Step 1. Go to http://www.wowwebstats.com/, read everything - we’re not going to reproduce everything they’ve written; that would be silly - and sign up for a non-paid account. Now we’ll agree that the instructions for working with reports are lacking, but the setup information is pretty cut-and-dry.

Step 2. Launch WoW and enable your combatlog. The command is /combatlog to turn it on and /combatlog to turn it of again, but please get an automatic combatlog addon. We love CLSaver and some people love Loggerhead. Whatever.

Step 3. Go fight something and record your combatlog.

Step 4. Get out of combat, launch the WWS Java applet.

Step 5. Open the Configuration tab and plug in yer info:

Don’t worry about the log roller, don’t worry about the HTML reports, (we’re not going to use them now).

Step 6. Load your combatlog by opening the Logs and Report tab and clicking the Add Log button:

Find your combatlog in your WoW Logs folder and click the Choose button.

Step 7. Enter your name, please, and click OK.Step 8. Open the Actors tab and click the Auto-Update button.Step 9. This next message ain’t whistling Dixie, partner. Your Actors are going to be a mess. The hardest part about generating a good WWS report is getting your actors correct.

In the next picture you can see that WWS listed Sashara as a Mob. Pffft; she’s our Main Tank, a feral Druid. We have to click on the Mob text and select Druid. You’ll have to go through the entire list and correct the Mob/player character issues, and fix the Pets, too.
See our pets? Shaman, Warlocks, Hunters, Priests, and everybody else seems to have some frickin’ pet of some kind. The pets will practically never be assigned correctly. Fix the pets and get those Hunter-pets assigned correctly, at a minimum.

Also, WoW Web Stats does not believe that Paladins can have pets, but in this Kara run our Holy Pally had a Woeful Healer. She’s a Pet but we cannot assign her to a Paladin. Oh well, life goes on.Step 10. Go back to the Logs & Reports tab and click the Host button. Things will whir and bubble and BAM your Internet browser will open and POOF your report shall appear.
Notice how there are thirteen actors? This is because we swapped out people during the run and all their data from all the trash and bosses is mixed and congealed into one big-bad-bama-mama report. What we want is to break this down by boss fight.

Click on the Split link and choose a boss fight. We’re going to choose our Illhoof kill.And here is our Illhoof kill. Notice how we only have ten actors now? The report keeps track of all this info extremely well.
Player: pretty obvious.

Pres.: Presence - If you are out of combat or not “doing something”, this column will show that. For example, our Shaman was caught in the Demon Chains, we think twice, so he was held inactive for some time. While he was chained he wasn’t healing or DPSing, thus his Presence was affected. Now while we were trapped in the chains, Hobbes kept attacking; our Presence kept ticking. The mages got sacrificed but they ice-blocked or something out of the chains, thus their Presence was almost 100%, too.

Dmg. Out: How much total-damage people did.

%Out: An individual’s percentage of the total-damage for this fight. Added together, the individual %Outs should equal 100%

Out: Graphical representation of your damage versus everybody else. Magnitude!

DPS: Ah ha… your damage over time. If your mage blasts the boss at the start of the fight with a 6000-crit then gets squashed, his DPS will be very high but his Dmg Out will be very low. Neither DPS nor Dmg Out tells as big a story individually as they do when shown together.

DPS Time: Different than Presence in that this is specifically how much of the fight you spent doing damage as opposed to “doing something”. If Hobbes is beside us and we throw a Mend Pet on him, our Presence is being updated but our DPS Time is not.

% In: How much of the total damage the raid endured that you personally took.

% Heal: How much of the total healing the raid delivered that you personally delivered.

Now let’s take a look at ourselves by clicking on our own name, Bigredkitty. The screen will refresh and show us our own, detailed stats.
See how it shows our Abilities along with our pet’s? Pretty spiffy. And OMG look! Remember when we equipped that new ring, wondered if our +Hit was too low, and thought we might start missing shots? Sure enough, we have. We missed 0.7% of our shots against Illhoof. Why that’s an outrage!

