HOWTO: Analyze Vital Sparks in WoL

[Concillian]

Vital Sparks an interesting mechanic for the Baleroc encounter.

It wasn't initially obvious exactly how to analyze this, and while it wasn't difficult to figure out, I thought others may find the information useful.

For this example, it's easiest to look at a single shard selection. To do this I brought up "damage taken" for the fight and selected the player(s) who tanked the shard of interest. In this case it was our first shard and a shadow priest tanked the whole thing, which makes selecting the time frame quite simple. It will be a little over 30 seconds of time. I turned off all other events to reduce clutter, but that's not necessary.:


When you have highlighted the right section, right click and choose "set page to selection." Now it will generate statistics only for the section of interest.

For the player you would like to analyze, choose them from the list of players and go to the tab labeled "Buffs Gained."

On this tab, there will be a Vital Spark buff with a number. This is the number of heals cast that landed that caused the buff stack to increase. It is NOT the number of stacks gained. There is a little "#" symbol next to each buff. If you click the "#" next to Vital Spark, it will show a fairly useless graph with a shaded green bar underneath it. That green bar has the info for total stacks gained:


The cursor is not screen captured, but I am hovering over a section of the green bar towards the end, and hovering the cursor there gives that list of Vital Spark buffs.

It will list one, two, or three lines of Vital Sparks:
- 1 line will be the number of stacks at that time
- 2 lines are listed when a new number of stacks is applied (when a heal lands)
- 3 lines are listed when 2 heals land at the same time ... like a cast holy light followed by an instant cast Word of Glory or Holy Shock.

I highlighted the last heal, where healers should always be coupling an instant to a cast spell so they can get multiple landed heals when stacks are high return. In this case, 8 stacks of Vital Spark for each cast that lands.
Looks like this healer landed 18 total heals that generated Vital Sparks in this time frame and since it was the first shard, the total number of Vital Sparks generated is equal to the number of buffs total (84). For shards other than the first, you'd have to subtract the initial number from the final number.

If you choose larger time frames, you will get multiple of the shaded green bars, one for each time frame when the healer is generating sparks.

Hopefully this can help people analyze their Baleroc logs.