Warcraft Logs, Healing, and you!
Logs are a valuable tool in helping analyze our performance during raids. It's important to have at least a general knowledge of how to read them, so here I'll post a quick guide to the basics of digging into logs and looking at your individual healing to see where we can all improve. First things first, where are our logs? Our logs are uploaded after each raid to https://www.warcraftlogs.com/guilds/11389, and a link can also be found on this website under "Resources". For the purpose of this I'm going to be looking at last Thursday's logs, and specifically at Try 2 on H Butcher. So, how do we get there?
From here click on Thursday's logs, which will bring us to this screen:
At the top left, we'll see Ko'ragh with a drop down arrow next to his name. This is where we can select exactly which fight we want to view.
Select The Butcher, and then select Wipe 2 from the drop down directly below.
Now we're on the Summary page, and things get interesting! Here we'll see an overview of Damage Done, Healing, Damage Taken, and Deaths. We're interested in the healing, so from the dashboard at the top select "Healing". You should see this:
From here, we can mouse over individual names and see a quick breakdown of healing by spell/ability. The solid bars under "Amount" indicate healing, and the lighter shades indicate absorbs. We're interested in seeing how we can improve, so let's go further and look at my individual breakdown. Click my name on the left, which will bring us here:
From here we can see a breakdown of every spell I cast, how many times I cast it, uptimes for HoT's, and overhealing by individual spell. Mousing over any spell name on the left will show a breakdown of your healing on members of the raid with that spell. This is where we can start to uncover our mistakes. Am I using too much mana far too quickly by spamming Healing Surge all the time, my expensive, but fast and heavy hitting heal? Considering I only cast it twice, this one's a no. Is there room for improvement for my HoT uptime (Riptide)? Absolutely! 78.97% isn't the best, and I need to do better at keeping it up on the melee team currently taking the Cleaves. Now let's take a look at my buffs. From the dashboard on this screen select "Buffs". Here we are:
This section will display any buffs you gained over the course of a fight. There are several things here we need to be looking out for. Did I pre-pot? Yes! You can see at the top that I gained the buff "Draenic Intellect Potion". Pre-potting as healers isn't something that comes naturally to everyone, but it can make a big difference in your healing for the first 23-24 seconds of a fight, and there isn't really a good excuse NOT to be doing it. Did I use my own defensive cooldowns? Well yeah, I did use Astral Shift once, but only once isn't good enough. This section is also where we can see our cooldown usage. Did I use my cooldowns at all? Did I use them as often as the fight allowed? We can see that I cast Healing Tide Totem twice, over the course of a 5 minute fight....good! However, we also see that I only used my Ascendance once...bad! Both of these cooldowns are 3 minutes, so there's something I can improve on! This section will also include any on-use/passive trinket procs. Lastly, let's take a look at Resources and see if I used a mana potion. Select Resources from the dashboard and we end up here:
From the left select Mana
This is where we can see our usage of mana potions, and gains of "power" from any other sources. This section also includes alternate power gains, such as Holy Power and Rage.
So there we have it! This is just a brief run down of obvious things to look for if you're just starting to explore logs. The information available here gets far more complex, and there's always the ability to dive deeper, and really get into the nitty gritty. Every one of us should be actively looking over these after every raid night and looking for areas of improvement. Even if you think you're doing perfectly, there is no such thing as a perfect healer and we can all step up our game in one way or another. Healing is a passion for me and I enjoy scouring over logs, so I'm always open to (and highly encourage) questions anyone may have.