Combat Parsing part 1~

I walked into the Realm of the Fae instance and was blown away at how amazing it looked. It was actually interesting, each boss hard their own mechanics which personally I was not expecting from the first bosses in the first instance of the game. The second time I walked in though I felt like something was missing, I had already learned of the encounters, gotten loot from the bosses, done the quests, so why would I run again? I knew what I was missing, a damage meter. Something to help me personally top my own best dps from one pull to the next.


I looked into the forums and I heard tons of posts of people who do and don't want damage meters. People who want and don't want addons. People who thought addons were aloud and people who thought addons weren't aloud. It was very hard to find a useful post about how to find out what my dps was. Eventually I came by a post of someone asking my very question and with my luck someone had replied with one brief sentence. Use Rift combat parser. Well, what is it? Where can I get it? How does it work? I have to say it wasn't easy to figure all of this out. I could find no step-by-step guide on how to make this work and because of it spent numerous amounts of time just trying to get the stupid thing to work. So for all who read this, here is my step-by-step guide on how to make this work.


1. Downloading the parser. I found the parser at http://www.riftjunkies.com/combat-parser/. It showed the features to the program and I thought it would just be a quick download, run, then I'd be playing with my new combat parser. If only I knew how wrong I was. First before you can download it though you have to register for the website. While this is annoying you should be used to it by now as almost anything you do online nowadays requires you to sign up or register for something before you can do anything. By my delight I didn't have to go confirm it on my email which is something I hate having to do whenever I sign up for anything.


2. When it's done downloading all you have to do is run the program and possibly have to do a small update. After that the parser should open up and be ready to use. You should see lots of options, boxes with check marks, etc. I'll get to those eventually but for now just go on to step 3.


3. Log on to Rift, when you are actually in the game type /combatlog
If you did it properly you should get some white text saying Combat Logging Enabled. It will create a Combatlog.txt file in your Rift folder which you will need to start your parsing. 


4. Go back to the parser now and either hit the button that says Start Parsing or go up to the menu bar, hit menu and then hit Set Log File. Go inside of your Rift folder and you should find CombatLog.txt and Set your parser to it.


6. If you were like me, I closed my Rift while I was doing all of this, so re-open Rift, if you still have Rift open then just ignore that. Now that your parser is all set up and ready to go in the future all you should have to do is whenever you log in to the game and you want to use the parser you will have to type in /combatlog every single time. If you don't the parser will not work. 


7. After that you can change your boxes around to have it show what you want it to show. Go attack something and have fun recording your data!


My next blog post will be combat parsing part 2, it actually has screenshots (Sorry my time was limited when writing this post) which will be about what each option does, the overlay, getting the advanced breakdown to see which move was hitting for the most etc.

I have finished the part two of combat parsing so I'll make a nice link here since they should be linked together. 
http://thisisnotarift.blogspot.com/2011/02/combat-parsing-part-2.html
I hope this helped some questions you may have had and I hope to see you in game!


Miku~








Links:
Rift Junkies website - http://www.riftjunkies.com/