Addon Corner: EavesDrop
Back in the day, Blizzard’s default combat log sucked. Like a lot. A massive wall of text and it was hard to discern what exactly happened specifically to yourself. Enter combat log addons. I used SimpleCombatLog for the longest time. It only showed my own events, color coded, I could see stuff specifically for me. Kinda like what the default combat log does these days.
And still, I wanted it even simpler, more compact, easier to read. Meet EavesDrop.
EavesDrop is written by Grayhoof, author of Scrolling Combat Text, so it looks very similar in how it works. You could call it Scrolling Combat Log. You get a configurable window with Player events on one side and Target events in the other column. The player column will list events happening to you. Basically all damage, all incoming heals on you, they will be there, with an ability icon in front of it, and colored for damage/heal type. In the target column, you will see all damage you do, with the corresponding ability icon.
Whenever I die in an instance or raid environment, I can just scroll up, and see the fatal blows or lack of heals. At the end of combat, there’s always a quick summary of damage done, heals received and damage taken. Very handy!
As added bonus, there’s a history function tracking your hit/crit records. In my example, I clearly need to reset it, because it has the astronomical values from Battle of Undercity in it that I’ll never repeat. It tracks damage done, damage taken, heals, just about everything you would want to track.
Very configurable, I wouldn’t want to miss this little gem of an addon.
I have been a huge proponent of EavesDrop since I found out about it, I consider it one of the must-have tanking addons.
Great post!
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A very good one for checking combat logs is Recount. you can see who killed anyone in your party and it’ll tell you (if you set it up) who hit you (red text) who healed you (green text) and it goes down and will say stuff like: Caboose dies.
I find it handy and I always keep it hidden and when I want to see what happend I just type /recount show. I find it easy to understand.
None the less that sounds like a really good addon that I want to try out.
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This looks pretty good. I just recently started tanking again and I use recount, too, mainly as a hold over from dps days. I do like it, though, as caboose points out, because I can shove it away and just pop it up after the fight when needed. I like the screen as clean as possible since I still have a hard time keeping track of everything going on.
Lost a perfectly good Rogue cause I had Omen set wrong the other day in Nexus. sigh. Have to give Evesdrop a try. Simple is definitely good for me.
-Fri
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admin Reply:
December 14th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
I like plain and simple, and EavesDrop e.g. is set for me that it will only show during combat, or rather, when any events are happening. If nothing is going on, it’s not showing.
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What in particular do you look for when you die for example?
Are you looking to see healer failure? or unusual melee dmg?
I ask this as I am not always sure why a group is failing. Joined a PuG last night for Heroic Gundark and we didn’t make it past the first boss. Now I was pretty sure I was doing all I could and the healer was landing heals on me. So I am guessing our DPS was poor. Would EavesDrop help confirm this or should I rely on Recount?
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admin Reply:
December 15th, 2008 at 9:39 am
In the past I would check to see if I got crushed, and I would check to see how many heals landed. Here Eavesdrop’s summary always helped greatly. But of course it doesn’t help with DPS problems as it only lists your personal damage, not that of your group. If you had problems with low DPS or DPS dying early or standing in the poison nova, Recount is a lot better as tool, or maybe something like Acherus.
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I’ve now installed this addon, and it does give decent overviews of what happened during an encounter. What I haven’t been able to find out so far, is whether you can report this data in any way?
Recount has a reporting function (which most often is used to spam dps meters by those that know they’re highest anyway), but it isn’t very good on the last few seconds when you die. I’ve tried Grim Reaper, but it often misses a couple of things if a lot is happening, and the report function is a bit clunky. Does Eavesdrop have a report function? If not, I’ll be keeping my eyes open for something else. Hard numbers are always good to show when things go terribly wrong.
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