Diagnosing Problems and Giving Feedback using WoL

He’s dead! My guild was previously stuck on Atramedes (bleh bleh bleh) for some reason for the last two weeks, and seemed to be making no progression what so ever on him. Every attempt ended the same way, boss @ 50%, and way too many people dead to kill the dragon for the number of shields we had left. We changed the strat many times. We stacked, we spread, we had designated people ring the gongs, we had whomever was kiting the flame ring their own gongs; the whole gambit. One of our officers (and healing lead) gave a mini-speech about how we seemed to struggle on fights that required more raid-awareness. She was right.

Feedback to fellow guidies is tough to give, and sometimes tough to receive. What I’ve found helps is getting cold hard facts to help support your feedback, and that’s where World of Logs comes in. It’s easy to argue with who said they saw what during the core of the fight, but a combat log sheds a stark like on the ins and outs of an encounter, assuming you know what to look for.

Step 1, figure out how people are dieing.

The easiest way I’ve found to identify what’s killing who, is to look @ the death log. Figuring out what’s killing people seems like a no brainer, but sometimes it’s tough when you’re in-game. When you’re looking @ an individual attempt (or series of attempts), try to find trends in what you see. For example in the screen shot below, I see players taking massive damage from Searing Flame, and then dying from Modulation.  

We figured out right away that we needed to get on the shield quicker to mitigate Searing Flame damage.

Soooo, we fixed our Searing Flame problem, but were still experiencing too many deaths, so back to the logs. The next logs we looked at showed tons of deaths from Modulation, but no significant damage in the log to proceed it. This means we had people carrying too much sound. So who do we talk to? We COULD just yell @ everyone not to stand in the fire, but yelling @ everyone often times does not work. Feedback needs to be personal, and specific. We started looking @ who was accruing too much sound by seeing who was getting hit by abilities that add sound.

You can easily determine who gets hit by specific spells right from the front page of your log. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the main overview page and look for the window called the Spell List. This is a list of all the spells present in the log, and you can see details by clicking on them. Sometimes you will see a spell listed twice, but you can tell which one your looking for as soon as you click on them. In this case, the 1st Sonar Pulse shows the boss casting the ability, and the 2nd is when a player gets hit.

In this fight, we wanted to see who having a hard time dodging the Sonar Pulse, and getting too much sound added before Modulation. We can do this by finding the spell name in the list, and clicking on the link. This log is about 8 attempts, and indeed some of these are added from standing in stuff on purpose to get dead quicker after a wipe is called, but if you’re looking @ this in a more real time scenario it’s more relevant.

Now that I’m looking at a specific detail of who is getting hit by the bad stuff, I know who I should talk to. I usually do this in a whisper before I call someone out in vent out of courtesy. In the case of this encounter feedback would look something like this: “Hey man, you are getting hit by Sonar Pulse a lot. When I say a lot, I mean like 50% more than me, and 80% more than someone who is doing this right. I can’t heal you if your 1 shot by Modulation, so dodge more circles for me and I swear your DPS will be better than if you’re tanking the floor for ½ the fight.”

It’s amazing how effective a whisper usually works for me in this type of situation. I hardly ever have to take it to the next level, which for me is calling people out in vent during the fight, now that I’ve used the logs to pinpoint who I should be looking at.