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Written by Anaea
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Monday, 09 February 2009 05:38 |
As the guild heads into harder raid content, your Stewards and I have been looking for tools to help us all as we strive to improve ourselves as players and as a raid. One of the best tools for this that we've seen is WWS.
What WWS Is
Simply put, WWS takes the combat log from an entire raid and breaks it down in useful ways. It will allow you to see "at a glance" numbers for DPS, damage taken, or healing across the raid. More importantly - it will give you an easy to use breakdown of your particular activities for particular times during the course of an entire raid. The amount of information you can get from one of these parses is staggering. Which is why I'm writing this introduction. ;)
How To Use WWS
The first thing to remember is that the "across the raid" information is the most superficial (and thus least useful) information in the entire parse. It's helpful as a benchmark - it can tell you if you're performing significantly under another player, for instance. But it won't tell you why.
The first thing you'll want to do in a WWS parse is to change the "split" from the Full Report to the particular boss fight you're interested in. The full report includes time spent on trash, which given the nature of trash is too varied to really get an accurate picture of how the raid was doing. A mage's DPS is not going to be all that high against a magic-immune mob, for instance. Setting the report to a particular boss fight helps you see a more tailored, and thus more useful, view of performance where it's a lot easier to take particular roles (interrupters, or beam tanks) into account.
Another useful source of information is in your "character" tab. This page will break down things like your DPS, DPS presence, DPS time, and specific abilities that you used and how often you used them. This is the information that made us such great fans of the tool.
For instance, as a healer I can look at how much each of my particular spells is overhealing, which allows me to make smarter decisions about efficiency. I can see from here how often my Renew is ticking, and whether it's being used to its full extent. I can also examine Buffs & Debuffs to see how often my trinket is proccing. All of this information helps me think more carefully about the abilities I use and when I use them.
We can also reference other guilds' parses on WWS as a benchmark. For instance, from looking at successful attempts on Gruul, Breue and I were able to see that the average DPS tends to be 500 and above. DPS below that tended to fall much more frequently into the "unsuccessful" category. This helps us set goals for ourselves and for the raid as we move forward.
Glossary of Terms for WWS
Some of the terms used by the WWS parse aren't exactly common knowledge, so I'll include a brief glossary here too.
- Presence - the amount of time a player was in the battle; this can be affected by death, for instance
- Damage Out - the raw damage dealt
- DPS - the amount of damage dealt per second
- DPS time - the amount of time spent DPSing; WWS considers you "not DPSing" if you haven't performed an action for five seconds.
- Effective Heal - the healing performed, minus overheal
- Overheal - the amount of healing that was over a character's max HP
Role Specific Uses for WWS
Kaite and I are currently working on some role-specific advice on reading the WWS threads, with a list of things to look at as a healer or a tank when you're attempting to gauge your own performance. We'll be posting these as additional articles.
Quirks of WWS
There are a couple of limitations in WWS, which I want to point out. These are somewhat advanced usages, and might be overlooked in a cursory view of the logs. But they can have a great impact so it's important to keep them in mind. As we find out more, we'll list them here.
- Combat logs don't pick up on buffs and debuffs renewed before they expire; this means abilities like Slice and Dice, Shield Block, some Curses, Unleashed Rage, and probably others may not show up as being employed frequently despite the fact that they're used quite often
- Dark Pact only shows up in the individual player's logs, so in order to appear on the WWS the combat log must be recorded by that person
- Flamecap also only shows up in individual players' logs.
- Interrupts are not parsed in WWS, but you can read through the "raw" combat log to track them.
- Additional melee damage provided by a Windfury procs is not separated from regular melee damage; therefore rogues in a Windfury totem group will frequently outperform equally skilled rogues in a non-Windfury group.
- Water Elementals, DPS Totems, Shadowfiends and other class pets are indistinguishable from each other in the logs. The person compiling the logs can assign all damage/reward from these to no players, or only to one player, but can't assign them to each class member.
- DoTs extend one's combat presence; this means, for instance, that Warlocks will often have 100% combat presence even if the fight prevents them from DPSing the entire time.
- The combat log has difficulties picking up buffs and debuffs on the mob, even though you can extend the range of the combat log for other purposes. This means that in any large, spread-out fight where things like Warrior Shouts are important to track, we will need to compile logs from multiple sources.
Even with these drawbacks, we hope you'll find the WWS information as useful as we do. It's an excellent tool for self-improvement, and for learning how to take our characters and our raid to the next level. Enjoy!
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Last Updated on Friday, 13 February 2009 13:37 |
