World of Logs - A Comprehensive Guide (19 replies to this topic)

Greetings, users of Icy-Veins!  There have been lots of questions on how to improve DPS, figure out why you're wiping, how to fix other raiders' mistakes, etc.  This guide will contain a plethora of answers to those questions and answers to questions you didn't know you had!  Let's get started.

World of Logs - if you're unfamiliar, head on over to http://www.worldoflogs.com/ to Register and get started.  All of the instructions are there on how to get you set up.  Once you're set up, you will start logs by typing "/combatlog" in your chatbox.  You'll get a message saying that combatlogs are being recorded in your Logs folder in your WoW main folder.  To stop recording logs, you type "/combatlog" again and you'll end logging.  Once you do that, exit WoW, boot up the client you downloaded, and load your log.  Now let's dig in.

The first page you'll see is the title page.  It contains a whole bunch of crap you don't really need to see.  What we're interested in here is the top menu bar.  It looks like this:


What you'll see here is your guild name, the date and time, and some other drop down menu items.  We only really care about Dashboard and Full Report.  Highlight over Dashboard, and you should see the following menu:


Some notes on each item:
Compare Fights - ignore this.
Analyze - super useful tool for analyzing details within a fight.  Covered later.
Damage Done - everyone's favorite menu.  Personalized fight details for individual members of damage done.
Damage Taken - everyone's least favorite menu.  Personalized fight details for individual members of damage taken.
Healing Done - Healing details
Healing Taken - ignore this.
Friendly Fire - ignore this.
Deaths Overview - ignore this.  You know when you died.  If you're interested in seeing who died to what in combat, I highly suggest the add-on "Fatality."
Survivability - ignore this.
Log Browser - ignore this.
Expression editor - ignore this.
Ranking info - details information on ranking performances.  Detailed later.

Now, highlight over the Full Report button.  You should see the following menu:


Some notes on each item:
Bosses - ignore this.
Kills - shows combat parses of boss attempts in which you won!  Celebrate your glory with this tab.
Wipes - shows combat parses of boss attempts in which you did not win.  Learn from your mistakes with this tab.
Trash - ignore this unless you're really hyped up on how good you are on trash.
Full Report - ignore this.

Now that the menus have been explained, lets see what's under the hood.

The first menu most people will care about is the best for analyzing single player's damage measures.  Let's pretend you are Zagam, a Warlock, and you want to see your performance on Gara'jal.  Under Dashboard, you'll click Damage Done.  Under Full Report, you'll go down to Kills and move your mouse over to the kill record and click it.  You'll be rewarded with the following window:


We now see everyone's damage contribution for the Gara'jal encounter that lasted 4 minutes and 53 seconds.  There's a spiffy chart there, but that's not what we came for.  Take a look at the numbers.  You might be thinking 'Wow, your Hunter is TERRIBLE.'  He's not, I promise you.  The reason I picked this fight is to demonstrate the difference between DPS and DPS (e).  Gara'jal is a unique encounter in which some players will go into a different realm for a period of time.  World of Logs is not able to pick up those players' combat logs during that, so they appear to be idle during this.  This provides me the opportunity to show you the difference between DPS and DPS (e).

Look at Zagam's record.  He shows 81,952 DPS but 81,509 DPS (e).  DPS is a measure of your damage done divided by your ACTIVE time.  Notice that my active time is 99.8% because I was there and doing things the entire time.  DPS (e) is a measure of your total damage done divided by the TOTAL time of the encounter, regardless of what you were doing.  Take a look at Cazlek, the Hunter.  His DPS is 68,399 but his DPS (e) is only 28,648.  This is because when he went into the other realm, the combat log basically assumed he stopped for that period of time.  Since his active time is 42.0%, you can see that he spent 58% of his time in the other realm executing those mechanics.  His DPS is a measure of how much damage he did in the time he wasn't in the realm, but his DPS (e) is a measure of his total damage done NOT in that realm over the total time.  Take this as an easier to understand example:

Mage 1 does 500k DPS for 30 seconds and then dies.
Mage 2 does 300k DPS for 60 seconds.
The fight lasts for 60 seconds.
World of Logs will parse Mage 1 at 500k DPS but only 250k DPS (e) because he was active 50% of the time.  This fight's parse is an exception with the phasing issue...typically on other fights, all players should be over 99% on their active time percentage.  If it's not, that shows the greatest opportunity for improvement.  They need better focus and to be active at all times.  Follow the caster's cardinal rule: ABC = Always Be Casting.

