Posts Tagged ‘Review’

Master Blogging and Altitis Birthsday

So after a significant slowdown to my posting activities, this is my 300th post on Altitis. Incidentally, the blog is also 1 year (and 10 days) old now.

Before moving on towards 400, let’s take the opportunity to review some facts both interesting and trivial about this place:

  • Collectively, my Damage Meter benchmarking series are what interested most readers, attracting slightly over 10’000 pageviews over time. While I can’t make any promises, I intend to get back to these “soon” to check where we stand now that the landscape has stabilized and the new combat log feature is almost ironed out.
  • My Parrot review remains the most popular post not part of a series, followed quite closely by my CowTip review.

Interestingly enough, as the wow blogosphere always makes a point of mentioning this kind of things, none of the above have ever been mentioned by wowinsider, and for that matter, haven’t been linked to from other blogs. The readers all come in through search engines, 98% from Google.

A quick review of phpbb3 combined with a mention of wowdb comes next in popularity, although I suspect most visitors to that page leave disappointed. From the search terms used, visitors were mainly interested in phpbb3 wow themes, not my short review & ramblings. Well, for wow-themed phpbb3 styles, here’s a short list:

There’s likely to be more out there if you want to google around but the above sampling should give you a good starting point.

My two most popular rants are tied to the Ghostwolf nerf, and I have mainly Mania to thank for that, as most viewers to these pages come from her blog.

One of my oldest theory posts still attracts a decent amount of viewers every day, the second one in the Defense Theory series which explains how PvE defense works, in particular for tanks.

Now for some other interesting or odd stats:

  • Last week, Altitis ranked second in Google for clicked queries on wrath talent trees (in fact I’m still second as I write this). There’s definitely a hunger for information on the matter out there. Unfortunately for visitors looking for this kind of information, what they get here is my post on how I believe it is too early to engage in in-depth discussions about wrath talents.
  • Some people are apparently still interested in my clumsy attempts to write my own armory crawler in php.
  • To the three people looking for Stop the Warrior: although we both are frequently commenting on each other’s posts and sometimes shouting out (or at) each other, his blog is over there. And while we’re at it, his GM, who holds a (probably deserved) bad opinion of me, has her own blog as well, and if you’re interested in insights into how guild management works in a serious raiding environment, you should have her on your blogroll. No excuses, go subscribe now.
  • What gives honor in AV? Killing other people of course, but also burning towers, holding onto towers until the end of the match, killing the opposing Captain (that’s either Galvander or Balinda depending on your faction), protecting your own captain until the end of the game, killing the enemy general.
  • Armchair from treehugger: dunno what you were looking for, but it sounds hurtful.
  • Casserole FFXI: sounds tasty
  • Cheese Conspiracy Theory: Yes, the good old mystery about the Darnassian Bleu still hasn’t been solved.

While there’s a lot of additional sassy keywords in here, this is probably enough of self-congratulation for a single post. As always, allow me to thank everyone of you for reading and commenting on Altitis, it’s your silent or outspoken presence which gives this blog a reason to be.

On Similar Matters

The Quest for Precise Damage Metering: Almost There

Numbers, numbers, numbers. That’s all Damage Meter addons are about. Getting those as close to what your server knows you have dealt is the big challenge, and the Eldorado promised by patch 2.4 is getting closer by the day.

To wit: I logged onto the Paladin to do some Shattered Sun dailies. On a whim, seeing I had both Violation and Recount active, I also turned on Loggerhead, and recorded my session.

As long as I kept bombing the dead scar, all three measurement tools fully agreed with each other. However, when my little loladin went back to do ground-based demon cleansing, differences started to appear.

Here are the relevant screenies with the numbers:

Recount and Violation

Recount: 1’631’418

Violation: 1’638’861

WWS: 1’632’022

WWS Summary

One thing to note regarding WWS, it appears to be counting the self-inflicted damage of my seal / judgement of blood as part of my total damage output:

Complete WWS Breakdown

Compare this to Recount’s damage records for Seal / Judgement of Blood:

Skill usage recorded by Recount

Now the interesting part is that if you add the self-inflicted portion of Blood to Recount’s total damage dealt, you end up with 1’638’810, a mere 51 points off Violation numbers, and that, IMO, explains the differences. Violation, too, counts self-inflicted Blood damage as part of your personal damage output.

