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Now that we've seen how combat logs can help us examine our personal performance, let's look at what it can tell us about our healing team. Healing leads have an unsual role during raids. In addition to understanding the general fight mechanics (don't stand in the blue stuff!), they should have a fairly strong grasp of the kinds of damage the raid might encounter, and then figure out how to utilize their healing resources to counteract that damage. If people are dying, then something isn't working out.
When troubleshooting healing, there are really two fundamental questions that will pinpoint most issues.
- Did everyone understand and follow his/her assignment?
- Did we correctly anticipate and prepare for damage?
Did everyone do what they said they'd do?
We've all been there. The tank is looking pink with health, and you see a big AoE spike hammer on your mages. You switch to help the raid healer, and suddenly everyone is dead and the tank is asking why she didn't get heals. Assignments are only as good as their execution.
Fortunately (or unfortunately!) World of Logs will tell us how well we held to our assignments. You can find this information in two places. For an individual breakdown, you can select someone's name to visit his or her character page, and choose the "healing by actor" tab. Or, if you want to see multiple healers, in the Dashboard menu, scroll down and select Analyze and Healing Done.
In the left side submenu, choose "by target" and press the Go button. This gives you a list of who received healing -- in most cases, the tanks should be at the top. You can mouseover each individual's total healing received for a popup menu that will display who contributed that healing.
Naturally, you want to see your tank healers at the top of the tank healing, and your raid healers should be the most common source of healing for miscellneous raid members. There are some exceptions - if you have a Shaman tank healing, his chain heal will probably do a significant amount of healing on the melee. But generally, this should give you some insight into how well your team followed their assignments.
Did we correctly plan for the encounter's damage?
No matter how many boss strategies you read, there's always going to be something unanticipated when you're actually in the fight trying to keep people alive. Combat logs can help you narrow down what that might be, and figure out how to compensate for it.
You'll want to start by hovering over the Dashboard menu, scrolling down and selecting Analyze and Damage Taken.
This is much like the healing version, except when you mouse over the damage taken by someone you'll see the specific abilities that cause it. A quick glance down the raid can tell you whether people are taking damage from something avoidable, or whether there's a strong AoE damage component to the fight.
For instance, on a recent Blood Queen fight, everyone except the two tanks took the most damage from Shroud of Sorrow, the Blood Queen's AoE ability. With this information, I would know to make sure that we have more healers assigned to AoE than we would on a standard encounter.
Let's say you were investigating whether or not you had enough healers assigned to a tank. From the Damage Taken page, you can click on the tank's name and be taken to his or her character page. On that screen, the "damage by spell" tab will show you the abilities that caused damage; just scroll to the damage taken table underneath the personal damage information. Most importantly, this table can tell you how much damage each ability "hit" contributed. If you're seeking 30k hits, you'll know you want to place extra healers on that tank to ensure a bad string of luck doesn't drop him or her before you can get a heal cast.
Additional Resources
If you're looking for some additional insights on group analysis, Life in Group 5 has a great article on piecing this information together.
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