• alcaras

There are several posts in various threads that mention WoW Web Stats, but there isn't a thread dedicated to getting the most out of this wonderful tool. Hopefully this can be that thread.

WoW Web Stats, for the uninitiated, is a Java-based combat log parser. To get it to work, a player edits their WTF file to set their combat log range to max (I believe 200), then types /combatlog (to start logging), engages a boss -- or an entire instance, and then types /combatlog (to stop logging). They then fire up the Java-based combat log parser at http://www.lossendil.fr/serendipity/ and upload the HTML output to your guild's webspace. There's more, as you might imagine, but that's the gist of it.

My questions are several:
- How do you use WWS in your guild? (e.g. do you parse just boss fights or entire instance runs? what are the advantages of parsing entire instance runs?)
- Any tips for using it, or useful UI mods? (e.g. AutoCL, hosted on lossendil's site, will automatically turn on your combat log when zoning into an instance -- is there a similar mod that will turn it on when engaging a boss?)

We've just started using WWS recently; for example, last night's (somewhat messy) Gruul kill: http://humility.subcreation.net/raids/20070424-gruul/ Right now I've only been logging boss fights and parsing those, but it's a bit of a pain to both remember to turn on the combat log and later extract the appropriate boss fight from the log manually.

In any case, I hope this thread can blossom into a rich discussion of how to get the most out of WWS

 

Pahalial

Comparing ability use, spec and gear with actual damage output makes for very interesting theorycrafting, to be sure. However, my personal bottleneck has been DPS uptime - I tend to be too cautious when it comes to arcane orbs, cube clicking, whatever, such that I often end up with ~5% less DPS uptime than other mages. Never would have realized this without WWS - I'm still having trouble forcing myself to be less careful, but at least now I know what the [main] problem is.

Anyway, relating more to your original question - the obvious answer is to let your players fine-tune their ability use. Our warlocks only noticed how often their DoTs have been falling off after looking at a WWS parse and seeing how few ticks they were getting compared to what they should be; I can tell from your Gruul kill that someone apparently judged wisdom early on and never bothered to refresh it (causing one of your hunters to drink a fel mana pot, which I'm thinking might be a main reason he out-dps'd your other hunter - can't verify gear as I'm at work) - also that no one judges light; can tell which mages were in the group with the shadow priest who died and consequently used an extra mana gem; etc.

At the risk of sounding corny, WWS is true 20/20 hindsight.

 

Cel

I think it would be useful if someone could write a parser similar to how WWS separates boss attempts and allows easy file saving. IE: I could keep the /combatlog on for a week of raids, then at the end, I could run this parser and have it cut the large .txt into many smaller ones with date/time and boss name, leaving the rest as trash damage output.

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

Alpha is recruiting... go go.

 

• Praanz

I personally don't see any importance in logging anything but boss-fights. Trash is just trash imo - and if someone is underperforming they are to busy playing Civilization 4 on their laptop etc rather than some tricky in-game issue. Stuff like that can be dealt with on the fly by watching SW Stats or so.

Keeping a track record of how people performe from week to week is pretty nice. It's also a good tool for people to use different gear/specs on easier encounter and comparing from week to week the differances.

I've compared various specs, high hit-gear, high crit gear...etc. The death replay is also very good - to find out what actually went wrong. Did or didn't the tank get any heals - etc.

And then you can find other Gruul fights on www.lossendil.com compare them with the output of some of your classes - like ... I see that all of your mages are frost spec for some reason... Where you to convince them to spec fire because it would up their dmg - WWS'es from other guilds with fire dps'ers maby would convince them.

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire.

You have not to move out of the fire, it will be nerfed soon.

 

The Iron Colonel

This is a great example of the kind of analysis we're hoping to get from WWS. I'm the hunter who chugged the FMP (I also had a few elixirs up, whereas Drogen did not IIRC. This obviously would lead to differences in damage output). Knowing that wisdom fell off the mob would have helped Drogen keep his DPS up. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

Riot

I very much like the way it parses the ability usage for people. It can very much help you to finetune what you're doing as a DPSer.

As a tank, I think I'd like to look the abilities I personally used and see what the breakdown is.

It's very interesting.

 

Ghalt

Rather than generating a report and manually splitting it up, use the 'Host' feature which puts the report on his server, then post the link on your own site.

It's only out there for a short period of time (like a couple weeks), and there are banner ads...BUT...the functionality is awesome.

