Graphical Tanking Rotation Analyzer

[Morgo]

Hey Folks,

I recently wrote a little tool to help me analyze the tanking rotation for my protection warr and other tanks in my guild, and I am playing around with the idea of writing some kind of web interface for it, so other ppl can use it.





It might look a little confusing at first, but that's mostly because there are no labels:

the first two lines are Shield Slam and Revenge cooldowns, respectively. The little green line at the end of every revenge is the "grace" second after 5 seconds until 4 GCDs are up (6 seconds).

The 3rd line is the GCD. Colors are different actions:

• Red: Shield Slam
• Blue: Revenge
• Black: Devastate
• Grey: Shockwave
• Pink: Thunder Clap
• Teal: Everything else (mostly Demo Shout)

The light green line are Sword and Board procs, obviously they disappear when used/run out.

The 5th line are melee swings:

• Blue: Plain Melee
• Red: Heroic Strike
• Green: Cleave

Last line is incoming melee mainly to detect rage holes and revenge procs. red avoided, blue normal hit, pink block, green boss miss (just to see if he is actually hitting at all)

Is anybody doing something similar / would there be any interest in a web interface to the tool (it's basically a simple log parser and some lines of python code) ?

Looking forward to your feedback!

Morgo

Edit: hm, somehow the "["img"]" tags don't work... trying something else
Edit2: got it now

[Katzazi]

I like the idea. It can help to see if you follow your priority system and how to improve.

However there are some things that would help to process the information. Like how much rage do you have. But I do not think that that could be integrated well.

I would like to see something like buff/debuff-uptime, too. So if demo / TC / shout dropped or is nearly finished. Or at least TH/SW CDs.

At the moment you do have many encounters where you can do a good round rotation. But sometimes you have to delay abilities for special cases (like SB to smooth something or TC/SW to grap hold on some adds or interrupts, or applying rend because of an air phase...).

I hope they get more encounters that forces you to do stuff beside your rotation. Anyway even than it is a good thing to see what you are really doing and what you could improve to integrate other actions in a better way.

I do not think I would use it regularly but that it would be a good tool to check my performance, the performance from new tanks or help learning a new rotation / priority system if things change.

[Morgo]

thanks for the input!

Rage is not logged in the combat log, so you would have to manually calculate the rage out of the hits done and taken, as well as talents. I honestly don't know if I would want to implement it, even if it could be done accurately.

for now, it's only meant for tank'n'spank encounters. our benchmark is festergut during active tanking time. This is the segment shown in the example graph (I manually check for start and and taunts by the second tank to get the right time frame)

For debuff uptime, I use world of logs. it has excellent tools for the job, and reimplementing them would be a waste.

[Katzazi]

I imagined that adding rage would be problematic so I do not expect you to implement it.

The idea with the buffs and debuffs is for evaluating the choice of pushing said button. Especially demo has a very low priority thread-wise (and a very high for survivability). The tank should ensure it being up all the (relevant) time. But he/she should not reapply it every GCD. So if you want to check if you do your priorities right than it is good to know when the refresh is needed.

[Leucifer]

Very cool. It's kinda like reading the "box score" for a boss fight.

Personally, I'd love to see something like this for my DK and even pallies and bears to..... just to see the variation between certain aspects of how they play. Id' like to see side by side

But really, I think it's a great tool. It allows you to visualize the course of the fight and any patterns that you might be able to improve on.

Very very nice. I like it.

[Morgo]

Added another picture with some annotations.

Leucifer, I tried to get it working for DKs (my main currently is a dk tank) but the dynamic rune cooldowns (they refresh faster when used within 2 seconds of becoming ready) keep messing things up, and I can't get it to work reliably. The only thing working so far is GCD usage, but normally I can't use all GCDs because Rune strikes eat away too much RP to DC. so, it't hard to tell if an empty GCD is a screwup or unavoidable. Parried Strikes keep messing things up further -.-

I haven't tried Druids yet, because we don't have any in our Guild... Same with pally tanks.

[Katzazi]

When I read your first uncommented picture I figured that you prioritize Revenge over SS. It was no hard to guess but that I could extract that information shows that it works. It would be much harder to get your priorities from the parse directly. Or a count how often you used each ability.

I think the tool could be helpful for many classes/speccs. I would love a prot-paladin version at the moment since I'm nearly finished to level my paly-alt and screw up the rotation too often. (Even if it is not as complicated to describe and to follow as the prot-warrior priority system.)

[Leucifer]

Added another picture with some annotations.

