Gentlemen, please review my prot log! How can I be a better tank? Going for KSH.

[hollow island]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/FMf9Bcgnr4HyawYd?fight=1&type=summary

[brazen furnace]

Hello, the amount of block hits is low, and could be higher

your shield block uptime is okay, so i think your getting hit in the back quite often

your cpm is okay too

quick correction about your cpm, you're playing colossus, you should be sending out more revenges, specially in aoe situation, it hits for a lot, thunderclap should be use to keep rend on your targets, or reset shield slam in situation where you don't want to rage starve yourself

[tawdry wigeon]

You're looking at the wrong column

You're looking at the amount column instead of the hits column

The amount will always skew high on base hits since you take drastically more damage when you don't block a hit

Their actual blocked hits distribution is like this:

[brazen furnace]

oh sorry, i never realised that, thanks !

[hollow island]

So I should just be sending more revenges? I’m good on my defensives?

I feel like I’m spending the majority of my rage on IP and SB. Especially in 10s

[tawdry wigeon]

If you send too much rage on IP, you actually get less IP over time because you generate less rage. I didn't get to really look at your log in-depth, since I just had like 30 seconds before work, but I'll check it out once I get home

[hollow island]

That’s pretty crazy. I IP a ton because I’m afraid of taking too much damage, but I absolutely refresh it before it’s done gone. I never even considered that I’m cutting into my rage generation.

Thanks in advance for the check out!

[tawdry wigeon]

You're getting clapped in the butt a non-zero amount

That's honestly where the remainder of your blocked hits is going

You also managed to waste literally 0 rage, which is good and possible, but generally indicates that you're not generating as much rage as you generally could, so you might be overspending on IP. It's a little hard to tell, since you are sending Thunder Clap a non-zero amount. The button has minimal value outside of rage and rend application for Colo, since it does no fucking damage

Revenge also has a chance to refund its rage cost as a result of the talent Frothing Berserker, which makes it often less expensive than it seems. As Colo, when in AOE, you often end up in a situation where you press Shield Slam to get rage/spend Outburst, followed by just sending revenges until you either Shield Slam again or need to TC to prevent running out of rage or to refresh rend. You sustain via the ton of leech in the class tree, followed by bandaging the damage you take from the IP applications that come from Violent Outburst.

There's a lot of different mechanisms that reinforce each other on Prot War, which is why it can be hard to visualize a lot of this if you don't know specifically what to work on.

ooh

I had a feeling this would be the case with your TC casts

You sent more outbursts on TC than Shield Slam

and by a lot, even

The only reason to send Outburst on TC as Colo is if you're in some real big boy pull hours (like 8 or so before even thinking about it) and are only looking for pure damage and don't need rage to keep revenge spamming away for more damage over time

also, for some reason, you kept using shield wall after getting hit with pierce armor

Yeah, it's mitigating the bleed,

but the initial hit also hurts

so you might as well also catch the initial hit with Shield Wall, as well

wait a second

Did you only send 3 Shield Walls at all in the dungeon? I didn't catch that

Alright, IO and this tier set is hard carrying your shield wall uses

That's going to be a very bad habit when trying to push

Almost everything else I've said so far is miniscule in comparison if you're pushing to almost any level, even some of the top keys

But mismanaging your defensive CDs is like the one thing that can kill you, and you likely haven't noticed since you are sending Avatar decently frequently and the tier set covers the other time.

You want to get the most uses out of your defensives as possible; Shield Wall generally has roughly like a 1 min CD with the rage coming in from Anger Management when playing well, and you also can have up to two charges when playing Double Wall as you should (it also reduces the CD by 30s, as a heads up)

At levels like this, it's not really too noticeable, but you will quickly see the difference between getting hit by scary stuff without shield wall and with shield wall when you start going to 12s and beyond

@hollow island

So, basically, advice would be:

1. Get a lot more used to using your defensives, especially Shield Wall. If you don't know you need it in the next 1-1.5 mins, just send it, especially at the start of packs and on boss mechanics that hit you.
2. Get more comfortable sending revenges and balancing your rage as Colossus; you'll get more damage and more survival over time as Colossus this way in large pulls. In ST, you'll still generally keep the SS > TC > Revenge priority going to keep rage gen up
3. Start tracking Violent Outburst if you're not already and aim to send it on Shield Slam over Thunder Clap at pretty much all times. It's even worth fishing a few globals in ST with revenge for a reset if you have an Outburst primed but SS is on CD

oh, and stop getting clipped in the back. This is your blocked hits with Shield Block up

@meager flower And for you, there's a few screenshots scattered through here to give you an idea on the process. When evaluating things, you need to consider what data is relevant to what you're looking for so you know what tabs to go to. Once you're there, there's also often filters to look through as well. For example, I was curious about Nick's handling of defensives on the first boss, so I needed to see when Nick was pressing buttons, so I go to the players page, check casts, make sure the correct char is picked, and then you can use the little + on the side to get a graph at the top you can compare side by side with.

