A few days ago I made a post with a puzzle to my readers, where I asked how one proves they’ve owned an item. To my surprise, a few of my readers posted the solution mere hours after my post was made. Glad to know my audience is an intellgent one, ;)

So, as promised, to those who haven’t read the comments to the last post, is the solution to the reader puzzle.

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Remember The Four Piece Bonus?

I mentioned in my last post that the helm was the fourth piece in my set, and allowed me to get the bonus that comes with it. Since there are only five pieces in the set total, and the officer claimed I obtained two of them, all I had to do to prove that I had the helm before was to prove that I had the set bonus before that Tuesday night.

The set bonus allows me to cast multiple Pyroblasts without using up my Hot Streak buff. While it did increase my MPS, it was a huge boost to my DPS (and my TPS!).

Therefore, to prove that I didn’t get both of the tier items on Tuesday, all I had to do was prove that I had four pieces before then, which means I had to prove I had the four piece bonus. Well, let’s do it!

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Reference Log (World of Logs)

Well, let’s open up my guild’s World of Logs calendar and see if we can’t find a raid we held recently for reference. Ah, there’s one! Okay, now that we have that open, there are two pieces of information that we need to prove that the four piece bonus was present. First of all, we must ask ourselves how many Hot Streaks I got. To keep our information relevant, let’s only look at Boss Kills, and disregard trash and failed attempts. Select Saladfork, and switch to Buff Gains, and you’ll see that I gained 112 Hot Streaks that night.

Now all we have to do is compare that number to the number of Pyroblasts we got. There are two things that are important to note though.

1. A good mage will never cast a Pyroblast without a Hot Streak proc. It’s not worth the cast time to do so, and you’d rather be doing something else (casting Fireball, Frostfire Bolt, or Living Bomb usually). Although I might not be the best mage there is, I know enough to follow the above rule. Therefore, we can assume that I cast Pyroblast only when I had a Hot Streak proc.
2. There are times when you get a Hot Streak buff and cannot use it. For example, you might get a Hot Streak buff just as the boss dies (adding 1 to your count), but since everything is dead, you cannot use it and it goes wasted. For bosses that require a lot of movement, you may move out of range of the boss and not be able to use your Hot Streak, again artificially inflating your Hot Streak count.

Knowing the above two facts, we can safely say that if my Hot Streak count is greater than my Pyroblast count, I must have had the four piece bonus in effect. If my Hot Streak count is greater than or equal to my Pyroblast count, I’m either a bad mage (and didn’t notice the procs), or I don’t have the four piece bonus.

So, let’s take a look at my Pyroblast count. This is going to be slightly more difficult than the Hot Streak count, because World of Logs doesn’t show you the total count for the spell, but it does show you how many hits, crits, and misses you had. So we just look at those and add them up to get our total Pyroblast count.

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You can see that I got 52 hits, 63 crits, and no misses (yay hit cap!). Adding those together, we can tell that I cast 115 Pyroblasts that night.

Comparing the two numbers, we can see that I cast 3 more Pyroblasts than I had Hot Streaks. Although not a whole lot more (wow, that’s an unlucky night, explains why my DPS seemed lower than usual), we can see that the four piece did in fact take effect in the above example. However, an increase of 3 isn’t very convincing, is it? Let’s try again with another log. This time with the one  I used as proof.

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The Proof (WowMeterOnline)

My guild recently switched to World of Logs, and are loving it, but back before I got the fifth piece, we used to use WowMeterOnline. So let’s repeat the above procedure with the raid that happened on the Tuesday in question (before I traded in the token for the fifth piece). First, we select Defeated Bosses so we ignore wipes and trash. Next we select my character, Saladfork. First, we go to Buffs and Debuffs and check the right column for the number of Hot Streaks I got. In this case, I got 153 Hot Streaks that night.

(Click to Enlarge)

Next up, click back to Damage Done and check the number of Pyroblasts I cast.

(Click to Enlarge)

Unlike World of Logs, WowMeterOnline does show us how many total Pyroblasts of ours landed on our target (it subtracts misses, of which I had 1). So in total, I had 198 Pyroblasts that night.

So comparing those two numbers, we see I had 45 more Pyroblasts than I did Hot Streaks. Considering I’m not a  bad mage (my performance in the log suggests this is true), I must have had the four piece bonus that Tuesday. Not only that, but it was a pretty lucky raid for me!

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Conclusion

Although the DKP Master trusted me enough to take my word that I had the four piece before hand, I used my resources and thought outside the box and managed to prove that I did. In the process, I also learned how to use both WowMeterOnline and World of Logs in a little bit smarter way to assess how I did after a raid.

And with that, this reader puzzle comes to an end. I’m ecstatic that you guys managed to figure it out, and I hope to have a few more for you guys in the future to get your minds cranking. For now though, I leave you with a question.

In the past two blog posts, I described a situation that resulted in me using a web-based fight analysis tool (WoL/WMO) in an interesting way.

How about you? Have you used a web-based fight analysis tool recently in an interesting or unusual way?