1) It’s a very widely held believe that WWS is most accurate and establishes a correct base line.

This believe is not correct for healing. WWS only has as information what the combat log provides, whereas online damage meters have extra information such as the actual current health level and max health of a player. This information is not present in the combat log. It’s important to note that the combat log does not report overhealing.

In game overhealing is calculated from the difference of current max health minus health before the heal landed compared to the incoming heal. If the incoming heal is larger than that difference the remainder is overhealing.

WWS does not have this information, so instead it estimates overhealing by taking the incoming damage number and comparing it to the incoming healing number. If there is more heals than damage that’ll be calculated to be overhealing. This algorithm will lead WWS to underestimate overhealing and overestimate actual healing.

In general for healing volume and overhealing stats in-game damage meters (if not subject to bugs) are more accurate than WWS.

In general one can expect WWS to underestimate overhealing and overestimate healing. This is what you saw in your test.

As a side-remark, the same holds for damage. If a mob has 20 health and is hit by 2000 damage all damage meters online and offline that I know will count the full 2000 damage, whereas actually this should be 20 damage and 2000 over-damage. We don’t really do this because mana-preservation isn’t such a longevity issues as it is for healers. Hence in this department WWS and online damage meters tend to agree very much, because they just calculate total damage done as displayed in the combat log.

2) Recount: I have since made various changes and improvements to recount, specifically to pet handling. The current version of recount will properly track pet healing, overhealing on pets, damage done to pets. With 2.4 Recount will also get the pet handling rewritten and I hope that the discrepancy you reported here will be removed by then.

Finally with 2.4 I’d expect the accuracy between meters to normalize. “Parsing” is straight forward, and certain issues that each meter may have handled differently will be unified.

BTW, the overhealing situation worries me a bit. In both tests now there’s some overhealing picked by some addons which appear to be otherwise, if not accurate, at least consistent with each others, and in both cases WWS sees nothing.

Food for thought.

After patch 2.4 -all- damage meters will need to be rewritten.

As part of 2.4 they’re changing the format of the combat log. So -everything- will need to change to follow suit. Just sayin’.

Nibuca
http://warcraft.fibergeek.com/