Regular raiders are always on the look-out for ways to improve their raiding performance and will commonly take advantage of the output of tools such as WoW Web Stats (aka: ‘WWS’) or World of Logs (aka: ‘WoL’) to provide them with detailed reports on how much damage or healing was done and by whom, what abilities were used, who died and how and much, much more.

Typically, there will be one or two people in a given raiding team who have been given (or have assumed) responsibility for producing these raid reports and the steps they typically have to go through are generally as follows:

- Create an account with the reporting system. (WWS, WoL et-al.)
- Enable the logging of all combat data to the WoW Combat Log file at raid start.
- Upload data about the raid from the WoW Combat Log file to the report website.
- Stop logging of all combat data at raid end.

In general it’s not a terribly hard task but there are a few caveats that can catch people out from time to time, the most common ones being:

- Forgetting to enable the logging of combat data.
- Not managing the size of the WoW Combat Log file.
- Being unable to upload combat data due to the size of the WoW Combat Log file.

As a result of these potential caveats, being the one responsible for combat logging can sometimes be a more stressful and annoying job that it needs to be. Therefore, we’d like to offer a few useful nuggets of advice to those burdened with such a task.

Automatic Logging:

To get woW to record all combat data to the combat log file, one simply needs to enter the following command into the WoW chat window:

/combatlog

This should trigger an acknowledgement message to be displayed in the chat window indicating that logging has been enabled. To stop WoW recording the combat data to the log, simply type the same command again and once more, you should see an acknowledgement message indicating this.

Naturally, it’s quite tedious to have to be responsible for manually starting and stopping the logging of combat data and if you find yourself forgetting to start or stop the logging from time to time you wouldn’t be the first. Step forward therefore magically-useful addon “LoggerHead”.

Loggerhead is a small addon that detects when you switch zones and the first time it detects a new zone it does not know about it pops-up a small window asking if you’d like combat data logged whilst in this zone. It then remembers your answer so it doesn’t need to ask again the next time you enter the same zone and eventually, you’ll move freely around the world and if you enter a raid (for example) it will automatically trigger the logging of combat data to the wow combat log file on and off as appropriate, assuming that you answered ‘yes’ for logging in that zone!

You can download LoggerHead from here.

Log File Overload:

It’s great to be able to have LoggerHead manage the switching on and off of logging automatically on our behalf and commonly means that the task becomes one we never think of again. There is however a potential problem with this that we have not mentioned yet.

Whenever you enable logging, WoW simply appends the current combat log data to the WoW Combat Log file, growing the file over time. As a result of this, without proper management, the log file can grow to uncomfortable extremes. Here at ‘BW-Central’ we’ve recently taken on the mantle of managing our raid’s ‘WoL’ report creation and had never spared a thought historically to looking after the WoW Combat Log file. The result? The file grew to about 4.5gb in size before we noticed which is rather a lot of data and wholly unnecessary.

The quick and dirty solution to this problem is to simply wait until you’ve closed WoW down, finished uploading any data you care to upload to either WWS, WoL or wherever and then simply delete the existing WoW Combat Log file. The next time you enable combat logging WoW will detect the file does not exist and will create a fresh new log file accordingly.

We’re huge fans of ‘automation’ though so we’d much rather not have to even remember to do this job on the occasional basis. Far better for us to find a way for it to be taken care of on a repeating and regular basis without any interaction from us. Step forward ‘Chomp’, ’7-Zip’ and a simple Dos batch-file.

First of all, get hold of the following two utility programs and install them onto your computer:

- Chomp – Enables the splitting of logs files into smaller individual pieces.
- 7-Zip – A free archiving tool in the same vein as Winzip and Rar et-al.

With these tools downloaded, the next step is to copy the following batch-file code into a new text file on your PC and save it somewhere safe that makes sense to you. Although you could save it into the default ‘log’ directory (typically ‘…\World of Warcraft\logs”) we’d recommend against that simply because there might come a time when you need to reinstall the game and if you’ve saved it there, you might then delete it in the process of reinstalling. A user-profile directory or similar would do just fine. Save the file with the filename “WoWCombatLogRotator.bat” in the location you chose.


@echo off
REM WoWCombatLogRotation.bat
REM Rotates the WoW combat log file.
REM Notes:

REM Delete unzipped log-file extracts.
ECHO Deleting uncompressed log files matching "WoWCombatLog-*.txt"...
Del WoWCombatLog-*.txt


(NB: See comment #5 and comment #6 below.)

Note that there are several lines in the batch file code that you need to customise to point to the locations on your system of Chomp, 7-Zip and the WoW logs directory. Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to jump on to the next stage of the proceedings.

We now have a program to split the log file (chomp), a program to add the bit we chop-off to an archive and compress it down to save space (7-Zip) and a batch-file to marshall the whole process. Let’s give a quick explanation of what this batch file does.

We could run this batch-file now to test it and by all means, if you’d like to do so, please do. We’ve set it to empty the combat log file completely so if you run it a second time before you play WoW again, it won’t have anything to do.

What we’d really want though is to set this program to be run automatically everyday on an automatic basis. Under Windows we have something called “Scheduled Tasks” which you can find in your control panel.

Open the Scheduled Tasks window and create a new scheduled task. Configure it to run once per day at a time you would generally be sure not to be playing WoW (5am seemed like a good option here at the ‘BW-Daycentre!’) and save the task with a useful name and description such as “WoW Combat Log Rotation” etc.

With the task setup to run everyday at 5am, the first new session of WoW on any given day after 5am will have a fresh and empty combat log. Should you for any reason need a previous day’s combat log, you will be able to find it archived inside the Zip format archive in the WoW logs directory under the name “WoWCombatLogs.zip” with each day’s log data referenced in the name by day and date.