Why bother to use WoL?

[Braindwen]

And they're a great resource for when you need to find out what is happening wrong on some bosses. For instance, your tank is dying to Alysrazor hatchlings. You may blame a healer, yet not know that as the Hatchling was going into tantrum, your tank took a couple hits from a worm's lava spew in addition to a melee swing from a tantrum'd bird.

To be fair, something like this should be checked with recount's death log, would be quite a bit quicker than checking WoL. WoL does go into more detail on deaths though (such as checking for CD use, aura gains/losses, etc).

Recently we've had hunter woes, so we use WoL to compare hunters to eachother. More specifically, we compare our new hunters to our disc. priest's alt in the alt raids (the buffs in each group are either the same or very close, we try to account for differences ). Sadly, the alt always wins, even against better geared hunters, but it lets us go into depth on WHY these hunters are failing, such as checking CD use, abilities used, etc. One of them, for example, never seemed to use readiness (1 Rapid fire in a 3.5 minute fight as MM), and for some ungodly reason would just stop doing everything, even auto-shotting, occasionally. Recount doesn't pick those bits up as well.

Lastly, having recently started using it, WoL is very easy to set up and get running. A log doesn't take much work to create, and its uses are many.

[Deleted]

To be fair, something like this should be checked with recount's death log, would be quite a bit quicker than checking WoL. WoL does go into more detail on deaths though (such as checking for CD use, aura gains/losses, etc).

Recently we've had hunter woes, so we use WoL to compare hunters to eachother. More specifically, we compare our new hunters to our disc. priest's alt in the alt raids (the buffs in each group are either the same or very close, we try to account for differences ). Sadly, the alt always wins, even against better geared hunters, but it lets us go into depth on WHY these hunters are failing, such as checking CD use, abilities used, etc. One of them, for example, never seemed to use readiness (1 Rapid fire in a 3.5 minute fight as MM), and for some ungodly reason would just stop doing everything, even auto-shotting, occasionally. Recount doesn't pick those bits up as well.

Lastly, having recently started using it, WoL is very easy to set up and get running. A log doesn't take much work to create, and its uses are many.

Where exactly do you see these things?

[Braindwen]

Where exactly do you see these things?

Death log: Players->click the player whose deaths you want to analyze. Click deaths (far right tab). Find the death you're looking for (it gives a short summary of recent damage taken, as well as a timestamp), and press "more" at the bottom right of that summary. A box will pop up with a log leading up to the death, showing abilities used by that player, and incoming damage and healing. 3 boxes on the right allow you to check spell casts, power gains, and aura gains. Aura gains will show CDs gained and lost, and I find it most useful, but they all have their uses.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...17c/details/6/
It's also possible to check deaths by using the Damage Done graph. Little red bars show up whenever someone dies, and right clicking those bars will give the option "Show death log for *player*". This'll bring up the same box.

Damage breakdown: pick the fight you want (full report's kinda silly as it includes trash mobs and all different bosses). Pick the player you want to analyze as above. Choose the "Damage by spell" tab, and look under "damage done". It'll give you a breakdown of abilities used, the damage they did, how many crits/hits/ticks there were, and how many miss/dodge/parries there were. Baleroc's particularly useful, especially for hunters since they just stand put and shoot practically the entire time.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=3865&e=4234
This is very similar to Recount, with a few improvements.

CDs used: Do the same as damage breakdown, except choose Buffs Cast or Buffs Gained. Buffs cast lets you check their debuff uptime as well, say for mangle or rake as a kitty, while buffs gained allows you to see raid buffs on the player and any encounter specific buffs or debuffs. You'll have to know what you're looking for, say rapid fire for hunters, or Imp. Steady Shot, so some class knowledge is important here. The tables here show both how often a buff/debuff was applied and its uptime (in both % of the fight and time). Clicking the "#" next to a buff will bring up bars that show when those buffs were active underneath the graph at the top of the screen. This mostly helps to see if they're timing CDs well.

We figured out he wasn't using auto shot cause his # of shots was low (and he wasn't using aimed shot, so the only reason we could figure was he'd stopped shooting). That was math, and we only did it cause I like math.

There's a ton of stuff you can do with WoL. I'd suggest playing around with it for a while to see what it can do, but I'm just that kind of nerd who actually enjoys playing around with something like this. If not, I believe there are some posts around here that give a good guide. If I can find them, I'll post a link here.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-World-of-Logs
From the useful threads sticky.
It's focused heavily on individual players focusing on improving themselves, but it does go into detail and uses some helpful screenshots.

