombatLogRangePartyPet "50"

...and change the values before you save the file.

Nope, functions to calculate range were removed from the WoW API awhile ago. Also, those values might not necessarily equal in-game yards.

Just the ol' method of moving farther and farther away and swapping stances or aspects would probably work, but as I've said. I haven't invested much time into researching this yet.

Something that Gurg has said in the past, with which I agree, is that FRAPSes of a fight in question show just as much, if not more, as a flat combat log parse. With encounters working more and more in the vein of precise positioning, rather than the old R&D joke of "Lower mob X's current HP to 0 before he lowers your raid's HP to 0", knowing where anyone is at any given time is just as important. Especially with a healer's "bar-mod" thing, like RDX or PerfectRaid, you can see, at any given point during the fight, how well someone is keeping himself alive and where he happens to be located at any given moment.

Combat logs help you see whether or not the numbers are 'coming together for a kill', but in modern encounters, in most cases, there's much more to the kill than just that.

Nice thing about combat logs is that they do show a lot more information than a FRAPs. You will be able to see things like Demo wearing off 6 seconds before a tank dies. (Happens a lot) Somethign that is much harder to see in a fraps if you aren't targeting that mob.

I actually just use grep to go through my logs. It doesn't do anythign for you automatically, but if you are good with regular expressions it will cut through a lot of crap very fast.

:unsure: Do you mean IGE?

I find this java until useful -

http://brockjones.com/wowparser/

Good for looking at damage type breakdown, ability use breakdown, etc, after the fact.