One other thing to notice here: notice the white triangles by certain players names.  This indicates pet usage.  Clicking the white triangle will create a drop down menu where you can see how much a Warlock's Doomguard did or laugh at the fact the Beast Mastery Hunter's pet almost beat the Hunter himself.  A Doomguard parse is an EXCELLENT way to see DPS vs DPS (e).  The Doomguard will only be out for 1 minute.  Let's say a fight lasts 5 minutes and he's out for a full minute.  Let's say while he was out, he did 10k DPS.  Under DPS, it will say 10,000, but under DPS (e), it will say 2,000.  This is how you see how much certain pets contribute to your OVERALL DPS.

Alright, with that explained, let's take a look at Zagam's details.  You can see anyone's details you care about by simply clicking their name.

Details for Zagam seen here:


This page is where you can find out why DPS from a particular player is good and why it might be bad.  On this page, you'll see various things including Hits, Crits, Ticks, Tick Crits, and Uptime.  Let's dive deeper into this page and see what happened.

Notice a special situation for Affliction Warlocks.  When channeling Malefic Grasp or Drain Soul, your DoTs are proc'd.  This is listed here as "Hits" while the actual DoTs themselves ticking count as "Ticks."  So you can see that Agony was ticking for an average of 16,370 and the Maleific Grasp procs were hitting for an average of 13,647.  The tooltip indicates that proc'ing the DoTs with MG causes 75% damage.  Want to see if they're right?

Let's take 13,647/16,370 = 83%.  Hmmm, something seems wrong, right?  Well don't forget this also includes Drain Soul procs which do 150% of the DoT damage.  Let's do another calculation.

Let's calculate my effective crit chance in this fight.  Adding up all of my Hits, I see a number at the bottom that reads 486.  I also see 108 Crits listed.  I also had 607 normal DoT ticks with 122 DoT crits.  This means I had 486 + 607 + 122 + 108 = 1323 total hits with 122 + 108 = 230 being crits.  230/1323 = 17.4%.  My static crit is about 11.3% while the Mage buff I got boosts crit chance by 5%.  11.3% + 5% = 16.3%...I'd say that's pretty spot on!

This is a great window to see what spells are delivering huge hits.  Here you can see that Haunt is critting for as high as almost 200,000 damage!  This is why I advocate hit capping for Affliction Warlocks.  If you missed here, oh man...that'd be rough.  Take a look at the far right column that says "Misses Total."  See all those blanks?  That means I didn't miss.  Hooray!  Now, let's look at the column that ALWAYS has a ginormous amount of opportunity for every class in the game: Uptime.

Uptime is a measure of how long your DoTs are up against the total time of the encounter.  Let's look at my DoT uptimes:
Agony = 99.4%
Unstable Affliction = 95.4%
Corruption = 99.5%
Haunt = 58.3%

Some personalized notes for myself: I did great at Agony and Corruption maintaining a perfect uptime.  Look what I left on the table with UA!  A whopping 4% of the time, I didn't have my 3rd DoT up!  This is something I would want to correct in future attempts.

On other classes, this is where you can see how good your raiders are at maintaining their DoTs.  DoT uptime is almost ALWAYS the most opportunistic part of a player's rotation where DPS can be improved.  Is your Hunter sucking?  Check his Serpent Sting uptime.  Shadow Priest failing on Spirit Kings DPS?  Check his Vampiric Touch, Devouring Plague, and Shadow Word: Pain uptimes!  Fire Mage looking amazing!  I'll bet his Living Bomb uptime is incredible as well as his Combustion.  Increasing your DoT uptime to as close to 100% is almost always the best way to increase your DPS.  Now, notice the top of the bar here and that it is currently highlighted with Damage by Spell.  There are many other options to choose from.  Healing Done is a mirror image of Damage Done except it tracks your healing spells.  Let's skip that and go right to Damage by Actor.



Here you can see what all Zagam damaged during this parse.  100% of Zagam's damage was on the boss meaning he never switched off of the boss the entire time.  Since this is the fight in Mogu'shan Vaults that most closely resembles a target dummy for those not tasked with the other realm, this isn't a very useful look.  Let's switch on over to Elegon.



