Our first guild shake out vs. Solarian took place and I can say we can easily down this mage, but alas ….. we finally made it on the 7th attempt.  The only cause of our deaths/wipes in the first 6 attempts was…. the bomb.  Yep, because most of our guild lives around the world (Australia, USA, South America), there are lag issues from time to time. 

When Solarian targets one raid member who has >400 ms lag, even the shouting and screaming on Ventrilo will not get the laggy raider to get away from the rest of the group fast enough.  My latency hovers around 300-400ms and Solarian’s room gives EVERYONE lower fps (too large a room or too many spell effects ?).  My fps went from 30 to 19 just by coming into Solarian’s chamber.

I have to tell you, there is a feature in the Deadly Boss Mod (DBM) addon that works wonders for letting YOU know that YOU are the BOMB and to run away from the rest of the clustered up raiders.  See the advanced options and click every item in the list (something like 6 or 7 options), one of which is something like “Play sound when Solarian casts Wrath on you“.  Very handy feature.

Had wipes because someone didn’t move fast enough and many raiders died from Solarian’s wrath debuff.

I don’t have any combat stats for the Solarian kill because I had to restart my computer and of course forgot to enter “/combatlog” to capture the data.  Here is the ‘almost killed Solarian‘ attempt.

Party members were:

• Warrior
• Warrior
• Warrior
• Rogue
• Shaman (me)

Buffs were:

• Windfury Totem (duH! look at all the warriors in my group)
• Strength of Earth Totem
• Healing Stream Totem
• Searing Totem

I did pop bloodlust/heroism in the first 10 seconds so we could get more dps in, but I don’t think it made too much difference in the end.

Check out the top dps on this attempt!  Hurray for 1626 dps!

Combat stats include things like damage taken, damage given, crits, healing done, ranking %, how-you-died and raid wide accuracy.  These are also my major concerns to combat stat addons.  That and the fact that people cannot seem to understand tact and showmanship go hand-in-hand when spamming your top ranking spot and the other lower ranking spots in dungeon instance run.  /groan

Why do people use the addon called …… Damagemeters?  It synchronizes well with everyone else in raid to get more accurate stats.  Overall, it’s a completely user hostile user interface and cumbersome to report things unless you spend some time to get commands set up and limit certain things and include others.  Want a report of the top 10 damage output on the last boss kill?  Just macro something with damagemeters, because hunting around to find all that is just too much configuration and setup for me to like.  Overall rating: User Hostile

Why do people use SWStats?  It has a pretty user interface & some of it is customizable, but I’m not sold on the accuracy or ease-of-use.  Overall I like it, just not as easy to use as Recap.  Want to report the last boss kill damage output and rankings? Click here, click there, click again and click a channel to dump the report into.  Too many clicks. Overall rating: User Hostile

 Why do people use Recount?  It has a little too much information for me.  I don’t like the graphs because they are not really useful to anyone except for me.  How can I share the graphs with the rest of the party/raid to show who’s on top?  It does report things, but you have to click here, click there, click this and eventually the report will fly down in a chat channel, but you get crazy stats with like “23.00192310923″ decimals of precision.  I don’t need precision to the 11th decimal place.  Too many clicks to get a simple report output.  I need to perform some more testing and configuration to get it to show me exactly what I want. Overall rating: User Hostile

Why do I use Recap for combat stats?  It’s easy.  Plain and simple.  The only configuration from the default settings I’ve done are “merge pets with owners” and “only include friendly members” and that’s it.  The only drawback I’ve seen is that it does not sync well with other meters.  Want a report?  Simply type a SPACE in a chat channel (i.e. Enter> “/p  “) and then SHIFT-LEFTCLICK on the column header in Recap for a listing of damage-out/damage-in/healing-out/dps/max hit or whatever you’ve included in your tracking window.  Overall rating: User Friendly  

__ Recap Damage Out __
(1) Asirae  23% 2,367,480
(2) Nefire  17% 1,749,877
(3) Neshot  12% 1,235,207
(4) Nesneak  9%   926,405
(5) Neheals  1%   102,934

What do you use?

Other hints:

Create a macro to set max ranges for combatlogging.

/console SET CombatLogRangeParty “200″
/console SET CombatLogRangePartyPet “200″
/console SET CombatLogRangeFriendlyPlayers “200″
/console SET CombatLogRangeFriendlyPlayersPets “200″
/console SET CombatLogRangeHostilePlayers “200″
/console SET CombatLogRangeHostilePlayersPets “200″
/console SET CombatLogRangeCreature “200″

Even though I’ve never tested this addon, it seems to be able to auto turn on ranges and /combatlog: loggerhead

December 3rd, 2007: *Update*  I just trashed all my combatstats addons and just simply run /combatlog now.  It’s less I have to keep up with.  Given the people that I raid with, there is no way I will pull aggro from my meager 700 dps when a mage or a rogue is up around 1000 dps.