Mooz

In the past 2 years of WoW, I've had a good number of weapons that had procs attached to them. Some procs made up a significant portion of my DPS (Misplaced Servo Arm) and some definitely did not (Perdition's Blade). Generally, there wasn't solid information out there on proc rates of specific weapons. Heck, the MSA thread here went on for months and I'm not sure if it ever arrived at a solid conclusion one way or the other. And combing through wowhead/thott/allak comments is painful, to say the least.

With TBC, and the host of new procs on weapons, sets, trinkets, and so forth, my proc watch hass been working over time and those poor guys in the blasted lands have been taking it on the chin far more than they deserve.

In trying to plan my upgrade path, looking at items, I was often left wondering how often something would proc and if it was worth chasing. Sometimes you'd find good info in an item's thread, or sometimes thott would have the proc rate pulled explicitly from the spell fire. But even then, there was there's the problem of "hidden cooldowns" on things like the Hourglass of the Unraveler.

So while it was possible to assemble all of this info from all over the place, there was never a centralized location for such information. In a fit of boredom yesterday, I decided to toss up a database that I could populate with procs, and then allow people to add datapoints of their own. I figure if each proc gets enough datapoints filled out, it'll approach some semblance of truth.

It's dirt simple right now, and I'm wondering what people would like to see in such a DB/site.

There are only 2 tables at the moment:

Procs:
ProcID (index)
Item name (the name of the item or set that the proc comes from)
Item url (the link to it on thott/wowhead/etc)
Proc name (the name of the proc)
Proc url (the link to the proc on thott/etc)
Approved? (is this proc legit to show and add things to?)

Datapoints:
DatapointID (index)
ProcID (the associated proc for this datapoint)
Number of attempts (how many actions that would apply this proc were taken)
Number of applications (how many times did the proc go off)
Log link (optional field for a url to a combat log for this parse)
Pic link (optional field url to a pic link for whatever reason, proc watch pic, combat log pic, etc)
Comments (optional field for comments on this data point)

You can see the rough skeleton here: http://www.notnice.net/procdb/ If you click on "Proc" at the start of a line, it'll take you to a list of datapoints for that proc. Right now, only the MSA has any entries since that was the only one that I had accessible from work.

You can add a new proc with the "Add new proc" link. You'll also see the list of pending procs on this page.

Until a proc is approved, you won't be able to enter datapoints for it, but past sanity checking the input, I'm not doing much in terms of the inputted values. If people want to fill it with drek, they can, and I'll just sigh, delete it, and go be emo in my rogue-corner.

It's horrid HTML to just get it up and working, and I won't make it pretty (or add the usual searching/sorting/etc) until a feature list of what people would want from it is nailed down (and people actually agree it might be useful, I guess).

While I have my own personal list of things that I want to add, I'm curious to hear from the people here what they want, and if they think something like this would actually be useful.

So what would you all like to see from such a thing and would you use it? I'm interested in any and all feedback, because this is certainly something that I've personally wanted as a resource for quite some time.

 

alienangel

Note what it does (and does not) proc on: only melee attacks, or also ranged? Spell casts? Resisted spell casts? Special attacks as well as autoattacks? Extra attacks from other procs? Do the procs generate rage for warriors/druids? Does the item proc in feral forms?

Those are the regular questions I see coming up about new procs once the "how much does it proc" question is answered.

 

• Glaurong

Several things that are going to be very difficult to account for if you only record the data you listed.

1) Hidden proc cools aka "this affect cannot happen more than once every X seconds"
2) Proc per minutes vs flat proc percentage.
3) Specific abilities which are unable to trigger specific procs.

It seems to me you would have to collect more data on weapon speeds, abilities used, min time between procs.

Maybe adding in a tool that allows people to upload combat logs and it parses out all that info?

 

Mooz

Originally, I had a ton of fields in the datapoints table (weapon speed, weapon "type" (aka 1h/2h/dual-wielding/druid-form), additional haste (SnD/flurry/etc), duration of the parse, and so on). The procs table also had a few other things (proc type (equip:, on hit:, on crit:, on spellcast:, etc), duration, etc). It would attempt to calculate out PPM, uptime, and other interesting stuff based on this, but the feedback I got from the few people I asked was that "most people don't keep track of those things, or even really understand them, and it'll throw any calculations way off".