But wait, it gets better. If we manually add up every line in the WWS detail report, the total actually reads 1’639’465. If you look at that breakdown, you’ll notice one oddity right at the bottom: 604 damage attributed to Mana Tap. That’s a fluke, mana Tap doesn’t deal damage, it drains mana. Remove this fluke and total damage dealt, including self-inflicted, according to WWS is… 1’638’861.

In summary:

  • WWS and Violation gather the exact same numbers
  • WWS currently needs some manual tweaking in order to exclude flukes
  • Recount is only off the other two by a blood elf’s hair

All three surveyed metering methods really do end up very close to each other. If we remove the bombing run from the numbers, after tweaking, Recount records 137’342 damage, WWS and Violation 137’393. The discrepancy is 0.03%. That’s tiny, and a testimonial to the huge amount of work put up by the three dev teams on patch 2.4 data.

On Similar Matters

Damage Meters in Patch 2.4, One Week Later

This is just a very short round-up of where the different damage meters are today in terms of parch 2.4 compatibility, not an in-depth benchmark.
I ran a very quick solo hunter test, here are the results:

  • Damage Meters in patch 2.4Assessment: Not updated yet, the author said he was working on it.
  • DamageMeters: Author has abandoned the project, a new maintainer might pick it up
  • Recap: Up and running (tested r66903)
  • Recount: Up, unfortunately the latest beta I picked up appears to be stuck in test mode. Undoubtedly, this should be fixed with the next revision (tested r67044).
  • SW Stats: Up and running. The pet settings appears to be broken in the sense that you get the data as a hover tooltip, but not as a separate bar yet (tested v2.2.0)
  • Violation: Up and running (tested r669621)

The data recorded by all three fully functional addons was consistent through and through, but this wasn’t a full test, just a “let’s look what works” sortie.

In related matters, for Combat Text Scrollers, SCT and MSBT have been updated for 2.4. The author of Parrot is currently very busy with DogTag 3.0, Rock and PitBull (several revisions going up per day), since Rock in particular is the bedrock on which all his addons are built, expect Parrot to come when he’s satisfied with the state of the three current focus projects.

On Similar Matters

Speaking of Item Tooltips, a Look at WoWDigger

Over the current wowdb popularity, I neglected to look at the other non-Affinity wow item database, wowdigger. And they also happen to offer item tooltip syndication, and apparently do even up the ante in terms of provided functionality.

To wit:

Including their own tooltip syndication script in your template will also enable the use of the [item] BBCode by default, so the editing feature I found handy with phpBB3 isn’t even necessary for this specific purpose.

But that’s not all they have to offer. Wowdb’s tooltips (and from what I gather the affiniy sites do that as well) will also work on skills / spells, but as an additional touch, wowdigger also offers the [spell] code for additional clarity.

Of course, nothing prevents you from using normal html links instead of the two BBCode tags, but the additional functionality is definitely there.

Last but not least, and here’s the killer feature, there’s an additional option which allows you to override any item links pointing to the other major databases with wowdigger’s tooltips. Why is this handy? Simple. Your blog or your forum may have had item links to wowhead before it joined Affinity Media for instance, or your DKP site package uses itemstats pointing to Allakhazam. Using this feature will ensure you get consistent, single-source tooltips without needing to rewrite any old URLs or go hacking into Itemstats or similar tools.

Beyond my personal distrust of their past or perhaps even present ties to gold sellers, there’s definitely one good thing coming out of IGE / Affinity Media’s snatching of Thottbot, Allakhazam and Wowhead. The competition isn’t sleeping, and the results of their efforts to keep up and even surpass the juggernaut brings along better products for us all.

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Damage Meters Benchmarking: Recount Maintainer Feedback

Elsia, the current maintainer of the benchmarked Recount, took the time to post extensive feedback both on general accuracy considerations and on the pet damage discrepancies noted with the now outdated version I used during the first part of the series:

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.

In retrospect, I realize that I quite simply stated that WWS would be used as a baseline without positioning its own limitations. Guilty as charged, and Elsia clarified the limitations of both types of measuring (online and combat log parsing) very eloquently. Indeed I should have cautioned somewhere that in this particular case, WWS does not serve as a baseline for absolute accuracy due to its own limitations, but more simply as a trendline which has two advantages, the first one not being actually benchmarked and the second one the trust it enjoys from the player community.

