Removing "padding" from combat log rankings

Warcraft Logs
1

While I fully endorse and appreciate removing “padding” from the encounters where it’s relevant (such as Botanist, Spellblade and Trilliax to name the three main contenders), I have one major issue with it:

It really fucking impairs my ability to see who’s fucking up

You’re removing the damage from all logs, including wipes. This includes casts on those “excluded” targets, as well as damage and debuffs. I literally have no way to check post-wipe if my raiders are actually hitting the correct targets, or if they’re “padding” for no reason by throwing in AOE spells because it looks shiny.

Likewise, I can’t check if my raiders are doing it when they should - an example being Botanist, where putting up vampiric touch on the two “extra” adds is a gain due to the insanity gain when VT ticks + selfhealing / absorb from VT, and never having to recast it (due to void bolt + 4 set) in the rest of the fight. Another being Spellblade, where a single havoc from a destro lock is (As far as I know, anyway) worth casting on the fel soul to get 2x immolates up on it for ember generation.

Another example where this is dreadful is the Fel Soul on Spellblade. You’re going to have guilds with brewmasters that will attempt to tank the soul with the statue to bypass the fel lash mechanic in the Arcane phase - but that requires a very strict “no hits at all so you don’t grab aggro by accident”-approach, and I can’t actually check if a raider hit it by accident (such as volley hitting it as it spawns, AOE trinket proc being in range of it etc).

In essence; By removing everything about these mobs that have no bearing on the DPS rankings, you’ve neutered my ability to analyze logs and actually figure out exactly what is going on during a fight / wipe.

Solution:

Allow us to see all the data of the logs as we used to. You already built in a functionality for removing “padding” with your “weighted damage”-option that you’ve really not touched on yet (IIRC it was supposed to give bigger numbers to a high priority target, so for example, damage done to fel lashers would count double because they’re far more important than tunneling the boss - this never happened as far as I can tell, though).

This is really what you’ve essentially already made default - hitting a scrubber has 0% impact on you getting a kill DPS-wise, so it’s weight would be set to “0”. Turn weighted damage on by default and use it for rankings if you must, but please give me back my full overview :(.

2

This is not correct. Casts and debuffs aren’t filtered at all and work exactly as they always have. All that’s filtered out is the damage. A couple of additional points:

(1) The events view isn’t filtered, and neither is the timeline view. You can still view damage that way just fine.
(2) Combat replay isn’t filtered. You can still see what people are targeting and who they are casting on.
(3) The Damage Taken by Enemies view isn’t filtered, so you can even still see all the damage in table form through that view if you must.

I think you’re really reaching with your examples, since casts are all still there (which is how you’d analyze VT), and the Brewmaster issue is the kind of thing you’d use replay or the events view for.

3

You’re entirely correct, I can see it through damage taken. In all honesty I didn’t think to check that, as my logic was “I want to see who’s casting spells on the soul first for it to take damage”, along with uptimes on stuff - historically, I’ve always done this through damage done, but I can see that everything I’d want to check is in the specific damage taken of the enemy. The only caveat being that if I’m viewing overall enemies, I can’t actually see the time duration that the fel soul is up on EG Spellblade - as seen in this picture:
https://gyazo.com/8f7df2cb13ebf86accd32e9fe785d441 (as you can see, fel soul is in the dmg taken breakdown, and if I click it, I can see dmg breakdowns, but the graph is gone because no damage has offically been “taken”).

I can make it work with the work-arounds you propose, it seems odd to me to remove functionality entirely, rather than provide a toggle.

4

I have to admit that as the logs person for the guild I kinda agree with the OP here. Removing it from the Damage Done drop-downs when selecting specific targets seems oddly limiting.

I 100% agree with removing this stuff from rankings and aggregate DPS, but I feel like the way it is implemented makes it awkward to actually see what is going on. It being available on Enemies -> Damage Taken -> Taken By Source is fine, but it’s still 3-4 clicks and can’t be easily merged into other Damage Done reports/queries.

If you go to Damage Done -> Specific Target, I really think it should still show the list as per normal, with the note at the top that it is excluded from rankings.

I also feel like it should also still be available on the overall damage hover tooltips in Damage Done -> All Enemies, but that would be more of a “nice to have” than showing when selecting a specific target.

5

For Scrubbers and Fel Soul, I’m inclined to agree. If you look at those targets specifically, then it’s probably fine to show that damage.

For Mythic High Botanist, though, I’m not so sure. Removing the padding on botanist is actually helping with analysis, not hurting it. It was very hard before the view changed to tell what everyone’s “good” DPS was, and even if you focus in on a specific boss (e.g., Solarist), you still only want to see the relevant damage.

6

Right, that makes sense. I mostly ran into this when looking at Fel Soul and Scrubbers this week. It makes more sense on Botanist because the same NPCs persist across the phases with the same names–can definitely see where the filtering helps there.

7

I should add that this is not something I should normally have to do much. This isn’t so much about removing “padding” as it is about removing damage that is completely irrelevant to killing the encounter. I actually view it as a “mistake” that Blizzard didn’t make Fel Soul share health with Aluriel, or that they allowed Scrubbers to take damage at all, etc.

8

Yeah I agree with that as well. I don’t really understand why Scrubbers take damage at all. Mostly just awkward.