How to Analyze WotLK Classic Raid Logs with Warcraftlogs (2024)

Warcraft Logs (WCL) is a professional website that offers combat analysisfor World of Warcraft. It uses the in-game logging feature and a custom-madetool to upload and analyze combat logs in real time. This can help you to findout where you and your Raid can improve, or to identify and overcome problemsthat lowered your performance or hindered you from killing bosses.

Besides combat analysis, Warcraft Logs also offers leaderboards whereplayers and classes in World of Warcraft fights can compete with and compareeach other.

Whenever you are facing problems in Raids, things can get hectic. Especiallyas a raid leader, it can be very hard to make the right calls on where toimprove, what strategy needs to be changed, or who needs to step up their game.Analyzing logs from WCL helps you to identify problems in your raid, so you cansolve them easier. Good raid leaders do this all the time and know how to readthose logs. Further, the rankings in Warcraft Logs can spur healthy competitionin your guild, as there is also a guild-wide leaderboard on WCL. If you want tobecome a better raid leader and have no experience with Warcraft Logs, thisguide will teach you the basics.

In order to get your logs uploaded to Warcraft Logs, you need to completeseveral steps.

On Warcraft Logs, you have theoption to sign up at WCL. Your WCL accountis required for the WCL Client, used to upload combat logs from your computer.Further, you can create or join a guild with your Warcraft Logs account, soyour logs are automatically shown on your guild’s page.

The client downloadpage offers the client for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. After installingit, run the uploader, enter the account data from Warcraft Logs.com and login there. You will also need to choose the expansion you are playing. The nextstep is that you need to choose the directory of your World of Warcraftinstallation. In most cases that is C:\Program Files (x86)\World ofWarcraft\_classic_\Logs (replace _classic_ with _retail_ or _PTR_, depending onwhich game you want to log), which you can choose with the “Choose…” button.Before you can finally start logging, you need to complete the next step.

World of Warcraft has a distinct logging feature, which is required byWarcraft Logs. If you are using addons likeBigWigs Bossmodsor Deadly Boss Mods,you can skip the next step, as these addons will automatically combat log for you inRaids and Dungeons.

If you do not have any of these addons, which is not recommended, or want tolog a fight outside of Dungeons/Raids, go to the game options in World ofWarcraft via Settings -> System -> Network where you need to selectthe Advanced Combat Logging option and press the Okay button. The nextstep is to type /combatlog in chat. Doing so will give you a “Combatbeing logged to Logs\WoWCombatLog” message in chat. Now you are ready to lograids and fights and can start logging with the next step.

When logging, you can live log, or upload a log after a raid. Live loggingis recommended, as it allows for immediate analysis of what happens in yourraid. When doing separate Raids, you may also split your logs into Raid 1 andRaid 2, and so on, or even individual fights. You may also choose if your logis Public, Private, or Unlisted and enter a description for your log,which will then appear on Warcraft Logs. Press the Go! Button and your reportwill be uploaded under the name given by you. The log will take some time to beprogressed, so you may have to wait a few minutes before you can analyze yourreport.

The following part of the guide will give you a brief overview of some ofthe most important log analyzing features. WCL has a very huge numberof possibilities and listing all of them here is not constructive.

To see your log, go to the Warcraft Logs page, click on your portrait in thetop right corner and click on reports.

This will show you a list of your reports. Click the report you would liketo analyze; it will look like this:

There you have the option to select between Encounters and Trash Fights,Encounters or Trash fights only, and in the bottom even pick single fights. Eachoption has their own amount of information you can get. While Encounters andTrash Fights/Encounters/Trash Fights gives you a rough overview over yourcomplete raid/only bosses/only trash fights, often you will want to look atspecific fights to find out what can be improved. In this example, we will takea closer look at the Eredar Twins Normal boss fight by clicking on it.

This new page contains a lot of information and can be quite a bitoverwhelming or lead to wrong conclusions. Therefore, it is possible to filterby Summary (default), Damage Done, Damage Taken, Healing, Threat, Buffs,Debuffs, Deaths, Interrupts, Dispels, Resources, and Casts, depending on whatyou would like to analyze.