What is certainly remarkable nonetheless is that in each of the exercises so far we have seen a clear and firm majority result which was consistent through different tools as well as the offline measuring offered by WWS. Which speaks quite highly for the huge amount of work produced for each of the addons by their respective authors, small discrepancies notwithstanding. Something I haven’t acknowledged so far.

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.

Which is of course excellent news for each addon’s userbase, and provided that every of the surveyed meters gets transitioned over to the new method, users will be able to pick the addon based on the feature set he wants without compromising with accuracy. As the mini-review in the first part of the benchmarking has hopefully hinted at, there is a vast choice available today and each of the tools bring their own unique design and data display to the table.

On Similar Matters

AddOns in Review: Damage Meters Benchmark III, solo Warlock

This will be a lot shorter than the other benchmarks as I wanted to verify the low-level hunter results. I tested a level 60 lock with lolguard in HFP for a while, all tested meters are consistent with each other and match WWS, with the exception of DamageMeters, which simply cannot account for the felguard’s Intercept Stun damage, and thus misses some of the pet’s DPS.

All other abilities are recorded properly, whether it is damage or healing output, not a single surprise anywhere. Next week I’ll try to produce some group results.

On Similar Matters

AddOns in Review: Damage Meters Benchmark II, solo Hunter

As we saw in the previous benchmark in our series, the surveyed Damage Meters get level 70 character solo play right. Before that one I ran a test series with my level 13 hunter, though, and the picture starts getting differentiated.

Here is the summary table:

Hunter Figures

The black squares indicate where I forgot to screenshot the data (/em slaps self). It was actually the first series I ran, though, and my mind wasn’t entirely settled on what I wanted to measure at that time.

Regarding Assessment’s Damage Done, it doesn’t show the pet separately in the total damage dealt, and rounded the figure at 11200 (hence the italics). The figure displayed above is obtained by substracting the pet damage from the drilldown view from 11200.

Recount’s pet damage started lagging below the others pretty early in the series and the gap tended to grow over time. There’s no practical mean to account for the loss of healing done tracked by either Assessment or Recount.

And then there’s DamageMeters, who was struggling on several counts:

  • Despite having the correct setting, it didn’t take the pet into account before a manual dismiss & call pet. At that point, the difference in pet damage was 156 (one fight). The gap never stopped growing fight after fight
  • In the detailed view, DMM doesn’t identify Gore 2 by name, but instead attributes some Autoshot damage to the pet, 291 damage to be precise.

Recap, SW Stats and Violation all tracked overhealing which WWS didn’t recognize, but the figures remain consistent both accross these three, and the sum of effective healing + overhealing matches the WWS total. DamageMeters got the healing figures right for that matter.

This concludes the solo play with pet for a low level toon. Due to the various troubles, I’ll run a test on my level 60 warlock next as a complement.

On Similar Matters

AddOns in Review: Damage Meters Benchmark I, solo

To begin this series, a nice surprise, in the sense that every benchmarked AddOn behaves properly for pure solo play.

The benchmark was run on my protection pallie, in ShadowMoon Valley, the ruins of Karabor, for some AoE grinding. I did 7 pulls totaling about 65 mobs, and while holy shield and consecration were always up, I varied sealing / judging between a crusader / retribution combo (for the people not familiar with the paladin, crusader amplifies holy damage while retribution does holy damage), and various combinations of light (healing) and wisdom (mana recovery) together.

I bubbled twice, potted twice, bandaged once in the whole process.

Benchmarking Results

Paladin solo test Results table

Screenshots and some more comments after the jump. (more…)

On Similar Matters

AddOns in Review: Introducing Damage Meters Benchmarking Series

EDIT: Readers wanting a roundup of which meters work in patch 2.4 will find it here.

Last night, one of my guildmates was thinking about getting a new damage meter addon, and asked what the best was. The answers were predictable:

  • “I use the original DamageMeters”
  • “Nah, DamageMeters is flawed, get SW Stats”
  • “Recount rocks and is most accurate”
  • “Nah, Recount is a memory hog, stick to SW Stats”.

And so on. Before one of you asks, he went for SW Stats after that convo :)

Anyway, this got me thinking. We all know the above stereotypes, but how much of it is true? While patch 2.4 should bring a lot of goodness for all damage recorders, I started wondering just how accurate in-game damage meters are, in the current state.