It shows the entire log stats, but it also automatically splits it into Boss fights if you want to view those. It even allows you to do custom splits. I've used it to try different spell rotations on trash to see how my overall DPS is affected.

Also, rather than trying to remember to /combatlog on and off, there is a setting where you can add the instance to autolog on and off. In other words, combat log turns on when you're in the instance, and back off when you're out.

Uses:

- Accurately compare effective DPS, split by fight. (Good to know how the make-up of the group could shift to improve).

- Look at the 'stats' of the mobs themselves to see exactly what kind of damage they are doing. For example: is Holy Fire fire damage or holy damage? Check out the Maiden to find out.

- Also useful to determine the percentage and volume of damage a tank is receiving on certain fights, which can help determine whether or not Amplify/Dampen magic would be useful or harmful.

- I've used it to determine how useful a certain spec is. For example, I could look at several weeks worth of Kara runs to find out how much mana Magic Absorption was giving me back before I determined that it wasn't worth the talent points for me at this time.

There's lots more! Especially with the robust splitting that can be done when it's hosted by Lossendil. (the creator)

 

◊ Praetorian

Oh hey, I was about to make a thread just like this.

Here's my question: Is there an easy way to generate a guild-hosted index page like this one:

http://juggernautguild.com/wws/wws-history/index.html

I can generate a local history directory, but it consists of hyperlinks to my own hard drive. Right now, the way I've been using WWS is to add a log, parse it, and then upload the resulting directory from my own HD to a directory on our FTP server. Guildmates can then browse the WWS directory to view any uploaded WWS parses. But there's no dynamic "raid history" page like the above that ties all the data together, shows player averages over time, etc.

Is there an easy way to do this that I've overlooked?

 

◊ Anias

I'd second the request. I haven't been uploading because I prefer to have the historical index, but if I could have both...

Perhaps it's time to hassle sebudai, all rumors to the contrary he's actually a reasonably helpful fellow. (Don't link me the poster, I'm willing to believe most of his bitching therein is completely justified.)

Regardless, now I have something to do today at work at least.

 

Riot

You mean instead of messaging me and bothering ME at work. Hint: I'm bored.

I would actually like to see tank stats from WWS - I would really enjoy seeing the ability breakdown and how similiar/different we all are.

 

• sadris

That isn't included in the default WWS? Wow, Juggernaut must be spoiled =p

If Kamien wrote that index file, I am guessing it is a script-generated directory listing, with a few bits of data pulled from the files themselves. (as the index gets updated as soon as Seb uploads a new WWS log)

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

◊ Praetorian

The wws-history functionality is a part of WWS. The problem is that I can only figure out how to generate it locally. If I were to upload it to our FTP, all the links would still be to files on my personal drive. I'm wondering if this is the result of a custom script to replace all local filepaths with the appropriate URLs, or if this is built into WWS somehow.

 

• mutagen

It is built-in, our history was a simple upload without any munging. I tried setting up the log-roller at one point but didn't spend much time messing with it, could one of the paths there influence how the history pathing is generated?

We're a 'medium guild' with the accompanying mix of casual gamers so I use WWS fairly gently. I post the overall raid for the meter whores and then break down individual bossfights to look at the stuff that mattered. I tried to find 'interesting' things in the data, both to satisfy my own curiosity and to maybe get a few other people to do a little theorycrafting and self-evaluation. I think it works, when I slack off and don't post raids for a bit I get more than one tell looking for the stats.

WWS historical records were great when 2.0 hit. Easy to see all kinds of changes. The armor change was a good one, could look back on a boss and see a nice increase in average hit on the tank.

 

• Snowy

I like looking at unique things to each encounter. Here's some things I look at out of curiosity:

Gruul: Shatter damage obviously.

Hydross: See who did the most damage on the spawns, and then Hydross. See who got Tombed a lot. Check max hits on OT's.

Morogrim: See who got Graved a lot -- explains why their DPS would be lower. Check just damage done on Morogrim, since AoE always puts mages/locks at the top.

Karathress: See how often Tidalvess got a WF proc. Click on "Spitfire Totem" and see who was best at unloading damage into it. If a mana user was really low on DPS, check damage done to them, and see if they took nature damage -- 6 ticks is one Leeching Throw. I took 3 one attempt and that's all she wrote.

Void Reaver: Check his damage done, see the number of hits to ranged people and that's how many times they didn't get away from an Orb in time. See if there's a pattern there over the weeks.

