Posts with tag world of logs

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

When it comes to tanking or healing, it's pretty obvious when you're doing things correctly. The metrics for these important roles typically involve staving off death as long as possible, whether it be through drawing a monster's ire or invoking the name of some unseen deity to mend the wounds of one's allies. As members of the damage-dealing brigade, we ret paladins can be said to adhere to the same requirements in that we attempt to kill our adversaries before they kill us, but truly gauging a DPSer's value involves more than just looking at meter addons like Recount and Skada. Today, we will discuss the use of a very versatile and amazingly useful tool known as World of Logs in the context of retribution paladin DPS.

Buffs gained

In my opinion, buffs gained is one of the more handy parts of World of Logs. Here, you can see what buffs you gained throughout the course of an encounter, from Bloodlust to Divine Guardian and beyond. Notice that if you click on the pound sign (#) next to any ability, a graph comparing your damage done with overall raid DPS will pop up at the top of the screen. Underneath that graph will be your selected ability, with green boxes representing the uptime on the buff or debuff. The check box next to the name of the ability will overlay this uptime information on top of the graph itself.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

While checking logs may seem to be the province of DPS and healers more than tanks, there's still value to be gained by diving into the numbers and checking out the numerical ins and outs of your tanking performances. There's much to learn and review when it comes to checking over the fine points of your threat rotation and survivability responses.

In this column, I'll go over three specific ways you can use a World of Logs parse to evaluate your efficiency casting Crusader Strike and how you handled damage spikes, determine what killed you, and discover how you could have prevented that premature demise.