So I thought, to heck with it, why don’t I just run them all against each other?

This got this series started. In the coming posts on the matter (which will take several days to unfold), I will run a couple of benchmarks between several damage meter addons and post the findings here. For the purpose of establishing a baseline, I will use WWS. LoggerHead will take care of stuff like log distance for me.

The following AddOns will be benchmarked:

The test is aimed at checking the results by sticking as much as possible to the out-of-the-box experience, the idea being that we look at the results a novice user could get within a couple of seconds of loading that addon.

Under this obviously biased criteria, I have renounced benchmarking Assessment on top of the others, simply because I have never been able to make it work for me in a simple way. As my readers will know, I’m not the brightest crayon in the box, and while it looks absolutely terrific in terms of depth it can provide, it is simply too complicated for me. Or rather, it is too complicated that I’m willing to invest the time learning how to make it work since I have been happy with an other tool for a long time.

EDIT: Thinking about this more, I realized that this is a little bit of a cheap cop out. I cleared up my WTF files and included the latest Assessment revision.

And on that matter, for the sake of full disclosure, I had been using DamageMeters initially, and eventually switched over to SW Stats in the course of 2006 or so, and more or less stuck to that one ever since.

The benchmarks I plan to run include the following:

  • Solo play
  • Group play without synching
  • Group play with synching

I will focus on the damage dealt and healing done breakdowns, and keep an eye on memory usage before and after a test run.

I have already started collecting some data, and some results may come as a surprise. Check this space for updates during the coming week, the solo play benchmarks shouldn’t be too long before appearing.

Part I: Solo play, level 70 paladin
Part II: Solo play, level 13 hunter
Part III: Solo play, level 60 warlockPart IV: Coming Soon EDIT: For lack of adequate guild support, and due to the imminence of patch 2.4, the group tests will have to wait to see whether this benchmark still has a point post-patch

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Addons in Review: AuraToChat

Remember that small but nifty AddOn ErrorMonster, which would redirect UI error messages like “spell not ready” and such to whatever frame you wanted it to?

Aura2Chat in useAura2Chat in useWell, from the very same author, Rabbit, comes another little but oh-so-handy AddOn of a similar purpose, AuraToChat. Its function is summed up in its name: It allows you to redirect information about gaining or losing an aura to wherever you want it to be.

Whether you want to keep track easily who in your group is entering or leaving your paladin’s aura range or to be alerted when you get close, too close, to some boss’ nasty tricks like Shirrak’s Inhibit Magic, AuraToChat enables you to get the warning where you want it and where you can see it best.

The first screenshot to the right just shows you the Strange Aura you get in Terokkar Forest’s Cenarion Thicket, redirected to a custom Parrot notification area. Again, straight and to the point, no needless bloat, these are perhaps the most defining traits of a Rabbit-written utility.Aura2Chat config 1

The configuration is accordingly attuned to the KISS Principle (Keep It Simple, Son!), as displayed in my now trusty RockConfig GUI and shown to the left.

You add an Aura by typing it in the top textbox, select a colour, hit enter, and there you go. As a nice additional touch, by default, AuraToChat will cycle through the colour palette all on its own, shifting through soft pastels for each additional Aura you add.
In order to avoid unnecessary bloat and due to the flexible nature of AuraToChat, though, it doesn’t have any preconfigured Auras. There could probably be some room to write presets for player-auras, instances and raids, but that’s adding a lot of bloat to a lean AddOn for stuff many players will never use. Perhaps one day someone will write a couple of default .lua files power-users could import for that purpose, but again, adding what you need is so simple, quick and straightforward that AuraToChat does very well without that.
Aura2Chat Output Config ScreenThe second screenshot to the right is very similar to ErrorMonster’s own, the Output selection, which will offer you a lot of options for notification ranging from Raid Warning to Popups, also recognizing certain popular AddOns like the mainstream Combat Text Scrollers, SpellAlerts and BossMods. Obviously, only the available options are displayed, that’s part of the Rabbit polish.

In summary, AuraToChat is a highly valuable complement for two kind of players, those who want to tweak interface and display to the max, and players needing to have important game information displayed where they will see it rather where the default Blizzard UI puts it. No needless bells and whistles, no creeping featurism – as always coming from this author, you have a very small tool with a strictly defined purpose, redirecting Aura gains and losses to where you want to read them. Something AuraToChat fulfills extremely well.

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