• Summary — The default option and will give you a generaloverview over the fight or the part of the fight you have selected. Selecting asingle player and going to the Summary will display their equipped gear.
• Damage Done — Gives you an overview about Damage Done, butwith more filtering options, such as by source (enemy or friend), by ability,to which enemy (friend or enemy).
• Healing — This is pretty much the same as the Damage Done Breakdown, just for healers.
• Threat — Can be interesting for tanks or for raid leaders tosee when an add was picked up, or for how long it was not picked up.
• Buffs — Gives you an overview about the buffs of the raid, andalso single players or enemies had via the All Friendlies menu inthe top left corner. This is particularly useful to track consumable andability usage of single players, or e.g. to see if they stack their DPScooldowns and consumables as they should.
• Debuffs — Does basically the same as the Buffs section, justfor debuffs.
• Deaths — Displays who died to which ability. This is veryuseful to find out if someone did not get healed for a long period, died to thefire boss (stood in a void zone) or missed using defensive cooldowns. Clickingon a row in the list of people who died, will give a more detailed report onthe death circ*mstances.
• Interrupts — Some encounters require interrupts or interruptyou. Both can be tracked in this section.
• Dispels — Shows you a table of who dispelled/decursed what andwhen, with more detailed information when you click the row.
• Resources — One of the most useful sections, as it can trackhow players spend their resources (e.g. Energy, Mana, Rage, Runes, Health,...)and if consumables, such as Runic Mana Potions are used properly byplayers. This section can also track how your resources were replenished, e.g.by Replenishment or Innervate.
• Casts — Is used to display what is cast at which time by whichplayer (or enemy). Casts can also identify if someone is not using each cast onevery opportunity, however, the timeline option explained below makes thisprocess easier.

Further, you may also analyze the report from the perspective of Friendlyplayers or Enemies and even select specific players/targets with the Dropdownmenu of All Friendlies.

The graph in the middle allows you to easily zoom into specific parts of afight, by selecting a part of the fight by holding the left mouse button anddragging your cursor to the left or right of the graph. You may reset this zoomby hitting your browser’s back button or by clicking the “[Reset Zoom]”option (after zooming into a part of a fight) in the top. The zoom feature isparticularly useful if you want to focus on a specific part of a fight, e.g.,shortly before a wipe or in one phase of a fight. Some fights are naturallylogged with multiple phases, which can be selected via the “All Phases”dropdown in the top.

In the top right corner, there are several options to look at your logs fromdifferent points of view:

The Analyze, Compare, Mechanics, Rankings, and Replay modes show you the logsfrom a different point of view.

• Analyze — This is the default mode in which logs are presentedand where most of the information you are looking for is found.
• Compare — Allows you to compare players in the same or indifferent Raids to each other. However, this option should rather be used whenyou compare two players of the same class/role in the same raid. The reason forthis is that players of the same class/role in the raid usually have the sameduty. Furthermore, different raids have different levels of performance, socomparing players in different raids with each other can give a verymisleading answer if one raid is overall a lot better than the other. Even whencomparing players in the same raid, things like deaths, disconnects, and raidsupport should be considered!
• Mechanics — Summarizes who is taking avoidable damage fromboss mechanics which can lead to problems. Also shows the use of potions andhealthstones, or slow deaths.
• Rankings — Displays some overall rankings of the raid, such asdamage or healing parses, and compares the raid to other raids. From thissection you will get some brief information, but nothing in-depth.
• Replay — One of the most powerful features of Warcraft Logs.The replay basically reconstructs a fight from start to finish in real time,including positions, player and enemy movement, as well as when which abilityis used. Like in a video player, you can use the search bar and speed up/slowdown the fight. Clicking on single players in the raid frames also shows adamage or healing meter.

The Tables, Timelines, Events, and Queries features will offer even moreoptions to look at the logged data.

In the Tables section you get a list of how often an abilityoccurred, sorted by percentage. This makes it easy to follow e.g. which abilitydid most of your damage/healing, or which ability damaged you how much.Switching to the Summary filter displays the gear used by a player.

The Events section shows you a list when what happened and it isrecommended to select a single player or enemy for this. The list is sorted bythe Summary, Damage Done, Damage Taken, Healing, Threat, Buffs, Debuffs,Deaths, Interrupts, Dispels, Resources, and Casts filters. This is useful, e.g.if you want to find out when someone dispelled. The Summary filter shows allevents, while the Damage Done filter shows when which damage spell hit thetarget. Of course you can also try out all the other filters and also zoom inin the graph. It is also possible to filter for specific abilities. On theright side of the table, standard buffs and debuffs are also shown, so it iseasier to track when which cooldown was used.