[HarleyM]

If your players are not willing to take constructive criticism and if you are not willing to kick them, WoL is probably pretty useless. That type of player rarely cares to analyze their own performance anyway. Many of the things people have said here can actually be done with recount, you just have to know how to use recount properly. In my opinion, the biggest advantage comes from the fact that it is easily saved. Not only is the information parsed very conveniently for you, but you can go back and look at it the next day, at work, or the next week. You don't have to worry about holding up the next pull, because you know you can analyze all the information after the raid. This also means that you can easily look for specific improvements across raid days/weeks. Further, as stated before, you can use it to ask for help online (as I cannot look at your recount).

[Deleted]

When raiding on a serious level, you can't use recount or skada as a dps tool. The reason for this is that WoL shows so much more info than dps alone, exactly for the timewindows you need it to show.

A side effect with recount is that it has been bugged since the start of this expansion, and it still is. It does not show elemental shaman dps correctly because it does not count fire elemental as being the shaman's guardian pet. In highlevel content this can easily be a 5-6k dps difference. Same goes for warlocks with ember imps i think.
As far a si know skada does not have this issue.

[cFortyfive]

Frankly spoken if you don't use it yet and have to ask why bother you probably neither need it nor would make good use of it if you'd use it so....

[kosuko]

Dealing awesome DPS is twice as nice when you share it with the entire world :3.

And as other people said you get A LOT more information. The dot uptimes are a nice way to evaluate certain classes.

[Deleted]

No offence but if you only use Recount to compare your meters on the Damage Done tab you probably don't need WoL.

If you are interested in analysis and improvement you should play around with it before you bother with WoL.

[Aroa]

Recount also only saves details the 5 last fights. On World of Logs they are saved for at least 2 weeks (forever if you buy a subscription).

[Deleted]

Recount also only saves details the 5 last fights. On World of Logs they are saved for at least 2 weeks (forever if you buy a subscription).

You can change it to 25 and you can make it only save boss fights. WoL saves your logs for 4 weeks or forever if someone is ranked.

[DeanyKong]

World of Logs is how I figure out why we were failing at certain things. It helps me figure out why some of my raiders are doing poorly by checking out their uptimes, cooldown usage, and other things.

[Blackmist]

Recount shows you WHO is crap.

WoL can show you WHY you are crap.

That is why.

[Buf]

WoL makes it so you can analyze who's doing the correct thing in your guild in terms of dps. i.e. your warlock only keeping his dots up 60% of them time. It's also a way to compare how well your dps does to what others who have done the content. I use it as a tool to help maximize my dps and extend my epeen when i parse in the top 200

[Bullarkie]

Because using WoL with a tool like raidbots.com can give you a lot of good info.

See this:
http://raidbots.com/comparebot/4ea577d54b1cfbed0b000a3a

[Deleted]

Use WOL as you would use slowmotion for any ball-based sport (tennis, rugby, football, golf, baseball, whatever) :
- without slowmotion, you just see that your ball went the wrong way, but don't freaking kow why
- with the slowmotion, you see what you did wrong when hitting the ball and you can now try to fix that mistake

[Soisoisoi]

It tells you why the DK who out rolled me on a trinket I wanted was doing over 8k less DPS than me.

Yes, I'm annoyed.

[Jellyphant]

Comparing world of logs to recount is like comparing a scalpel to child-friendly scissors. Sure, if you just want to cut a piece of paper the scissors will work, but don't hand them to a doctor and expect him to perform surgery.

[Braindwen]

Dealing awesome DPS is twice as nice when you share it with the entire world :3.

Hehe. <3 how easy it is to rank as a bear.
Given that we 3-heal just about everything, most of my guildies have almost no hope of ranking. Meanwhile, my competition sucks, so I rank just about every fight I tank

Oh, but selfish stuff like that is totally not why I started logging in the first place. Of course not.

[Sevaara]

I honestly hope that's a joke. Your officer is actually stupid, you can check EVERYTHING on World of Logs. During our Ragnaros H progression we check everyone's deaths in depth, we check if they used personal cooldowns and how often they used them, we checked if they were potting, checked damage taken during engulfings, damage done on seeds etc.

I also use it to check into healing, number of spells used and what spells were used. Somebody spamming regrowth and ooming themselves stupidly fast won't really show on Recount but on WoL it will. Then you can check the number of times they innervated etc.

I facepalm when people think WoL is solely for DPS.

[ItZMuRdA]

WoL is just far, far more comprehensive than recount/skada. I'm really not sure how to explain it, when you can sit there and sift through combat logs line-by-line to find stuff, it really makes a huge difference. Granted, for normal mode casual game play it might not provide you any benefit, but when you're a guild that cares to analyze logs of both their own guild and other guilds on a regular basis, WoL provides infinite more functionality than an in-game damage meter.

---------- Post added 2011-10-24 at 12:40 PM ----------

Comparing world of logs to recount is like comparing a scalpel to child-friendly scissors. Sure, if you just want to cut a piece of paper the scissors will work, but don't hand them to a doctor and expect him to perform surgery.

I like it. You have my stamp of approval.