While very subjective to the fight we’re working on, I like to constantly think about what I can do better. As any healing class in Cataclysm, I feel like we’ve been blessed with lots more tools than ever before. And lots more things we need to keep managed in our arsenal.

I have a habit of looking at every boss fight log, especially on progression fights and wipes. Not just for me, but I look at my healing team. Sometimes I also look at our other team’s healing logs. Lately, I’ve also received several reader requests to look at logs for problem fights so put it into guide form here.

The basics first!

What are logs?

While there are several out there today, I’ll focus this guide on World of Logs, available at  http://www.worldoflogs.com/

World of Logs is a combat log analyzer which allows gamers to save, share and analyze their raiding experiences conveniently and thoroughly in World of Warcraft.

Evaluating logs is not for a “this person is better than that person” kind of thing. Its so we can get better at what we are so passionate about, healing and progression! Someimes we can find little things that help our mana management, or we find out we miss our own cooldowns. I urge you all to learn to read logs, look at your own logs (did you know you can run them yourself if your guild does not?!) and learn how you can take advantage of the resource.

Looking at World of Logs Parses

Nowadays, us healers have more tools at our disposal than we have ever had before and being an effective healer means we use them at the right times during the fights.

A healer who doesn’t use their full toolbox on progression fights is simply not being an effective healer.

In short, evaluating logs will help you to be better at what you love

The first step to evaluating a healer’s logs is to understand how to read the logs!  First, assuming you have a link for logs run on your particular fight, you can view them a few different ways. First by the guild calendar, then find the event or raid you want to see, click it to open.

In general I look for overall throughput, active time spent healing, healing spell usage and over-healing compared to overall throughput, and cooldown use. To show you, I’m going to compare a few different holy paladin logs for different encounters in Firelands and explain what I look for and found on each of the healers.

Find the event or raid you want to see, click it to open. I chose the Nefarian attempts in this case.

Then you see this. At the top is a chart, with the blue text showing each and every attempt