Alright, that's more like it.  Now you can see that Zagam successfully did damage based on his assignments.  Elegon obviously took most of the damage, but check out that Energy Charge damage!   This basically shows which players are damaging what.  Very useful if you're wondering if your Warrior switched to adds when they spawned.  Having trouble with the Celestial Protector?  Switch people around and use logs to find out who's best at contributing damage in certain places.  Also right below is a chart of where damage coming in was.  This is a summary of all damage by those sources.  The Analyze option I referenced before will show a more detailed look at where damage is coming from.  The Healing by Actor tab is exactly the same except it mirrors healing instead of damage.  Let's take a look at the Buffs Gained tab, the next most opportunistic place of boosting DPS!

Buffs Gained



This is the page where all kinds of good things can be told.  Much like Uptime for DoTs, this records what buffs were present on your character and can also be used to find out why someone's DPS was so good and others were not.  Let's take a look at some interesting notes...

Commanding Shout and Horn of Winter = 100%.  This means the DK tank and my Fury Warrior did a great job making sure their 5 minute buff didn't wear off.  Seeing the fight be less than 5 minutes contributed, but you see the point.

Light of the Cosmos = 45.3%.  That's a baller trinket!  45% uptime?!  WHOA!  It simulates at 41% uptime in Simcraft, so it's interesting to see real live results compare to Simcraft.  A further look in live results shows that Light of the Comsos and its related Spirit, Strength, and Agility trinket all have insanely high uptimes.  Get them and get them fast.

Now let's look at some mechanical things such as my Dark Soul:Misery use.  Fight duration was 4:53, and since DS:Misery has a 2 min CD, I could only theoretically use it twice.  Buffs cast shows 2 uses!  No wasted CDs.  Use similar comparisons to see if your Mage is using Combustion off CD or if your Rogue is using Adrenaline Rush correctly.

Potion usage - ever wonder who is being truthful in using potions?  Check it out - logs records this, too!  Potion of the Jade Serpent is listed one time for 47.7 seconds....wait a second, doesn't the potion only last 25 seconds?  Is Zagam hacking the game?  Answer: no.  He's using a potion before combat begins, otherwise known as a pre-pot.  This duration is lost to the logs as it only starts recording when combat begins.  The 47.7 seconds indicates I lost 2.3 seconds of my pre-pot which is a reasonable amount of time.  Two potions is the most you could ever expect to see out of someone due to the combat lockout, but use this type of analysis to see if all of your raiders are using potions.  It's inexcusable NOT to be using potions as easy as they are to make.

Check out the Timewarp duration.  0.4 seconds.  Notice Bloodlust's duration: 0.0 seconds.  But notice how long we had Sated: 32.9 seconds.  This is because of the Timewarp bug currently in action.  This is being corrected, but it's nice to see things people reporting as bugs as actually showing up in the logs.  If you're sensing an error in combat, this is the best place to look to see what's happening.  You can also see sneeky things like Voodoo Doll uptime.  It should be one minute based on the dungeon journal.  It's popping up here at 61.9 seconds.  Either I got it for 1.9 seconds at the very end of the fight, or that sneeky little Gara'jal is cheating on his debuff duration!

All in all, the Buffs Cast tab is VERY useful for finding out what's going on with a player's uptime on buffs and debuffs.  The Buffs Cast tab and Deaths tab is generally overrated and not important.  The next section is the best section for analyzing ways to improve your raid.  It can be utilized with the Analysis tab under your Dashboard tab at the top.

Analyze



This tab is where the magic of World of Logs comes alive.  This is where you can toggle things to see every possible bit of information you could possibly ask.  Note above, this is just a DPS look at total damage done.  Notice the left hand side where there is a button option of 'by source' 'by target' or 'by spell.'  These are the options we'll take a look at below.  Since we've already explored the damage done by individuals, let's utilize the Analysis option to see Damage Taken.  See below:



Now, we naturally would suspect that our tanks would take the most damage.  (Notice we are looking at Stone Guard now).  So we can see overall damage taken, but let's say your healers are complaining that people are taking way too much damage.  Are your healers complaining or do they have a legit complaint?  Let's take a deeper look.  On the left hand side, go to 'by spell' and click it.  Now, under Source, you want to change it to Amethyst Guardian.  Let's see what that looks like:



Wow.  How baller is that?  Now you can see all the damage that is ONLY coming from the Amethyst Guardian!  You can change this to look at any one target.  Let's go back to our Elegon talk...is your raid group wiping to all the adds at the end of the 3rd phase of a cycle?  Are those Celestial Sparks wrecking your healers?  Who is taking all the damage?  You can do exactly what you do here, put Celestial Spark instead of Amethyst Guardian to see some answers.  Is your Hunter taking a ton of damage to the Sparks?  Tell that fool to start misdirecting to the tanks!   Resto Druid getting owned by the Sparks?  Use Hand of Protection on him!  Finding out who is taking the damage can help you mitigate it.  Let's get back to our Amethyst Guardian.  As you can see in the above picture, I've hovered my mouse over Amethyst Pool to see who is taking the most damage to this.  Notice the window pops up below showing that my Mage and Hunter LOVE to stand in these things!  Or do they?  Both are competent players, so perhaps it's possible that they just got unlucky and had the pools spawn on them more than anyone else.  Overall, this 2.4M damage is very healable over the duration of the fight.  This can be useful for seeing who is messing up Jasper Chains, who is standing in fire on Feng, or who doesn't reset their stacks on Elegon.  An extremely useful tool, you can basically see who is doing what, when, where, and how.  Let's take another look into specific targetting with the Analysis Tab.

Let's say you're curious as to who is destroying all the adds on Elegon.  What's your strategy?  Do you CC?  Who's doing the AoE?  Which tank is tanking them?  Well, I'll show you what we do:



You can see right now that my Mage and Warrior dominate those adds.  How?  We stack them up on a tank, pull them inside, and let the Mage and Warrior do a majority of the damage while the rest of us get back on Elegon.  The Warrior pops "Die by the Sword" while the Mage pops his Frozen Orb.  These two together melt the adds like warm butter on a hot summer's day.  This type of look would also be useful if you think some DPS aren't switching to adds when they should be.  This type of tool was extremely useful for finding out what classes were best on Heroic Spine with the burst damage on the Tendons (I know, a bad, bad memory).  We've played with damage taken and damage done...what about our often forgotten healers' roles?!  Let's look...



Nice.  You can see what is doing the most healing here.  Rejuvenation FTW.  The same goes here as it would for damage...hover over any ability and you can see how much healing that ability did and to whom it healed.  I hovered over Healthstone here to see how effective these are.  I notice the healing is a bit low...are people not using my amazing cookies?!  Did you think this couldn't be answered?  Check this out:



Hey Warlocks, want to call your raiders out for dying and not using a Healthstone?  Did they say they used one but you KNOW they didn't?!  USE THIS TO PROVE THEM WRONG!  These are Healthstones used for Elegon.  Now, I've given my raiders very explicit directions.  We ALWAYS are to use Healthstones after the 3rd charge dies during Phase 2 of the first cycle, after the 3rd charge dies during Phase 2 of the 2nd cycle, and as soon as you can during the final burn phase.  How many are listening?

Grave = 2
Guidenstern = 3
Cazlek = 3
Zagam = 2
Keitel = 2
Grant = 2
Kavelier = 2
Mageaclysm = 1

Notice anyone missing?  We didn't 8 man it.  Larce, my Resto Druid didn't use them one time.  Neither did my Protection Paladin, Varalus!  They got yelled at.  This is a valuable tool for finding out if healers are using their mana potions, too.  Also, while we're looking at this chart, you might go 'hmmm, it healed Grave for 254k but everyone else around 120k.  Remember if you use any healing inside the bubble on Elegon, you get 50% additional healing!  This means that Grave and Zagam are getting the benefit of the bonus (Healthstones heal 20% of YOUR max HP now) while everyone else was using them outside, losing 50% of its potential.

Really neat stuff you can do with all of these analyses.  Now, for those who truly excel, I introduce to our final tab, the Ranking info.



What we are seeing here is the Gara'jal kill that I was referencing earlier.  This shows several things.  This records your damage done, your healing done, your damage taken, and then it uses an internal flag to see if you are a healer.  Notice here that it only uses DPS (e) and HPS (e).  This is so people can't break records doing obscene amounts of damage in very short ranges thus skewing the numbers.  Only your effective DPS and effective HPS can be used to rank.  Now, let's look at Zagam's numbers.