Timelines basically visualize the Events (above). The visualpresentation is not as detailed, but can be used to easily find out whatrotation a player is using, if the player is executing a rotation well or ifthere are gaps between abilities (as in the example in the picture below).Timelines can be displayed for all players, but it is recommended to look atindividual players. The Timelines filter can also be used to visualize theability usage of enemies more easily.

Queries allow you to find more in-depth information in your reportbut is rarely used, as the standard filters presented here provide very goodresults in most situations. The usage is more complicated, and if you areinterested in learning more about it, we suggest using theThe Complete Guide to Pinsprovided by Warcraft Logs.

Rankings in WCL are used to compare performance between players. Rankingscan be Gold (best),Pink (very good), Orange (good), Purple, (above average), Blue (average), Green(below average) and Gray (poor). It is extremely hard to achieve aGold parse (a gold parse is thebest parse), unless the gold player is very skillful, has a ton of raid support,and their raid is very good. Pinkparses can be achieved if you are a skillful player and know when to presswhich button, and additionally your raid team needs to be good.Orange parsesare mostly from the more skilled players in average guilds,Purple parses are mostly fromdecent players in average guilds. If someone parsesBlue,Green, orGray, it usually means that theycan improve a lot and will probably need advice to do so.

The rankings are given out, depending on which percentile a player is in:

• 100 —Gold Parse
• 99 —Pink Parse
• 98-95 —Orange Parse
• 94-75 —Purple Parse
• 74-50 —Blue Parse
• 49-25 —Green Parse
• 24-0 —Gray Parse

These parse numbers can give you a quick overview about how skilled a playeris, but it should by no means be blindly taken as a definite answer on how tojudge players. The parse one is to get hugely depends on the performance of theraid the player is in, the amount of buffs a player receives and, of course,the player's skill. A player may put in a lot of effort in their parse, play verywell, but may not get a 99 or100 parse because the raid they are inis lacking equally skilled players, making a boss kill take longer. There isalso the phenomenon of players buying parse runs, where they aregiven damage buffs and encounters get wiped until the highest possible parsefor a class/spec combo is achieved. Another problematic scenario could be thata player intentionally takes damage, so a healer can heal a lot more and parsehigher than other healers in a particular encounter. A negative parse examplecould be that one player in a fight dies often because their raid's healers arebad and gets green or gray parses because they are only alive for half of the fight.

So, as said above, we suggest using these parses as a quick overview for howgood someone roughly is, but do not base your final judgement onparses. Exceptional players are mostly in the 95+ percentile, good players tend to be in the94-85 percentiles, while averageplayers tend to be in the 84-50 percentiles.

Here is an example of how a DPS parse ranking for a certain boss can look:

Apart from DPS rankings of your raid, WCL also has server and world rankingswhere you can compare your raid to other Raids on your server or worldwide. Theserankings can be sorted e.g. by Speed (how fast a raid was cleared), Boss DPS,Boss and Trash DPS, Healing, etc. The options are countless, and comparing yourraid to another raid on your server/worldwide might spur some competition inyour raid.

Reading Warcraft Logs correctly requires some experience and trying outthings to find the information you are looking for. Apart from the explanationsabove on how to use the basic analyzing features, there are a few moretricks to keep in mind when analyzing logs:

• You may enter player, guild or server names in the search bar at the top tofind their parses or info about a server.
• Most information on WCL contains more detailed information when you clickon them or mouseover them.
• With dropdown menus you can select single players or NPCs you want todisplay information for.
• For encounters that have multiple phases, each phase can be displayedseparately at the "All Phases" dropdown menu next to the Boss name (afterselecting a boss fight).
• Each wipe on an encounter can be selected separately.
• Use the "All Abilities" filter above every graph if you would like to findout more about one certain ability.
• You can toggle between WoW expansions in the top left corner of the WCL webpage.
• Be curious and explore the countless functions of WCL. There are so many,that no guide can list them all.

We hope that this guide encourages you to use Warcraft Logs and makes iteasier to use for you. If you have any further questions not covered in thisguide, Warcraft Logs provide more information and help via theirDiscord Server,Forums, and theRetail andClassic help pages.