How to Improve Your Raid With Wipefest

Quick Links

Wipefest

To get started, head over to Wipefest. Wipefest defaults to the Live version of World of Warcraft, but you can swap to Classic (where Ulduar raids and onwards are supported) with the game version selector in the top-left:

Analyzing a Fight

There are three ways to find a fight to analyze:

Search using a Warcraft Logs link to the fight
Search for a character and choose one of their parses
Search for a guild and choose a fight from one of their guild reports

Once you've loaded a fight, you'll see three views to choose from: Mechanics, Players, and Timeline.

Mechanics

Mechanics is the default view, and aims to give an overview of each mechanic in the fight, how well the raid executed that mechanic, a tip for how to improve, and a short video demonstrating what the mechanic looks like.

For example, on The Primal Council, players must move out of the Earthen Pillar spawn locations to avoid taking heavy damage and getting knocked back. When expanded, the Earthen Pillar mechanic shows a visualisation of the damage taken, a mini-timeline of events, and a video tip from the Mythic Trap guide.

Here we can see that the bulk of our Earthen Pillar hits was from the second cast, that no one died to the hit (an Overkill column would be included next to the bar chart if this were the case), and that the damage is roughly up to 50% of a player's health, so is dangerous and could certainly contribute to a death shortly afterwards if other things went wrong.

Raid Score

The left-hand column of the Mechanics view shows a number from 0 to 100. This indicates how well the raid performed on this mechanic compared to a large sample of kills within the past week.

For example, a score of 75 indicates that the raid performed better than 75% of other kills within that sample, while a score of 50 indicates that the raid performed averagely on that mechanic.

Most mechanics are scored, but some don't make sense to be scored (such as tank swaps) and are simply informative.

Wipefest roughly orders mechanics by their relative importance to each other. The metric used is based on a sample of kills within the last two weeks and scores mechanics as more important if they were more likely to be performed correctly on the cleanest of kills (kills with the highest overall mechanical scores) within that sample.

From this screenshot, we can see that on our wipe we were performing a lot worse than average on getting frozen by Primal Blizzard, dodging Earthen Pillars, and using combat potions. We performed slightly worse than average on ensuring Meteor Axes were soaked by enough players and not spreading Conductive Marks. We actually scored above average on the "total number of deaths" insight even though we had 3 deaths to Conductive Mark - this indicates that it's very common for kills of this fight to include multiple deaths and you shouldn't be surprised if your first kill is a bit messy.

Players

The Players view provides similar information but looks at it from a different angle. Here, you can see a breakdown for each player of how they performed on each mechanic.

Player Score

The same sample that is used to calculate Raid Score for mechanics is also used to calculate Player Score for players. To calculate the Player Score, Wipefest asks "what would the Raid Score be if everyone in the raid performed the same as this player did on this mechanic?".

For example, if a player takes 20k damage from an ability, their score is based on what the raid would score if everyone took 20k damage from that ability. Note that this is only a contribution to their player score, and each contribution is also weighted by how important that mechanic is compared to other mechanics (which Wipefest also calculates daily).

It's also important to note that:

If a player dies, their score is reduced based on how early into the fight they died.
If a player doesn't die, they will always get a perfect score for the "Healthstones / Healing Potions" mechanic.
Some mechanics only contribute towards a separate bonus score. These are mechanics that not everyone gets an equal opportunity to participate in (such as interrupts, dispels, and soaks).

Player scores should be taken with a pinch of salt. There are factors that might influence how a player scores on a certain mechanic that Wipefest simply isn't sophisticated enough to be able to understand (purposely taking damage to push DPS, being forced to stand in something because of another player's movement, etc).

Player Score Grid

Wipefest Subscribers gain access to an extra visualisation in this view: the Player Score Grid. This shows a heatmap of scores that can help identify if there is room for improvement in a particular mechanic, a particular player, or even a particular role.

Timeline

The Timeline view aims to give a high-level overview of the major events within a fight. By default, things like important boss casts, debuffs, raid cooldowns, and deaths are shown. This can help you analyze healing cooldowns and precise timings of certain mechanics, or get a quick overview of when people died, when lust was used, etc.

Guide

Lastly, the Guide tab gives you quick access to the same raid guides that we show on Warcraft Logs and Mythic Trap. These guides are a combination of text and short videos, which makes them clear and quick to digest.

Multiple Pull Analysis

Wipefest Subscribers are able to generate an analysis that combines multiple fights together, which lets you see how well mechanics have been handled across all the pulls of a boss. This can be particularly useful when you are progressing on a tricky hard mode.

When viewing any report, you can choose to analyze all pulls at once. Or, you can go to the Multi-Report Analysis page and choose whether to analyze pulls across multiple reports from your guild, a character's parses, or multiple Warcraft Logs links.

Rare subscribers can analyze up to 50 pulls at once, while Legendary Subscribers can analyze up to 150 pulls at once.

Legendary Subscribers can also share the multi-report analysis they generate with other users in their guild.

To do this, Wipefest needs to know what guild the users are in. Each user should go to their account page and choose their main character (you can change this every 2 weeks):

After you have chosen your main, generate your analysis. You can then share a link to this analysis with other Wipefest users in your guild, assuming they have also set their main in the same way!

Discord Integration

You can also invite the Wipefest Discord Bot to your Discord server

You can use the /help slash command to see the different ways you can interact the with bot.

The most useful command is /listen https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/.... This will tell the bot to start listening to a report and to post brief Wipefest summaries (with links) after every pull.

Wrapping Up

So, take a look around and start analyzing your raid's performance. Feedback is always greatly appreciated!

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out in the Wipefest Discord server.

You can also find Yax on Twitter. Special thanks to emallson and Essk for help with development.