I like looking through different classes and comparing people in them, just seeing how their skills break down, their average hits, and so on. You can see that on some days, the DMs are just won by someone who got a really nice string of crits. On the other hand if two mages have the same spec yet vastly different damage all the time with roughly equivalent gear, maybe it's time to investigate their skill breakdown.

What NOT to do:

Don't ever look at "Miscellaneous gained" for "Illumination" on a paladin. F paladins.

 

Scheme

Are you looking at the data.xml file? The "links" I see in there are all relative; they're just the directory names of each parse, e.g.: dir="wws-20070411-2054". I just upload www-history and the newly generated wws-$date-$whatevertheothernumberis folders with no changes. Works fine.

 

◊ Praetorian

Hmm, it's possible I'm an idiot! Let me look closer at this later.

 

• Arawethion

Have you actually tried uploading the /wws-history/ folder that it generates automatically? That's all that I did, and I got this:

http://www.sigilguild.net/hamlet/WWS/wws-history/

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

◊ Praetorian

Sure enough, I'm dumb. Alright, that's good then -- I hadn't poked around the XML,.

 

◊ Asgorath

When generating logs, do you guys all use the trim feature to get the data for a specific boss fight? Do you typically have /combatlog enabled for the entire raid, or just for the boss fights? I'm still figuring out what all the options mean, and I must say the auto-split feature of the hosted reports is really nice. Haven't been using WWS for very long, and I'm sure I'm just missing something obvious here.

 

Cel

This is something I was wondering about. I was thinking there might be a way to get the locally saved reports to split like the hosted ones do, but I don't know how to do that.

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

Alpha is recruiting... go go.

 

The Iron Colonel

This is a little bit more of a "how to read WWS" question than a configuration question, but I'll fire it off anyhow:

I'm currently trying to figure out what the average clipped time on my autoshots is based on WWS, and I'm not exactly sure how to do that. From the original dump that Alcaras posted
http://humility.subcreation.net/raids/20070424-gruul/
and I click on my name (Herne). It says I was dpsing for 6 minutes at 95% presence - does this mean I was dpsing for 342 seconds (6*60*0.95=342) or that I was dpsing for 6 minutes which was 95% of the time I was in combat (which would be the entire length of the fight, since I didn't die)? I'm unclear as to how to determine my actual amount of time spent dpsing in the fight (I can time it using my damage meters locally, but I figured if we're gonna have WWS anyway I may as well just save my compy the resources and turn off the damage meter).

Assuming that the 95% presence takes into account the time I spent stoned (lol) during Gruul, I'd then take the time spent dpsing (342 seconds) and divide my auto shots into it to get time between autoshots (on average) and then compare that with my modified weapon speed - all of which I can do. I guess I'm just asking about how WWS times things and what the 95% presence means.

 

Rikktor

On encounters that have a larger-than-usual combat range we've used multiple people to log at the same time and then used the script to combine them; this stabbed us in the back when Gurgthock played detective and found out that my system clock was different than Sebudai's, causing some things to be logged twice and creating a lot more work for Seb in redoing all the old logs.

When I did log, however, I had /combatlog on all the time and extracted the appropriate boss encounters by highlighting and scrolling up in Notepad (which took a good 5 minutes per boss). Is there a more efficient way to do this? I'm not totally familiar with all of the intricacies that come with the program.

I've found WWS to be invaluable for comparing my damage with the other Warlocks. The number of DoT ticks is what interests me the most, for instance trying to max out the number of ticks you can get on Leotheras without pulling aggro after a whirlwind, or just seeing the difference in the number of ticks of each DoT.

 

Lucrettert

Just a quick question, is the combatlog that gets generated affected by combat log mods? Also do you have to have all the options checked off to track everyone?

 

◊ Asgorath

That's kinda what I figured, given the fact that wow.exe locks the log file even when logging isn't enabled (preventing you from renaming the file and starting a fresh log). I'm sure it would be possible to replicate the hosted log split feature, where you just feed in a single log from the whole raid and get a bunch of files that correspond to each boss kill or attempt. From reading the WWS forums, it sounds like this won't ever be added to the standalone WWS parser, so it'd have to be a preprocessing step before you fire up WWS.

 

The Iron Colonel

Sounds like it's purely an issue of identifying start and end points of boss fights and then breaking the file into smaller bits, which should be a fairly trivial task for anyone who knows anything about programming (i.e. not me). My only concern would be if the WWS parser has specific tags it seeks when doing its thing that preprocessing might screw up.