These guys over on the right in this screenshot:

You'd also need to know when the boss is casting things, so you can also filter what enemy actors are doing at the top, under the name of the encounter/dungeon

Same process here, find the enemy whose casts you want to check, click their name, press the +,

You get two neat graphs

You can also zoom in to specific times to have an easier time seeing things by clicking and dragging

Zooming in on any graph to a given time will zoom all of them in

And when you're done looking at that time, there's a reset zoom at the top near the encounter/dungeon name

The other useful thing is the source aura filter option; when looking at a given player/enemy on damage done, taken, or healing tabs, there's a funny bar riiiight tucked in above the charts at the bottom

Top of this screenshot here:

You can click those to turn them green, which will filter events to be only things done while that buff was active.
You can click it again to turn it red, which filters events to be only things done while the buff wasn't active

These basic tools let you do things to see like what you're doing while you have buffs. For example, my Outburst example from above. Since Outburst is consumed by either Shield Slam or Thunder Clap, you can see what it's being consumed by via checking the casts done while Outburst is active.

There's a lot of logic things like that you can use to understand how damage is being done, taken, when, and what people are doing with it

That's what I mean by how to parse logs and how I came up with the advice for Nick above

A lot of it is just getting in there, understanding the game and what information is even processed, and then figuring out what is relevant to what you want to learn

[meager flower]

I expected this to be the case... there's so much info I didnt really know how to look at it or even begin to sift through it. this thread has been incredibly helpful

I think what I've learned most is that you need to be very intentional when looking into logs

asking specific questions, like "how well did I use SW on bosses" to illustrate using one of your examples

you don't know until you know, you know?

huge props @tawdry wigeon

[hollow island]

@tawdry wigeon First of all, thank you. I know you didn’t have to do any of this but it really helps me improve my gameplay. Not only that, but the blurb to @meager flower will help me analyze my logs in a robust manner.

1. I’m shocked that I only use shield wall so sparingly. I feel like I’m hearing that damn shield wall sound all the time. I understand now that it’s my tier set really keeping me alive. Wild. I’ll press that more proactively.

2. Holy shit I had NO idea outburst was being consumed by TC. That’s a HUGE blunder. I always assumed I was building rage by spamming TC. How the hell did I get to 10s without realizing that. If you’re saying it does no damage, I’m not generating any rage by doing it… what a god damn waste. I will track my violent outbursts.

3. The shield wall AFTER the pierce armor is me thinking I’m getting the entire dot. Totally neglected the initial hit. Thank you for that. I’ll start sending it before the cast ends.

4. And probably the most silly, I will stop turning my backs to enemies. How embarrassing.

What a master class in log diving.

Thank you.

[tawdry wigeon]

Yeah, TC does generate rage, but it's outclassed when it comes to out ursts by Shield Slam since it's a ercentage modifier, making TC even less valuable than usual. In AOE, you often don't need it for rage gen with CDs and everything else, so it falls.off a bit outside of "occassional" uses.

It's still generally at like 8 CPM, but SE and Revenge end up at like 15+ CPM

[meager flower]

uh oh mine looks about the same

just shy of 76% blocked... the top run for mechagon had 91%

oof

hmm #100 is @ 81 and #500 is @ 78

[meager flower]

81.4 while SB is active.... definitely taking hits to the bum

[tawdry wigeon]

Yeah, it's technically possible to block every single blockable hit

In practice, that doesn't happen for a lot of reasons, including z-axis jank. A random mob stepped on a pebble? Sorry, boss, he's not in your block range. Simply perish.

On top of that, a non-zero amount of people pushing the highest keys as Prot War aren't that good at always maintaining shield block; as long as it is up for the highest blockable damage events, it's possible to stumble through the rest. Most notably, on most bosses, you could just literally never press SB outside of blockable tankbusters and be literally perfectly fine and even self-sustaining in even some of the highest keys done