Your Tank Died. Want to Know Why?

Here’s the story. You’re healing a raid group on a boss like Nightbane. Things are going steady and smoothly. Then your tank drops from 80% to0. WTF just happened?

No more will you wonder why.

Enter Recount

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you Recount. It’s a diagnostic mod that has a ton of features and tools which can help track an assortment of information and display it graphically or output it as text. It keeps track of information like:

  • Damage done
  • DPS
  • Healing done
  • Dispels (what you dispel)
  • Dispelled (what you’ve been dispelled by)
  • Deaths
  • Interrupts
  • Ressers
  • Activity
  • Mana, Energy, or Rage Gained
  • CC Breakers
  • DOT Uptime
  • HOT Uptime
  • Spells Used

Tracking Deaths

This is the main reason why I use Recount. If I can determine why my tank or assignment died, then I can take measures to prevent it from happening again. There’s also this "peace of mind" factor. By knowing why my tank died, I can either accept responsibility or say that there was nothing I could’ve possibly done.

Recount death tracking in raid

Take the above image as an example. Chamelion is one of the tanks for Gruul and he died. Within the space of 2 seconds, he went from 90% to 0%. From this image, I know that Chamelion absorbed almost 17000 damage under half a second. It would’ve been very difficult for healers to react that quickly to that kind of damage. I have the peace of mind knowing that there would’ve not been anything for me to do (PW: Shield and a Prayer of Mending would’ve been eaten).

Do I have your attention now? Good. Want to learn more about it? Keep reading. However, there is a downside (scroll to the bottom).

Usage

Let me show you how to use it. It’s fairly intuitive (for some). I’ll start with the Death tracker. This is one of many different possible windows that you can switch through.

How many times did you die? Here you go!

From top left to top right, you’ll see several different icons. There’s icons that show horn, gear, page, xpage, left, right, and the X.

Horn: This controls output properties. You can relay information into Guild chat, officer, raid, party, say, current target, player name, or special channels that you are in (custom channels). Using the top slider, I can control how many people to report in whatever channel I like. Note that I can only do one chat channel at a time. I cannot broadcast in Guild and Officer chat simultaneously. If I want to broadcast in both, I’ll have to do them one after the other.

If I want to whisper to a certain person, then I check the box next to "whisper", type the name on the bottom, and press report.

Window where you can choose which channel to output information

Gear: This opens the detail window of the particular tracker that you have open. Each tracker has it’s own specific set of options. I’ll write more about this later.

Page: You can control which chunk of data to look at. Here’s a screenshot below. I can include cumulative data up to the point where I’m at, echo the current fight, or examine individual encounters.

The window where you can choose which part of the fight to look at

Xpage: This button resets all information that you’ve collected up to this point.

Left/Right: Using these buttons, you can cycle through the different windows.

X: Closes the Recount window but it still tracks data in the background.

Death Tracker in Detail

The death counter here allows you to track the amount of times that players have died. Not only that, it can show you why they died. Press the detail button (looks like a gear) brings the following window up. On the left side, I can choose which mob killed me. On the bottom, I can filter what kind of information I want to look at. In this case, I’m looking at any information that’s relevant to me EXCEPT for Heals. From the timeline, I can see that it took me about 14 seconds to die from Akil’zon.

Tracking deaths in Recount window

You can also select which deaths you want to echo and display. Pressing the little horn icon lets you echo what you have in front of you to whatever channel you want (See above).

Anyway, there’s simply too many features in Recount to be covered in one article alone. Over the next week or two, I plan to break down certain features of Recount that apply to us healers and officers. Maybe I’ll skim the rest.

The Bad Thing About Recount

I’m going to copy and paste the author’s own words and warnings about Recount.

Warning – Recount can use a decent amount of memory at default settings due to saving of DPS and other stats every second. These can be disabled if not used in the options under filter by unclicking checkmarks under the stopwatch. Memory usage though shouldn’t effect your performance though.

In other words, it’s a HUGE resource hog. Try it out and see if you can handle it. If you notice yourself lagging a lot during Raids, disable it immediately.

Download Recount:

Curse.com

14 thoughts on “Your Tank Died. Want to Know Why?”

  1. Yeah, I used Recount for a little bit and loved it, but I ran into the lag issue. For a while, I’ve just grabbed every addon I’d like and set it up, so I probably have a lot of overlapping stuff. I gotta clean it all up so I can change this in for SW Stats.

    Reply
  2. Even with the “save every second” turned off, Recount is a gigantic resource pig. I like what it can do – enjoyed it when I had it installed – but it’s simply too bloated to justify. WWS for me.

    I’ve also heard from more than one person in my guild that it bugs out their entire UI from time to time, and they have to disable it in certain areas/encounters to prevent that.

    Reply
  3. I expected the major downside to be that it’s no longer being updated, the creator having stopped playing WoW.

    That’s the one reason why I haven’t d/l’d it. I’m not really interested in getting used to it and having it break from a patch.

    Reply
  4. The original hasn’t been updated for a while, but someone else picked it up and updated it for the latest patch;

    Recount (Preservation)
    http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/10598/

    I’ve been using it for quite a while since it also provides useful statistics for tanks (incoming damage, damage mitigated, resisted etc.) and hunters (hits, crits, misses if any) and so on.

    Didn’t know it could do this too, sounds very useful when I’m healing and tank just drops. Thanks for the tip!

    Reply
  5. As far as resource usage goes, I haven’t had much trouble, and I don’t have the latest and greatest PC either. I keep my addons to an absolute minimum though … Suspending it in battlegrounds saves some too.

    Reply
  6. Karthis: I haven’t had any UI problems with it. Then again, the only addons I use are Xperl, Omen, CTRaid Assist, and Bongos.

    Gwaen: The issue with WWS is that unless you’re extremely dedicated, it can be a bit of a hassle for you to switch out of the game, throw in your data to be crunched, wait in line for a minute or two, and then check it out. I usually use WWS as a post raid tool. I use Recount when I’m in a raid and I need to know right there and then what happened so I can adjust on the fly.

    Malva: From what I noticed, Recount is being maintained by someone else. Melanne posted a link =).

    Reply
  7. Been using it a while for Tanking needs and analyzing my damage. I never have problem with lag issues with it. Have found it a great tool as it keeps the addons I need to a minimum for other things.

    Great write up though.

    Reply
  8. I ran Recount for a while, ran in to too many resource problems.

    Expiration is a command line tool that gives me the info I need to konw. Example:

    /expiration report Tadri

    Spits out the last ten lines in the combat log concerning Tadri. It’s faster to use than Recount and does what’s needed.

    Reply

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