RaidBot for DPS History

Another great tool – the RaidBot for DPS History. Like the State of DPS, this is a graphical presentation of the dps ranks, but in a line graph. As cool as the State of DPS is.

Nice to see the geek-programmers out there creating parsing tools.

The State of DPS

If you’re a dps fanatic, and like to keep in the loop on exactly which spec is progressing well, then check out http://stateofdps.com/

It takes the top 200 runs from the World of Logs project and supplies a ranking of the classes by dps output. You can further dig by class and by boss to really compare. Its really quite cool.

A note though – these logs are the best 1% people in the wow population, so do not expect to produce the same results. This site is a guide, so please treat it as such (until you can hit 22k dps, then you’ll be in the logs).

Damage Meter, Recount or Skada?

Skada in action

A week ago I changed from Recount to Skada for tracking damage. My first main reason was memory use in the game, as I was told that Skada has a lower memory footprint. Now that is slightly true, although I think if you have 11 meg in use for Recount and only 7 for Skada (which were my stats), then I don’t see that as a huge change; but lower is better.

It does not tell me which of the two actually consume more resources and processing while running though, which is something that I think has more bearing on “lag” that players complain about. The cpu processing might actually be more important than the raw amount of data the mod needs to hold. i.e. I can write a routine that burns cpu cycles, but only uses a small amount memory; and vice versa. And I’ve not found any reference to wow mods that tells me which is dangerious to game performance.

Recount in action

Skada performs the same basic functions as Recount. If you have one, the other will not significantly change your game. Initially I missed some of the information that Recount makes very obvious, but I am finding that I really don’t overly care 95% of the time, and now I can live without it the remaining 5%.

My major beef with Skada is how obtuse it is to change the visual presentation. The default settings are too small in my opinion.

Particularly the font size is slightly too small on the small screen I play on, and that means that its difficult to tell what the stats are. Mostly this bothers me because I also not to wear my glasses while playing, but in general I should not have to squint to see the bar values. It could be said that I don’t need that level of understanding, but for a dps player; we all know that ego makes it important.

To fix this open the options.lua file in the base directory of the mod, and change the “barfontsize=11” line, to read a higher number. I found that 12 or 13 was plenty.

Happy killing, and knowing your damage.