blue response to tracking absorbs

[lamente]

So I thought this was interesting. Emphasis mine.

We're still working on showing absorbs. It's technically very challenging. It's not information we currently pass down to the client, and while passing that information down isn't too tricky itself, making sure we can share it without affecting your performance is less trivial.

And if there are any armchair programmers out there temped to reply "That's so easy; I could do it in 5 min," you should send a resume.

Also, the kind of players of which you speak -- sophisticated enough to download Recount but out of touch enough to think Disc priests aren't preventing an enormous amount of damage without demonstrable proof -- are a curious breed.

If I'm not misreading here, it sounds like the fear is that if the raw numbers for absorbs were just displayed in black and white, all other forms of healing would suddenly look relatively useless. The implication seems to be that they want to show absorbs, but in such a way that the information is dampened (or something) to be roughly on par with actual healing. It is further implied that the idea of displaying this skewed view of absorbs is what is creating the technical challenge.

Although I had a hunch that absorbs account for a lot more than we realize, this bit of information is pretty surprising...

[Athael]

He means your computer performance, i.e. lag, not your player performance.

[Hendrixstorm]

Things like GAPS(Guess Absorbs Per Second) are NASTY on memory, forcing every single person in the raid to have a function like that would be shitty. If they can come up with a less memory intensive option that will show absorbs, great! Until then...Get it yourself.

[Xiphias]

Those are nasty because they're guessing...

The server already keeps track of damage that gets absorbed (since it says "Absorbed" and such), it just would also have to pass WHAT absorbed the damage, and by who.

In my opinion, this is relatively little information... if worse comes to worse, they could just return how much damage shields absorbed altogether when they wear off. For example: "Priestydude's Power Word: Shield dissipates from Tankyman having absorbed 2407 damage." or, if it wore out due to relatively little damage, you'd see "Priestydude's Power Word: Shield dissipates from Tankyman having absorbed 3 damage."
Sure, you'd have to figure out whether it could have absorbed more or not (which would be easy by just looking at the maximum amount absorbed, or somesuch) but it would be a lot less server-client communication overall (rather than sending more data each time the character takes damage, it's only each time you cast the spell).

[Deleted]

Current COMBAT_LOG_EVENT for an absorbed spell.
timestamp, event, sourceGUID, sourceName, sourceFlags, destGUID, destName, destFlags, spellID, spellName, spellSchool, amount, overkill, school, resisted, blocked, absorbed, critical, glancing, crushing

simple add absorbspellID, absorbspellName, absorberGUID, absorberName, absorberFlags. Done.

[Moshy]

I knew judgements of the wise/imp stormstrike/shamanistic rage not working through absorbs wasn't intended!

[Puri]

He's talking about computer performance, not players :

[boneschaman]

Current COMBAT_LOG_EVENT for an absorbed spell.
timestamp, event, sourceGUID, sourceName, sourceFlags, destGUID, destName, destFlags, spellID, spellName, spellSchool, amount, overkill, school, resisted, blocked, absorbed, critical, glancing, crushing

simple add absorbspellID, absorbspellName, absorberGUID, absorberName, absorberFlags. Done.

but if there is a feral tank and a pala with valanyr and a disc healing him you have like 5 different absorbs at the same time. means 5 additional lines of combatlog for one tick of incoming dmg
lag inc

[Deleted]

simple: one additional argument Absorbs, which is a table
{
[1]={name = "Paladin",spellID=9001,name="Over ninethousand!"},
[2]={name = "Disciplinor", spellID=Whatever,name="Power Word: Shield"}
}
You get the idea.

[SuperCommander]

Instead of sending a SPELL_MISSED event for a full absorb a SPELL_DAMAGE event with 0 damage could be sent instead(This will not impact the amount of data sent by any large margin).

Unless I am mistaken, it does seem that the blue poster has no idea what he is talking about.

[Taryble]

Well, most blue posters are not actually Devs - most of them are Community folks. He's probably just passing on something from an ACTUAL Dev, and mangling it a bit (or misunderstanding it) as he does (like the classic party game "Telephone" illustrates often).

[FallNAngel]

Instead of sending a SPELL_MISSED event for a full absorb a SPELL_DAMAGE event with 0 damage could be sent instead(This will not impact the amount of data sent by any large margin).

Unless I am mistaken, it does seem that the blue poster has no idea what he is talking about.

Well, unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't understand how that will help tell you how much was absorbed (which was the entire point of this).

but if there is a feral tank and a pala with valanyr and a disc healing him you have like 5 different absorbs at the same time. means 5 additional lines of combatlog for one tick of incoming dmg
lag inc

I still fail to see how this would create more lag unless they're sending the absorb notice in addition to a 0 damage notice, then you're sending unnecessary information... in that case, a full absorb should be sent *instead* of a damage notice. Only when there's a partial absorb should you have both. That way, 5 different absorbs from 1 tick of damage? That's fine... if they weren't absorbed, you'd have 5 lines of damage for one tick anyway.

[ikabod00]

Well, most blue posters are not actually Devs - most of them are Community folks. He's probably just passing on something from an ACTUAL Dev, and mangling it a bit (or misunderstanding it) as he does (like the classic party game "Telephone" illustrates often).

If i am not mistaken, Ghostcrawler is not just some Community person. I believe his title is something along the lines of "Lead Systems Designer". So he is probably one of few who post in Blue that DOES actually know what he is talking about when it comes to this stuff.

[SuperCommander]

Well, unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't understand how that will help tell you how much was absorbed (which was the entire point of this).

I still fail to see how this would create more lag unless they're sending the absorb notice in addition to a 0 damage notice, then you're sending unnecessary information... in that case, a full absorb should be sent *instead* of a damage notice. Only when there's a partial absorb should you have both. That way, 5 different absorbs from 1 tick of damage? That's fine... if they weren't absorbed, you'd have 5 lines of damage for one tick anyway.

The SPELL_DAMAGE event contains fields with the damage done, damage absorbed, critical(Yes/No), amount blocked amongst other data. This even is sent EVERY time a spell does damage.

The SPELL_MISSED event is sent when something is fully resisted, fully absorbed or fully blocked. With this event the data sent is only the misstype.


While I do realize that these combatlog events do not represent the actual data sent from the server to the client(These events are used only for the API), but it is fairly safe to assume that the data sent contains similar information.

[Taryble]

@ikabod00
I wasn't even paying attention to which Blue it was. Yeah, GC is actually a Dev - but he may not be the Dev actually working on that.

[ComputerNerd]

Somehow I do not see it being the individual computer performance being the issue.
There are already several addons around to try and estimate those same figures, a modification of recount for one.

The design of the combat log and its change from text based, to database from my understanding had more of an impact on addons using it than any introduction of more data would have.

[kaelleria]

Short answer: Yeah we can do it.

Long answer: Yeah we can do it. Yeah we'll have to redesign parts of the server, database and the application itself, then test it and make sure we don't break everything.

[Bombthreat]

Wait wait! What if the absorb crits? ??? ??? ???

[Tanksenior]

Wait wait! What if the absorb crits? ??? ??? ???

Since when can absorbs crit...........

You trolling us mate?