Making the Best Use of Recount, Part 3: Damage Done Details

This is the third in a series of posts about Recount, an add-on for World of Warcraft. It gathers and reports on data taken during combat.

Segment List:

1. The Introduction
2. Display Window Basics
3. Damage Done Details
4. The DPS Report
5. Damage Taken and Friendly Fire
6. Healing Done

Individual Player Data – Mouse Over

In the last installment, I introduced the basics of the Recount window you see by default. If you hover your mouse cursor over a player’s name on the Damage Done summary data chart, you get some detail on the top three damage-dealing abilities/spells used by that player and on which three mobs the player has done the most damage. If that player has a pet (be it a permanent companion like a hunter’s pet or a temporary cooldown pet like a shadow priest’s shadowfiend), the top damage abilities of that pet are also shown.

So when this data was recorded, Frostfire Bolt made up 29% of the total damage I did, Blizzard made up 15%, and damage over time from the Ignite talent was 12%. My Mirror Images were 3% of my total damage output. 67% of their total damage output (67% of that 3% of my total output) came from Frostbolt, and 32% came from Fire Blast.

The following is an example of what the mouse over data looks like for someone without a pet:

As you can see, the Top 3 Attacked chart collects data by creature name. As often as not, it lists trash mobs — if you fight 50 mobs called Unyielding Constrictor, Recount will count the total damage done to all of the Unyielding Constrictors for creating this chart.

Individual Player Data – Click

If you look at the top image, you’ll see that my top three damage abilities and the Mirror Images only add up to 59% of the total damage I’d done. To see the full details of a player’s damage done, you would click their name in the data summary chart. This opens a new window like the one below.

The window is split in half, horizontally. In both halves, each item in the list is assigned a color for use in the pie chart to the left.

The top half lists the player’s damaging abilities according to how much of the player’s total damage they composed, from greatest to least. This amount is shown in the Damage column as an exact number, in the % column as a percentage of the total, and graphically in the pie chart. The Count column tells you how many times the ability hit something, not how many times it was used. So a multi-target ability (such as Blizzard) would add to the Count total every time it hits a mob.

The lower half shows further detail for the damaging ability selected. It shows how many of the counted hits with the ability were hits, crits, misses, dodged, parried, resisted, or what have you. They are listed by frequency, with most frequent at the top and least frequent at the bottom. For each type of hit, the minimum, maximum, and average damage dealt is shown.

The best uses of this detail window are:

1. Making sure your hit rating is high enough. If your hit rating isn’t high enough, you’ll have misses. It’s a less painful way to be sure than calculating hit percentages or memorizing what buffs give you how much of a boost. (For full details on how much hit rating you need to be effective, I recommend reading WoWWiki’s hit rating and/or spell hit pages, depending on your class.)
2. Understanding your spell/ability rotation better. Being able to see where exactly your damage comes from helps you make the best use of your spells during complicated fights in which you can’t hold still or what have you. And what better way to maximize your spell rotation than to understand the individual parts? For fire mages, as an example, it makes it clear why you need to avoid ignite munching (namely, that Ignite damage is such a large part of your DPS that it behooves you to throw out the extra scorches before your instant Pyroblasts from Hot Streak).

Additional Damage Done Detail Windows

You may have noticed that this detail window has left/right scrolling arrows at the top by the report and close buttons. There are other Damage Done detail charts. The first of these under discussion is the Player Damaged Who screen.

Players/mobs attacked are listed in the top half by damage the player dealt. As with the Top 3 Attacked chart in the individual’s mouse over summary, all mobs with the same name are counted as one for purposes of data gathering and chart creation. The lower half shows the damage dealt to the mob selected in the upper half by each ability used.

The last of the Damage Done detail displays is for time the player spent attacking given players/mobs. It’s much like the Player Damaged Who window, but it shows time spent attacking with each spell instead of damage done.

Coming Up Next

Next time, I’ll be looking past the Damage Done charts. The other summary charts and their corresponding detail windows tend to work much the same way, but there are a couple of exceptions — notably the Deaths detail window.