Casual Healin'

I don’t think I’ve previously mentioned my sinister secret. I love parsing combat logs after playing each night! Most players (in fact, even most Guild Masters) don’t know how, or just don’t do this. For me it appeals to my need for science – I can run the logs and replay the fights and work out what happened – good or bad – during that fight. This helps me to work out what to do different next time. The information here is also MUCH more useful than a simple DPS meter could ever be – as a healer topping the meters means almost nothing – it especially means nothing once you wipe.

Last night however, I was playing with recording video from WoW, and it crashed my game at one stage. When I restarted (in between Icehowl and the Worms!) things were as normal and I thrashed my way through to the end of the night. This morning when I went to grab the logs to have a look at the good, the bad and the ugly, I discovered… nothing! Crap, WoW turned off logging when it Crashed it seems. And the log it had up until that point (which only has Icehowl in it anyway) is corrupted due to the crash. Bugger.

All that lead me to see if I could find a more elegant way to grab logs. I am going to trial Loggerhead tonight, just because it has an LDB icon which should make it easy to see if logging is on or off. It also auto switches on logging in certain zones – which means I don’t have to remember, or suffer massive file sizes that I have to go through and chop up the next time I want to parse them.

I am also going to have a play with some of the websites out there like WorldofLogs.com, just to see what the results are like, compared to my own parses. I’ll link up a few of the parsed logs from some of the different offerings so I can work out what works best.