Making the Best Use of Recount, Part 5: Damage Taken and Friendly Fire

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

The next two reports I cover, again clicking to the right in Recount, are not complicated. Their formats are similar to those of reports covered previously.

The Damage Taken Report

The Damage Taken summary chart lists players in order according to who took how much damage. Each player’s bar shows how much damage they took, followed in parentheses by what percentage of the total damage taken by everyone was taken by that player.

Clicking on a player’s name in the list brings up a detail window similar to those for the Damage Done report.

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 mobs which damaged the player according to how much damage they did, with those mobs doing the most damage at the top. The Damage column lists the flat number of damage dealt by all enemies with that name for the duration of the data collection, and the % column shows how much of the total damage the player took that damage is.

The lower half shows more details about the damage dealt to the player by the mobs of the selected name. It shows a list of the mobs attacks, with the attacks that dealt the most damage to the player at the top of the list. It does not show details about the mob’s critical hits, misses, and the like.

Why the Damage Taken Report Matters

The damage taken report can be used as a tool for diagnosing threat problems (though — to be completely honest with you — it’s not usually necessary, since the kind of problems it shows are usually pretty easy to diagnose without any help).

The tank(s) should be on top with a rather large chunk of the damage taken. If a damage dealer is pulling aggro, a quick look at this chart can tell you who that is so that the player can adjust his rotation or what have you and prevent further problems. Even the best tanks have trouble competing with damage dealers in superior gear going all-out on mobs — sometimes the damage dealer needs to back off a bit. A look at the Damage Taken detail window for a player can help determine if the player needs to be more careful on certain kinds of fights or against specific mobs.

The Friendly Fire Report

The Friendly Fire report doesn’t usually have anything to show you. The only times friendly fire comes into effect is when a player is mind controlled or has one (or more) of their spells reflected. When there is data, its summary looks more like the Damage Taken summary than the Damage Done summary. It only shows the amount of friendly fire damage done by a player and what percentage of the total friendly fire dealt that said amount was.

In contrast, the detail window is pretty much identical to the detail window for a player’s hostile attacks under the Damage Done report.

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.

Why the Friendly Fire Report Matters

In boss fights such as, say, Yogg-Saron where you have the potential to have multiple players mind controlled at once, you can look at who’s doing the most friendly fire damage to determine who needs to be taken care of first.

In situations where you’re dealing with spell reflect, however, it can really only serve as a reminder to casters to watch out for spell reflect. It could also be used by an individual to track his progress in avoiding spell reflect.

Coming Up Next

Next time I start getting into the healing charts. They’re the charts most often looked at after the Damage Done and DPS charts — and, likewise, the ones most abused after the Damage Done and DPS charts.

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