But, um… just how many shots did we actually miss? Well, see that little blue “+” next to the word “Config”? Click it.Now WWS shows us tremendous detail in our Abilities. We missed one shot, we Crit on 64 shots, and we hit 81 shots.

81 + 64 + 1 = 146

and one miss out of 146 shots is

1 / 146 = 6.849315e-03, or 0.006849315, or 0.007, or 0.7%

Very nicely done, WWS.

We can look at the same data for Melee for Hobbes, too. What’s super-spiffy is seeing that Hobbes’s regular-ole Melee attacks account for 26% of our total damage. Keeping your pet alive is amazingly critical, isn’t it; that’s a lot of damage!

So what else can we do? We can compare inter-classes. For example, on Illhoof we had two mages. Let’s compare their combat data:We’ve got a frost-spec mage and a fire-spec mage, don’t we. In this fight, the frost-mage out-DPS’d the fire mage; not something we’d expect. Perhaps the fire-mage was doing something wrong, perhaps the frost-mage was more-powerfully geared than the fire-mage, we honestly have no idea; this was a Kara-PUG and we don’t know these fine folks.

However, in your raid and with people you do know and gear you know they have, it can be pretty easy to see who is outperforming whom. And if the wrong people are doing more damage, then you know you have an issue that needs to be addressed.

Now you can also see another inherent problem with the WWS system: the inability to assign “generic” pets to individuals. We had two frost mages in this raid at different times, but they both summon the same “Water Elemental”.

If you have two frost mages in your raid, either one mage is going to get credit for both elementals - as is what happened here - or you can set the elementals to be assigned to nobody, like we just did with the Woeful Healer. In either case, your Mages’ data is going to be messed up. Watch out for this when your raid has multiple Shadow Priests, Shaman, or any other multiples of classes that have non-distinct pets.

How about we look at pet-data now. Although we don’t have two hunters in this raid, this is a great way to compare different pets, say a ravager with Gore versus a cat with Claw, or a hunter with a cat and Bestial Discipline and a hunter with a cat and doesn’t have Bestial Discipline.Should we break down Hobbes’s data? Oh yeah; we’re hunters and every spec should be concerned with the damage one’s pet brings to a fight.
Take a look at the bottom of that picture and find the Buffs & Debuffs window. See how it looks like Hobbes proc’d Ferocious Inspiration twelve times? That’s not correct; that’s just twelve times we “gained” the FI buff, not the number of times that FI proc’d. If we had FI up and Hobbes proc’d FI again, that doesn’t count as a “gain”.

How many times did Ferocious Inspiration proc? Well, for that we just need to know how many times Hobbes crit. We can see that by looking at the details of Hobbes’ data.
Hobbes Melee crit 22 times, his Claw crit 22 times, and his Kill Command crit 4 times. That’s 48 crits and thus 48 Ferocious Inspiration procs.

What about Frenzy? Hobbes “gained” Frenzy thirteen times, but how many times did it proc while Hobbes had it cooking already?

Since we have 4/5 in Frenzy, that means 80% of those 48 crits resulted in Frenzy-procs.

22 + 22 + 4 = 48

48 * 0.8 = 38.4

We can estimate that we had 38-39 FI procs during that fight, (let’s call it 39 if for no other reason than Hobbes is Uber). Since we “gained” Frenzy thirteen times, that means Hobbes proc’d Frenzy-on-top-of-Frenzy 26 times. Pretty nice!

So that’s our introduction to WoWWebStats. There’s a lot more stuff that you can look at, analyze, and use to make adjustments to your spec and play style.

Dig in!

Edit: There’s a lot of information here and we may decide to update/modify this post over the next couple of days. We posted this at 11:03 and for the past 30 minutes we’ve been tweaking it non-stop.