Based on the desire to get precise details quickly on progress nights I am trying to put together a ‘best practice’ guide on analysing raid performance and wipes. This will be initially for my use, and then for other officers in the guild. In the long run I would guess I will be using Omniscience, however as its not yet available I am trying to understand how to get as close as possible to the same information, and speed of analysys in game.

At present I use(or am aware that I can use):

1) I Ensure combat log range is extended
2) I Ensure that the combat log is on (default blizzard log)
3) I ensure that SW Stats (currently Beta2) is running properly
4) I ensure I am frapsing anything significant

Going into real detail is still something I am new to, so two questions:

1) How can I best use the combat log I can generate, what tools should I be using to filter\parse output from said log, and can these be run ‘in game’ as opposed to by tabbing out ?

2) Is there anything significant I am missing (add-ons perhaps?) that would change dramatically how I approach this task ?

As you can see I am not MT, but as raid leader I am trying to rely only on the information that I can capture. The intended purpose is analysing the whole raid group, individual performances, and refining strategy on the fly.

WoW Web Stats

**edit
Bah, too late.

Quick newbie question: how do I extend the range of the combat log?

If you use a mod called "AutoCL", it'll do it for you (max 100yards with the current version of AutoCL).

http://ui.worldofwar.net/ui.php?id=3077

It's very handy because it'll automatically start/stop a combat log when you enter a raid zone that you specify. Just don't forget to delete your combat log before you enter a zone if you don't want to simply pile on new data on top of stale info.

I use Hitsmode for my combat log. It is very similar to the default one, but uses colors so it is easier to understand the information in it.

There is yet another one by the same author as SCT (Greyhoof) that is also popular, but I can't recall the name of it. If you search wowinterface.com for that author it will show up.

Eavesdrop

Nurfed Combat Log

a) Color Coded User friendly View
b) Easy to Configure
c) Can re-direct combat information to different chat windows (2 default chat windows + upto 5 user created chat windows)
d) Can monitor a single target or a set of targets or Party or RAID or Self in a chat window

I'd love to know if anyone has seen a mod that shows a report of the cause of death for each raid member. Did they not get heals for a period of time? Was it random burst damage? Did they not move out of AoE or not wear resist gear? Did they pull aggro and get killed? Did slow debuff removal kill them? It would be awesome if there is a mod that could give a rough idea of which of a list of such causes killed each person. It would also be nice if there were a way to mark when a wipe has been called/implied, since subsequent deaths don't need analysis.

I know this is a topic that's come up several times since I've been around here, but this is the only thread I could find
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=7926

If you are into the bossmod-writing portion, Transcriptor is probably a good thing.
http://www.matts-hosting.com/addons/.../Transcriptor/
(requires ace2 i belive)

It gives you the combat log, but broken down by what ingame events they fire

Is there some documention for Transcriptor?
Couldn't find it on curse/wowinterface/ui.worldofwar.
And Google showed only "use transcriptor!" sort of messages. :/

I can only provide non-empirical evidence, however from a personal perspective I see no difference in performance from increasing combat log range. If you try it and it does not suit you you can always reset it!