What do you use as raid evaluation tools guys, the dps side? I am pretty unsatisfied with SWStats or DamageMeters...

Ideally I want an addon that shows for example a raid DPS curve over the course of the fight, and not just an average number...also each players performance will be way better monitored if you can see a steady 1000 dps over 1-2 minutes and then a drop to 500 for some reason (afk for example) and then resume to 1000 shortly after...and comparing several guys' "curves" can show when in fight theres a significant dps increase/decrease and the reasons can be evaluated in terms of strategy and so on...

I am yet to try recap, but I am not sure if such features are yet present in any addon...perhaps you can give me some pointers. thanks.

This post is in the wrong forum, but I'll bite. Using the parsing process on a combat log with time-stamps means that theoretically you could create a (total) damage curve and derive a slope at any given point on the curve; this may or may not be valuable, however. If you're doing 20k dps in the first 10 seconds of a 5 minute fight and then you die, you'll have high dps (800 dps, actually) but it's irrelevant, because you've now screwed the fight up by interrupting the tank from building threat.

What may be more useful, however, would be the ability to determine concavity of your damage curve with the second derivative. Ideally every dps class should have a concave curve with a positive slope. This may or may not be realistic, however, given that such a curve would scale off to infinite. Rather, one should determine a realistically sustainable dps window and then check to see what the curve looks like. If the curve us concave and has a positive slope, great; that player is dealing damage at an increasing rate throughout the fight. If a player's damage curve is convex with a positive slope, things look good (they are dealing damage, but the rate at which they are dealing it is not increasing).

The problem players could be easily identified; their total damage curve in the nominally sustainable dps window would be convex with a negative slope or, even worse, concave with a negative slope. These players are either dieing early in a fight or are generally not able to sustain a solid rate of dps.

Of course, this is all just theory and speculation, but hopefully someone sees where I'm going with this.

Moved.

I don't think anything like that is out there, so I'll add to the wishlist:

It'd be awesome if you could do a class-by-class comparison within that, and do a very simple normalization for gear. Like for instance, for fire mages, divide the dps by the average fireball hit or something like that to identify what's going on independently of how geared (or undergeared) each player is. Ideally, you'd normalize by some simple function of their +damage/crit/hit/AP/etc, but that would be a huge pain to implement.

For mana users, it'd be nice to have a graph of mana too, so you could easily see that their dps dropped when they went OOM as opposed to some other reason.

I mean the coding would be tough if you wrote it to auto-inspect people or download Armory stuff for up-to-date stats rather than reverse-engineering the stats from damage of common spells.

Or instead of doing all that math to derive how many fireballs they cast, you could just track that directly, as SW_Stats does.

Yeah, we agree there. Obtaining information from the combat log is simple; from the armory is a pain (and wouldn't be worth it, considering that the armory occasionally doesn't update for relatively long periods of time).

A combatlog parser that outputs a graphical curve would be neat. With the x-axis representing time and y-axis representing damage, there would be an opportunity to also show bars parallel to this graph extending in the y-axis direction representing the times when certain buffs/debuffs have been placed and removed. Incoming awesome-o MSPaint skillz:



Thus, if this were an analysis of one player in a raid, the green bars would each represent debuffs placed on a boss and the blue bars would represent buffs activated or deactivated within this timeframe. If it were a graph of the entire raid's dps, the blue bars wouldn't be present and it would be easy to see how debuffs on a boss affect dps, such as "Expose Weakness" when it's on and off.

I don't wanna put words in anyone's mouth, but it sounds like many people are interested in a combat log parsing program that can create dynamic graphs of various stats as well as a parallel timeline showing buffs/debuff. I have to say, I'd prefer to do this all out of game (seems like that would be easier to implement anyway). Likewise, I think I'm partial to the html output that WWS has; this makes access easier for the entire raid. Other thoughts to put on the wishlist?

Its no easier out of game than in game. The out of game advantage is you can create webpages out of game. I personally prefer in game since want to see whats going on now not later normally.

I mean the code to create graphs if you use my library is damn easy. Its basically

CreateGraph
AddDataSet

The harder part is actually gathering the data.

Some examples of it in use

Memory is a greatly overstated performance metric that I laugh when people act like its the end all be all We aren't dealing with consoles with a really low memory amount and often the amount of memory in use doesn't even relate to the amount of processing time the addon uses.

Recap example uses less than 2MB of memory for a night of raiding and to me it would be fine if it used up 10 times that if it could give me a much more detailed view and really it needs much less than that.

For an addon you definately don't want to store the combat log messages or exact things but instead you can easily store a outgoing & incoming DPS and HPS numbers for every player once every second.

Thats 8 bytes for each with 4 variables tracked so 64 bytes per second.
25 players so 25 players* 64 bytes per player per second = 1600 bytes per second.
1600 bytes per second * 60 seconds per minute / 1024 bytes per kilobyte = 93.75 KB/Minute
Estimate 25% Overhead for Lua variables (not sure on the specifics but it has to track stuff like type and its being stored in a table) 93.75 KB/Minute* 125% = 117.1875 KB/Minute

So we are talking about ~120 KB/Minute so its going to be around 1 MB per Boss Fight. If there is the allowance easy autorecording only at boss fights (something that looks say like the RDX timer). The real importance comes down in the data management to ensure memory usage is kept to a minimum for example by allowing for autodeleting of fights lets say less than 2 minutes. Also sparse data tables because the truth is not many people have a ton of Outgoing DPS & HPS with lots of Incoming DPS & HPS.

Overall to me this seems well worth it for someone trying to analyze whats going on and how someone could potentially improve in the raid. Heh, I think I will try coding up something later tonight maybe.


BTW if you are concerned about performance issues make sure you aren't using KTM that addon sucks up CPU usage like nothing else (even while you are standing around doing absolutely nothing with no combat messages occurring near you).