Intro to Pins and Queries

This article will explain in detail how pins work, what they can be used for, and provide some examples to help you unlock the full potential of pins. Let's briefly start by explaining the structure of pages in Warcraft Logs.

Warcraft Logs has several views of data, such as the Analyze view, and the Combat Replay view. With the Analytical View, you can look at Tables, Events, and the Timeline view.

These views are all different queries to the log data. A query is a request for specific information. One of the above options is 'Queries'. We will go more in-depth on how to navigate the Queries in a bit.

What is a Pin?

A pin is an additional query that is executed along the original query. Pins can allow you to modify the original query in a variety of ways. There are five types of pins: decorator pins, badge pins, filter pins, summary pins, and DPS weight pins. We will get into what they mean below.

Decorator Pins

Decorator pins are used to add new matches to your original query. You can think of a decorator pin as connecting to the original query via a logical 'OR'. The events matched by a decorator pin will get added to the raw events view (if they didn't match the original query already). In addition, you can also show the matched events on the graph as well.

Badge Pins

A badge pin does not match any new results. Pre-existing matches are badged. This means it gets a marker showing the results that match. This option is useful in the Deaths pane.

Filter Pins

A filter pin is used to remove results from a view. It is the most powerful of the pintypes, as it can be used to actually change the displayed graphs and tables in the analytical view to narrow their results. It removes any results that don't match the pin.

If you want to see Damage Done only when specific buffs or debuffs are up, or Healing Done only to targets with a certain debuff, then filtering pins are the best way to view that data.

Summary Pins

A summary pin will only show up in the Summary pane. It adds together results by source, by target or by ability. It displays matching results as a total in the Summary pane. These pins can be used when you want to quickly total how many ticks of damage someone took, or how many times someone got a buff or a debuff.

DPS Weight Pins

A DPS weight pin will only show up in the Damage Done pane when Weighted DPS is selected. It will apply the weight you specify to a mob.

What are queries?

Queries are a way to ask the log a question. It allows you to request specific information from the log report.

The Queries menu looks like this:

This has a wide variety of options to narrow down your search and which view.