The hope was then that enough people would fill out sensible comments and link to logs to allow people to draw their own conclusions.

Sadly my regexps are not strong enough to write a combat log parser though.

Maybe I just put in a ton of optional fields and let people use them as they see fit, and then people can sort by "people that bothered to fill out the important data that I care about". That's certainly easy enough.

 

• Cryect

Unless you have the data created by an addon and submitted I would say overall this seems pretty worthless since different conditions can radically alter the perceived proc percentage (especially with cooldowns on the procs).

Look at Parserlib and you don't have to worry about parsing the combat log yourself.

 

Brewdinar

While I do agree that informal testing by the public at large would probably lead to inaccurate and arguably worthless conclusions, at the present time basically the only people in the know about your project here (presuming this, admittedly) are the theorycrafters here at EJ (and the few people that you mentioned, who I would assume are also generally well-informed and of a relatively negligible number). Until such time as a worthwhile addon could be crafted, I would expect the currently-cut data fields that could be optionally filled by people here to be at least worth seeing, if not actually informative So, I would ask that you do allow those extra data, but not yet require them or base calculations from them. User-friendly bits like adding in the sorting options that you haven't yet, and some sort of visual styling (perhaps branding the project in the process?), would also be nice.

That feedback given, I would like to comment on the bolded section above. If it could be done, this would be one of the most worthwhile bits of work for the WoW community in some time. I cannot give greater encouragement that it gets done at some point! Doing each of those by hand, based on user-submitted logs and comments, is basically out of the question, and so I come around to the addon.

Having had the wonderful idea of creating this database, the ability to populate it with relevant and accurate data becomes the most important activity now. Relying on people to record logs and manually input data will not only cause occasional mistakes in input but drive people away from helping out. Dozens of people may /log and type in their results, while hundreds would be willing to install an addon that would generate more, and more accurate, data.

Get in contact with some WoWAce addon developers, perhaps, and make a pitch for a real vision here: automated capturing and parsing of all proc-based abilities in the game, in all aspects [possibility of crit, cooldown, PPM vs. Proc%, exactly which abilities will and won't proc it, uptime in various situations (with an on-site calculator, perhaps?), you name it!], all in an easy-to-browse site that can also be used as a tool in external sites (a la The Armory becoming a way to generate item lists and tooltips via AJAX) via a few simple imbedded scripts. Imagine if all the item databases (Thott, Wowhead, Alla, etc) decided to use your proctype, proc%/PM, and such, and embedded that information in their pages! In fact, that raises the possibility of handing over the idea to one of them, with their greater ability to create useful tools and their larger install database. If the goal is simply the existence of a useful tool to provide info to, and collect info from, the community as a whole concerning procs, that might be the more optimal option, as well as the easiest for you personally. TBH, I'm rather surprised that Thottbot for example didn't have this sort of thing going on a long time ago, as it was already collecting an obscene amount of information last time I used the addon

There you have it... in one rambling thought I've gone from suggesting that you give this small community more options and power in creating a home-grown database of useful information, to advocating selling out to one of the database powerhouses! To me, regardless of who creates it, a proc db would be an immensely useful resource, so I can only advocate that it does get created, and that it eventually becomes primarily automated, for purposes of data entering, sorting, analyzing, inference, and exporting.

Good luck with the project, and I hope to see it develop into its full potential. Now to rummage through my bags to find something to test and contribute


:edit: In the mean time, perhaps adding some sort of meaningless "Biggest Contributor" list or something, to encourage people to help out. People like to see their names in lights, and it doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult to parse out a "contributed by XXX" at the end of each comment. It'd also add a bit more faith in the results on a new item, say, if User01 posts his log, and his previous logs on other items matched up nicely with the sum of everyone else's, so I suppose I'm encouraging tagging contributions whether they're acknowledged by you or not