Zagam's DPS (e) = 81809
Rank Limit = 85484.

The Rank Limit is what you would need to rank, or be in the top 200 of all parses across the world.  The % of Limit column shows what % you scored based on your spec and how close you came to ranking.  You can see that Zagam did 95.7% of the required DPS to hit the top 200 on this fight as Affliction.  Check our Mr. Mageaclysm!  His % of limit was 103.6% meaning he ranked in the top 200 in the world as a Frost Mage on this fight.  You can see all rankings on the home page of your log on the right hand side.

This concludes the World of Logs use guide.  I hope that some of you gained some newfound skills when analyzing your raid's logs.  Hopefully you can look at your own logs and assess your own situation and possibly help a guildie out as well!  Remember, World of Logs is a tool and is only as sharp as its user.  Hopefully today I've helped you sharpen your skills!

Nice Job, thanks for that.
Only thing i'd like to mention is about the Log Browser and maybe the debuff part.

Would be nice to include a sidenote for debuffs at the Buffs cast tab, since those are also things that are often missed or could be improved. Im refering to debuff uptime on bosses ofc.

About the log browser: For me its a great tool the do in depth analysis. Main parts here are probably reaction times (how long does a take the raiders to get under the barrier for Force and Verve, ..), to figure out what spells work (HoP for Garajals Shadowy attacks) or even if you are wiping and have no clue why after the first pulls of a new boss.

All in all the Log Browser (at least for me) is a tool to improve the whole raid or its synergies (cooldowns, tactics, ...) while the damage/healing done tab and the details page are more for individual improvement,

Maybe you want to add something about that, if i can provide some input I'll be happy to do so.

Thanks again, great job

Edited by Scrounger, 16 November 2012 - 03:07 PM.

Wow this is an awesome guide, I was having some trouble understanding the logs and this will definitely help. Thanks!!

I have to say, this is pretty amazing. I often use World of Logs to analyze spell usage from top raiders (when I have a doubt about a rotation) and this pretty much sums up all the cool features of the tool.

Regarding the low browser, I am under the impression that it is limited to a few seconds of the fight, for logs other than yours.

I wonder if we should contact the people from World of Logs and tell us about this guide here

We need more hits so it pops to the top on Google searches.

This guide makes it impossible for me to hide from the truth so that hopefully down the road I can glory in it.

Thanks Zagam!

Zagam you have been extremely helpful on these forums and I wanted to thank you keep up there good work

Anything I can do to help the community.

Teach a man to read his logs: help his dps for one fight
Teach a man to analyze his logs: help him and his friends forever

Zagam, on 21 November 2012 - 07:01 PM, said:

Teach a man to fake his logs...

Holy cow this is just like a rundown I wrote on my guild forums ~6 months ago only ~23.5 times better in every way. I'm just going to link this instead

Great Guide dude, I've used WoL may times on previous expansions but this time around with a new computer I'm having trouble getting the client to download.  I hunted around in the WoL forums and faqs and found that my Windows 7 might need the latest Java.  Since I used both 32 and 64 bit programs I "tried" to download both of them but when I go to complete the install I get a file missing error and I can not complete my Java download and with no Java no logs so I was wondering if anyone has had a similar problem.  Is it something in Windows 7? Should I use a specific browser to try to get Java and then the client?  Do you use a specific browser for better perfomance with the WoL client?  I love the guide and I'm going to link it to my guilds website, thanks for all the effort you put into this.

Edited by Liplock, 28 November 2012 - 07:19 PM.

Liplock, on 28 November 2012 - 07:18 PM, said:

I have been having issues using the client in Firefox recently, so I've resorted to just running it in Chrome, which seems to work fine.

I run the program in Firefox and an error always pops up.  What I do is just go to the site and redownload the client everytime.  An error still pops up, but I just close it then run the program like normal where I upload the logs.  Can't comment on specific computer composition errors.

Hello, great guide, you have my thanks as many things troubled me in the past! I will read it more carefully in the coming days, but its seems have everything a guild master or an officer needs!

Edited by cerberos, 13 December 2012 - 05:27 PM.

Thanks for writing this guide! I'll be refering some guildies to this post in the next few days as we've just started raiding together.

Glad to have helped!