How to improve your raids, WWS-style.

Now, you definitely do not have to be a leader to do this, although I feel it is the responsibility of every guild leader to do it.

When you look at your raid, think to yourself, how can you make this raid better. I can only assume that when leading a guild, you would like your guild to be constantly improving. Whether its constantly getting new blood in, recruiting better members, getting more geared up as a whole, getting more experience working together, etc, you want to see these things happening to make your team play better.

Well, much like a professional basketball coach will do after and before games, a very helpful way to improve your team is simply to review the footage from the night before. Now in Warcraft, its difficult to get a fraps of everyone in your raid... in fact, it's darn near unreasonable to do it. But there is a tool out there that exists called WWS-- Wow Web Stats.

It works very simply... anyone in the raid can activate a combat log. It's built into the game.. you just type /combatlog. What this does is it will output all your combat data (and everyone in range) to a text file, which you can then process in WWS after. WWS is a 3rd party program (a Java web application actually) that can parse that combat log that you just took. It goes into some very very good detail, so you can find DPS holes in your raid, or find strategic errors, or just find slacker members.

http://wowwebstats.com

Now how can you use this tool to help your raids? Well, 1st off, try to download an addon or something like "LoggerHead" which can extend the range of your combat log to 200 yards (default is like 45 yards or something small like that..).

Then just follow the directions on the website and start putting up logs. The important thing is to use this to compare both members inside your raid, and to other guilds logs.

If another guild's rogue can do 1400dps, but your guild's rogue can only do 800dps on the same fight... look into it. One would naturally assume gear, but if you look deeper into it, that might not be the case.

If comparing between gear disparity worries you, its ok.. stop comparing with the top 10 guilds in the world. If your guild just killed gruul, keep paging back until you find a dps log that looks close to yours, and see if there's anything they did slightly better than your guild.

The point isn't to use this as some sort of pissing contest to see how good you are compared to others.. it's to use this as a real tool to try to find DPS holes, problem raiders, etc, so you really have to get into the mindset of using this tool to find what part of your raid to devote more time to.

I mean, if on a whole, you see that your shadowpriests are doing only 650dps on a fight where typically other shadow priests in full Frozen Shadowweave are achieving 950dps on, then it's time to examine what they're doing differently, and how to improve that. Is it DoT uptime? Spell/dps cycle? Meta gem or gemming problems in general? Lack of consumables used? This tool can help you a lot, and it has certainly helped my guild tremendously.