Leucifer, I tried to get it working for DKs (my main currently is a dk tank) but the dynamic rune cooldowns (they refresh faster when used within 2 seconds of becoming ready) keep messing things up, and I can't get it to work reliably. The only thing working so far is GCD usage, but normally I can't use all GCDs because Rune strikes eat away too much RP to DC. so, it't hard to tell if an empty GCD is a screwup or unavoidable. Parried Strikes keep messing things up further -.-

I haven't tried Druids yet, because we don't have any in our Guild... Same with pally tanks.

I'll be honest, with a DK, with the DK, I wouldn't even worry about the rune cooldown. Focus on each of the basic strikes. For me, for example, I'd want to know the following:

1) Boss hits .... hits / misses / avoided
2) Rune Strike used
3) Icy Touch / Plague Strike used
4) Heart Strike / Pestilence / Blood Boil used
5) Death Strike used
6) DnD used
7) Vampiric Blood / IBF / AMS used
8) WotN proc

By simply seeing the pattern as to when each of these are being popped, you'll be able to get a wealth of information. Here's my thoughts on each:

1) Ties in with all cooldowns
Seeing this... you should be able to see the direct tie between an avoided hit and rune strike. Additionally... should see patterns between 1, 7, and 8, particularly what types of situations are causing you to use 7 and 8. Is it spike damage? Or is it flurry of inbound hits?
2) See #1 up above..... also, see if you're maximizing high threat strike in relation to 1
3) Easy.... used for either refreshing diseases or IT for snap agg.....
4) Good to see if used to refresh diseases (Glyph of Disease) or damage output. I know I go on streaks where I tab-strike the shit outta heart strike. It'd be good to see just how often that really occurs.
5) This is a big one because it is a big rune soak (one frost and unholy) BUT..... it'll also show if self-heals are sporadic or paced. Also.... can be compared to #1 to see if it is being used AS a true self-heal in response to incoming damage
6) Personally.... hope to see used only once. If I see it more than once.... it'll likely preclude a lot of bad events elsewhere and a "dead zone" in other usage
7) To see if these are being used well in response to #1.... and just what seems to make me trigger these
8) THIS would be golden.... because when THIS is on.... I KNOW things are not going well for me.

A GREAT one that you might want to add..... for ANY tank... if possible, is heals received. Doesn't matter how big even. You might be able to learn a lot from seeing what the healer is doing. Is it even paced? Are there flurries of activity? Did they let you coast through spots where you managed to avoid a lot of hits.... or were they burning mana pointlessly?

I'll admit.... I suck at programming. Never really got deep into it (beginning level college courses for it were so crappy and uninteresting.... ). Something like this though makes me interested in learning again (and I do better teaching myself that sort of thing anyways).

You've got me interested. Want help or a crash test dummy on the DK end? My druid is still being leveled up and it'll be about a week or so before he's ready.

[Khordam]

This looks really cool. One suggestion though: Why don't you draw Sword and Board procs up into the Shield Slam cooldown line? As it is, the SS cooldown is not really accurate or meaningful without looking four lines down.

[Morgo]

I'll be honest, with a DK, with the DK, I wouldn't even worry about the rune cooldown. Focus on each of the basic strikes. For me, for example, I'd want to know the following:

<snip>

The hole parser Idea was mainly meant as a THREAT analysis, basically how "tight" your rotation is. I started it for dps warriors in the first place Your suggestions are very survival-oriented, and I noticed me playing a lot different when dying really matters (read: solo tanking LK, not having runes/RP up when Soul Reaper hits can be devastating). The big difference is, for a meaningful survival parser, you would have to see the incoming dmg / actual health levels... I like the idea but I would have to parse for lots of more stuff (the easy part) and figure out a way to display the info conveniently.... Actually, I think using WoL dmg done/dmg taken analyzer does a much better job for figuring out when you press button x in response to y while tanking.

I have a DK tank myself, my warrior is actually much worse gear-wise =) But thanks for the target dummy offer

[Morgo]

This looks really cool. One suggestion though: Why don't you draw Sword and Board procs up into the Shield Slam cooldown line? As it is, the SS cooldown is not really accurate or meaningful without looking four lines down.

Good plan. will put it in, as soon as I have some spare time (university is really getting the better of me atm)

As a side note, I did some math about using Revenge every 5 seconds, and pushing the rest of the rotation back as a result... it looks like a dps gain of around ~15-20 dps, but it would be advantageous in fights with few revenge procs... nothing worse than seeing the revenge proc end half a second before the the 4th GCD is up...

[Forklift]

Very cool. Keep us posted!