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...The combat log stores the last five minutes worth of raw combat events....

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Am I reading this right? Can you not log more than 5 minutes of combat without the log being overwritten? Can someone clarify, I must be wrong surely as that kind of limitation would truly suck.

Also, re: the issue of identifying owner's pets such as Water Elementals etc. Can someone provide a definitive answer on whether this is solved or not, and evidence your answer? I am not really interested in stuff like 'it should be possible' etc theories.

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Oh ... heh... guess i didn't need to write all that ;)

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>grins< No problem, Cog. I just got my hopes up too far when I first heard about the upcoming log changes. We *are* receiving some extra information with the changes; enough to satisfy issues with pets when parsing two logs instead of one. But there are still going to be problems with figuring out whether paladins and shamans really do heal that much better than priests and druids or if it's just a significant portion of priest/druid healing getting attributed to the warriors. ;) It's hard for me to get my guild on-board with caring about WWS when every log comes with the caveat that dozens of things are likely either not counting at all or counting in an inexact, if technically "correct" (warriors healing themselves with lifebloom), manner.

I'm also not particularly fond of *requiring* sync to make this work. I'm the only member of my guild that bothers with WWS reports since everyone else just figures their numbers are wrong due to these problems, so as long as I have no second log to upload with my own, my water elementals will still be unattributed when another frost mage is in the raid.

It seems like (though it must under the hood be much more work than it seems to me) a simple ownership field would fix all these issues in one fell swoop. Assign pets and "bouncing heals" an owner and leave the field empty where it doesn't make sense. Tada, totems, pets, prayers, and lifeblooms all metered in a friendly manner without requiring two corroborating logs (which introduce their own issues in WWS with system clocks being milliseconds out of sync and things like curses of doom showing up twice in one second from the same warlock, obviously impossible).

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...I'm also not particularly fond of *requiring* sync to make this work. I'm the only member of my guild that bothers with WWS reports since everyone else just figures their numbers are wrong due to these problems, so as long as I have no second log to upload with my own, my water elementals will still be unattributed when another frost mage is in the raid.

It seems like (though it must under the hood be much more work than it seems to me) a simple ownership field would fix all these issues in one fell swoop. Assign pets and "bouncing heals" an owner and leave the field empty where it doesn't make sense. Tada, totems, pets, prayers, and lifeblooms all metered in a friendly manner without requiring two corroborating logs (which introduce their own issues in WWS with system clocks being milliseconds out of sync and things like curses of doom showing up twice in one second from the same warlock, obviously impossible)

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Exactly, prima facie, the 'syncing' requirement sounds dreadful. I too post WWS now for guild to analyse performance and I'm sorry but I really, really wanted ownership tags on pets. There were so many posts asking for this that, forgive me but it seems they were utterly ignored.

I had hoped that the combat log revamp would improve the accuracy of the parses/healing meters. But without some sort of change to deal with the lifebloom, prayer of mending, etc... issues, the change really falls short of this. I do appreciate the improved accessibility that the logs are being put in though. Hopefully some future patch will give us what we're looking for with accuracy. Thanks for your hard work Slouken and the rest of the UI team.

Ohh and yeah the container type API is really nice. Saves me a whole lot of trouble in one of my addons. Thank you thank you thank you for that.

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I am not really interested in stuff like 'it should be possible' etc theories.

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Then dont post here until the PTR is out and people have run experiments.

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Would really like to emphasize this.

Currently, the theory is that you will be able to differentiate one water elemental from the next; the only detail being that every mage must individually claim every single one of their water elemental spawns. Using WWS for an example, it would be possible to write a small helper addon that each mage installs and then contributes to the WWS data, but, every mage will be required to submit this information for it to be accurate (ranging from an addon to a full combat log).

Lifebloom, Prayer of Mending, Earthshield, all remain unchanged. The combat log revamp was not a game mechanics revamp.

While we don't have a live PTR, I am expecting the above to be how it works once we can verify for a fact that is indeed how it works. If you want anything more than theory, sorry, you get to wait for the PTR to go up.

A question related to the GUIDs and their creation:

Just how dynamic are these GUIDs? For example, in any of the following situations, would a new GUID be generated?

1) Given player A and player B standing in range of each other, should A invite B into his group, would either of the GUIDs change?
2) Given player A and player B standing in range of each other, should player A run far enough away from B so that A's client stops synching B, would B (or from the other side, A) get a new GUID once A ran back into range? (I'm assuming that they will stay consistent in a party.)
3) Given a raid and a raid boss, if the boss despawns due to either a wipe or boss mechanic, would the GUID change?
4) A mage summons a water elemental. The water elemental despawns, and then some minutes later, the mage summons another water elemental. Two GUIDs for the elemental, or one?
5) The same as the above only applied to standard pets. Death/despawn/resurrection.
6) Related to NPCs and other players: if two players run into range of a new mob, will both players see the same GUID? If not, would this change in a party?

Essentially, I'm wondering just how much of the GUIDs are client side vs. server side, in addition to details like pet spawns/despawns. I realize that some of these questions are slightly redundant with what info we already have, but there are some questions regarding them just the same.

It appears there is no way to correlate non-friendly unitid's (e.g. target, raidxtarget) with entities from combat log events if there are several mobs of the same name, with the possible exception of raid tagging them all. Anyone disagree?

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It appears there is no way to correlate non-friendly unitid's (e.g. target, raidxtarget) with entities from combat log events if there are several mobs of the same name, with the possible exception of raid tagging them all. Anyone disagree?

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You should be able to correlate target to a GUID. raidxtarget would be more difficult, but would be possible with cooperation from raidx running an addon.

Each combat log event from what Slouken has posted consists of the following things:

DATE, ACTOR TRIPLET, ACTEE TRIPLET, DETAILS

The TRIPLETS consist of the following:
GUID, Name, Bitfield

Your target will always have 0x00010000 set in the bitfield. So just whenever you get PLAYER_TARGET_CHANGED watch for a combat log event with that set on one of the bit fields. And you can make the correlation.

However, as far as I can tell you can't make this correlation on demand, you have to passively wait for a combat event to do it for us. Which isn't really ideal.

Would be heck of a lot easier if they gave us a API that did: GetGUID(UnitID).
Maybe we'll get one and they just haven't shared it with us.

What about Shaman Totems?

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What about Shaman Totems?

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They will likely function in a similar manner to pets. Drop a new totem, new GUID.

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Players keep their GUID forever, and are unique even in cross-server battlegrounds.

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This being the case will it ever be possible to make Armory queries based on player GUIDs?

Its certainly not necessary if you're running a mod to keep a mapping of player name and Server to GUID, but its one piece of data vs 2 pieces of data to store.

Also the output for WoWCombatLog.txt Slouken posted above had just player name in there. It'd be convenient given just a WowCombatLog.txt to hit up Armory to resolve the player's GUIDs to name, class etc

Or, you could just store both pieces of data.

Because you will anyways.