Poukey, the owl who reviews your runs
It went off the rails. I saw everything.
I read World of Warcraft's combat log and tell you who died, why, and what could have prevented it. In Mythic+ and in raids alike. I have excellent night vision, it helps.
I report facts, I don't hand out grades.
Three moments from the example key, replayed exactly as the log wrote them. You follow one player, their spells and the health they take off each enemy; every kick draws a line to its target, and every crowd-controlled enemy wears a ring. I didn't add a thing.
In the replay, three boxes to tick in its settings make it speak louder:
- PortraitsEach enemy and boss's face instead of a diamond: you see at once who's hitting.
- SpellsEach player's last spell, above their head or flying to their target.
- CastsWhat everyone is casting or channeling, as a small bar above them.
Every mistake gets its own sheet.
Click a line in the report to see what happened, and what you still had up your sleeve at that moment. Every moment can be rewatched in the replay.
The last hits taken, the health melting away, and the defensives that were still ready.
The kick that hit nothing, and what the enemies were casting just before.
Who took what, and how much. Every hit can be rewatched in the replay.
Their deaths, wasted CDs and missed kicks. You can put them next to another player.
Two hunting grounds, two ways to lose.
Mythic+
The timer, the upgrade you earned, the damage of every pull, and above all the kicks: a key is lost to a spell that goes through more often than to a boss.
What we look at in keys
Raid
Where the boss was at the wipe, who hit what, and several attempts read as one to see what keeps happening from pull to pull.
What we look at in raidsSo what am I for, exactly?
Everyone has lived through this key. The timer is still doable, one pack too many shows up, the healer drops, then the tank, and twenty seconds later the whole group is running back from the graveyard. On voice, everyone has their own explanation. The tank pulled too big, the healer didn't see it coming, the mage swears they kicked. Nobody is really lying. Nobody saw the whole picture either.
In a raid it's the same thing, only longer: ten pulls on the same boss, and the same mechanic taking someone out every time without anyone connecting the dots.
The game, on the other hand, wrote it all down. As long as it was asked to, every hit, every heal, every spell cast or interrupted is in a file, down to the millisecond. The catch is that a thirty-minute key makes hundreds of thousands of lines, and nobody wants to read them. I do. It's pretty much the only thing I'm good at.
I'm not here to rank players. There are already great sites for comparing your DPS with the rest of the world, and I'm not trying to replace them. What I care about is the question everyone asks right after a wipe: what actually happened, and what could we have done differently? For a death, I look at what hit you in the last few seconds and whether a defensive or a healthstone was sitting on your bars. For an enemy spell that went through, I look for who had their kick up and stood close enough to use it.
I'm careful not to blame anyone wrongly. The log shows neither your talents nor what's in your bags, so I only bring up a potion or a defensive if I saw you use it during the run. When I'm not sure, I keep quiet. I'd rather miss a mistake than make one up.
You can go over a key on your own, with a cool head, before bringing it up with the group. Or send it to everyone with a link, if you'd rather argue it out together.
In the end, I just want the next key to last a little longer than this one. And one day, to make it in time.
First time? I'll guide you.
WoW only writes the combat log when asked to: install the SimpleCombatLogger addon, it takes care of it for every key and raid. The file lands in the Logs folder, next to the game, and that's the folder you drop onto the analysis page. I'll handle the rest.
C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft\_retail_\Logs I read at your place and only take my notes back to the nest.
Your browser reads the files straight from your disk, and there's no account to create. The result of each analysis then goes to the Wipe to Win server, never your log; you can turn that off in Storage. Only Google's ads, which pay for my birdseed, set cookies.
- Your logs
- Read on the spot, never uploaded.
- The analyses
- Kept in your browser and sent to the server, unless you turn sending off.
- What goes out
- Spell IDs sent to Wowhead for the icons, and key timers fetched from Raider.io.
Let go, I'll catch it mid-air!