How to use Warcraft Logs [Part 1]: uploading and searching

[Pandacho 284]

First of all, let's cover uploading your own logs:

1. Go to the WCL site and sign up. You now would be able to upload your logs, logging in with your username or via Battlenet after linking your account:

2. In order to upload the logs, you will need a client application. Download it here. 

3. Before starting to log, you have to enable Advanced Combat Logging. Without it being enabled you wouldn't be able to see a lot of vital details like ilvl, talents, gear, artifact traits or resources that are written separately for every fight.

Go to Game Menu (in game) > System > Network. Tick Advanced Combat Logging

4. To enable combat logging in game, go to your chat window and type /combatlog. Now everything you and the players and enemies around you do will be written to a file called WoWCombatLog.txt. The file is sitting in WoW directory > Logs. When you want to stop logging, type /combatlog again or just exit the game.

5. There are two ways you can choose to log. The first is to upload the entire log file after the raid is over. The second way is Live Logging. In this mode you will see the fight on the site right after it ends so can study wipes immediately to see what went wrong.

You can enable Live Logging in WCL uploader before the raid starts:

If you don't need Live Logging, open the WCL uploader after the raid and choose the first option 'Upload a Log'.

 

Now, what you can search for on the WCL site?

Pressing the button in the left upper corner will allow you to browse through all the logged raid fights, their rankings and statistics:

Very useful option here is to search for the fights with specific filters.

For example I want to know whether my guild would be able to kill Heroic Odyn or we'd better farm more HC EM to gear up. So I'm going to check how many guilds in Europe were able to kill Heroic Odyn in 15-man composition with 3 healers while their ilvl was not higher than 878 during the last week:

We will go to the left upper dropdown menu and choose Odyn Rankings. This is the window we'll get:

Now we should filter our options by clicking on the 'Search' button:

After applying the search filter we'll get a list of raid teams that were able to kill HC Odyn in our composition:

Here you go! There are more than enough kills, you shouldn't worry and may even check some logs for fight or comp tips.

Another very useful feature is to check for usage of a specific gear piece, ability, talent or even enchant. For example, there was a problem with Mark of the Claw enchant not working for resto druids. It was announced recently that the bug was fixed and now it works as intended. It is an expensive enchant so I'd like to check whether it really works before changing to it.

In WCL we can filter the usage of a specific ability, so I'll search for Resto Druids in EU region that were using Mark of the Claw enchant during the last week in the Odyn fight and check whether the enchant proc'ed for them. Type the ability name in the search window:

Now you will receive a list of resto druids that used the Mark:

Then you can open a specific log and check how much the enchant procs during the fight:

 

There is another kind of search in WCL too: you can look for a specific player, guild or realm logs.

Choosing a player will bring you to their Rankings window.

You should note that the initial window will show you DPS rankings for the highest recorded difficulty in the most current content, no matter what's the player's role in raid (dps/healer/tank).

So if I am a healer and want to check my healing performance in HC EM rather than Mythic EM or HC ToV, I have to apply new filters:

You can click now on any boss and see specific logs for every fight.

If you are searching logs for a guild, you will be redirected to their Calendar so you'd be able to choose one of the raid days. Hovering your mouse above these days will allow you to see the fights list:

If you can't recall the guild name, searching the realm will bring you a list of all the active guilds (those using WCL) there.