What can we actually track and record?
 

Hi there,

I would like to know what and how much we can track what the player & party / raid member does and when they do it.

I am thinking about starting my WoW addons career with an overambitious project, but before I do that, I'd like to know if that is anyway possible.

I find recap, recount and skada rather limiting in sense of fine tuning your damage, healing and actions in combat. Especially if you try to compare your self with another player.

I would like to make a graph / stats addon, that will track the start of a combat, then on player basis track every single action that they make and when they make it. Then draw a graph out of it having a line for outgoing DPS, and then a small dots presenting an action done on that time, and when you hover your mouse over them they show details like what action it is, what buff you've gotten, or the target of your action and so on.

Its really important for me to be able to track all the actions done, GCDs, castingtimes, and it would even be awesome to see like "started to cast Cobra shot but failed at 0.6s" and not just for me, but for everybody in the raid.

I would really appreciate if you could point my way that what I need to study to go about this task, or if this is even possible :)

Oh, and I do realize that this is a HUGE project to take and will take ages to create, especially when you're completely new to Lua and so on.

And to make it realtime might be quite a harsh thing for a computer to run, but maybe if it records just your data but then would be able to export and import the data for comparison?

You can gather quite a bit of data from the combatlog.

I guess the best example, besides the damage meters that already exists, is the different websites where you can upload your combatlog, like World of Logs.

http://worldoflogs.com/

You can read about the COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED event to see what kinda stuff is going on.

http://www.wowpedia.org/COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED

As far as your project goes, while it seems quite overwhelming, I'm guessing a lot of it is at least theoretically possible. But it's a huge amount of data and to process it all at once..

Well I think it is a bit overambitious, but would love to see something like this. As a officer and raid leader I struggle to sometimes understand why some raiders under preform, and or just don't hold their own against other people of the same class with lesser gear. As far as the data you can collect as Ailae has stated the combat log is how you would go about gaining your information.


Personally I use a combat log parser. It has a ton of information, let me see if I can get you a link to one of my old combat logs.

The free hosting site that i used to host my combat logs was deactivated due to not using it, but here is the parser. http://www.ehfs.info/

You can check out some screen shots there.
And here is a demo report
http://www.ehfs.info/demo/index.html

Hmm
 

If you wanna gather information from everyone in a raid i think best way to do that would be to have an addon that communicates with other users like gearscore.
but then agian.. it will slow your gameplay down.
For one single addon to track 10 or 25 players abilities..
Think that is impossible for 1 addon (alone user)
Since you need to mark a player to see his cast bar or enemys.

But i wish you my best luck :)

Thanks alot for the replies, I think I can go on forward with with my studies using your tips.

Mostly what other addons are missing is the timing of actions and actually seeing their rotation. I can skip most of the features and let the proper DPS meters do their work, beside that. Its going to be more of an event meter so to speak :)

But what do you mean by "marking the players" to be able to track them? And does this differ from bosses somehow?

Almost all of the information you’d need is available in your combat log. Blizzard added the combat log intentionally so that damage meter addons didn’t have to clog up the network with communications. The only thing you might want to know that wouldn’t be available without communication would be the target of someone else’s in-progress spell cast, but you probably don’t really need that.

The Blizzard UI doesn’t show you cast bars for your group members, but you can get information about the spell casts of anyone in your party, their pets, their targets, their targets’ targets, and so forth. An addon could show you cast bars for all of those units, and an addon could definitely save all of that information for later reference. You don’t need to target them, or “mark” them somehow.