Uploading Your Logs

Locating The Logs

If you didn’t change the default folder, you can find the logs in:

C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\Guild Wars 2\addons\arcdps\arcdps.cbtlogs

If you were to go to that folder, you would see something like this:

You can turn on a setting to save logs generated by ArcDPS to folders based on the encounter type, making it easier to find it later on. A log file itself will look something like the image below. If you don’t compress the logs, they will have .evtc-filetype instead of .zevtc.

Uploading The Logs

Now that you have located the file, head to dps.report. There is a toggle between nightmode and normal mode at the top right. You will see the page open up as shown below. You can simply drag and drop the file into the box or you can click on the box and locate the file from your computer. Once you have uploaded a file and the website has parsed it, you can simply click on the link to open it.

There are some settings underneath the box where you can drag and drop your logs to upload. Most notably for PvE content, you can turn on the setting to have anonymous reports. In this guide, every log has been anonymised as to prevent people from shaming and blaming other players. It is considered polite to only share anonymised logs publicly as some people might not want their performance being broadcast to the world.

Upon opening the link that was generated after uploading your log file, you can see a page that looks something like the one below:

Congratulations! Now you are ready to start reading and analysing your logs. I would still suggest that you get other people with experience to chime in if you want to improve. For logs related to raids, strikes and benchmarking, Snow Crows Discord server is probably your best bet for getting help with your logs. Click here to join the server now!

For anything fractal-related, you might try asking the people on the Discretize Discord Server.

🛎️ Processing Logs Locally

You can process logs locally using the same software that dps.report uses. The software is called GW2-Elite-Insights-Parser. The GitHub page offers a more complete explanation on the usage of this software.

Log UI

I will be dividing this into multiple smaller sections. Skip if it seems redundant or obvious. Or read through it all lol, I am not your boss. Hovering over the columns, icons and numbers on the dps.report-page may show you extra information about the statistics being shown. Sate your curiousity and hover over everything!

Basic Information

If there is a small, yellow/orange box with a question mark inside it on any of the parts, you can hover over it for information regarding that part as you can see below.

If it is not obvious on the page and this guide doesn’t help, you might find this tip helpful! With all this in mind, let’s go ahead and break down the UI of dps.report, part by part.

1. The total health and how much the encounter had left at the end of the log. To see the percentage left, simply hover over the health bar. The result is straightforward; either you killed the boss or you didn’t. Duration is something that should be noted when comparing different logs of the same encounter as it gives you information on the general speed of the kill. In slower kills certain classes might benefit from having a longer ramp-up time whereas other classes might suffer if the phases end up too long.
2. Statistics will show you, well, statistics about the fight. Combat Replay will show you a “replay” of the fight from a top-down view. It gives you multiple options to see boons, attacks etc., making it extremly useful to see the minute details of the fight. If you have the ArcDPS healing addon installed, you will also see the third tab. More on that later in this guide.
3. This part of the UI is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT when you start to analyse your logs. You can select the whole fight or the individual phases to see where everything went awry or to compare boons between phases one or two, for example. “Phase” usually means the phases when you were damaging the boss and “split” the phases when you were split up/not damaging the boss. The naming scheme changes from boss to boss but it’s chronological, so you’ll figure it out in no time. There are even breakbar phases, meaning the times when you have to break the defiance bar on that encounter. This will help you if you need to see whether people contributed their fair share of CC or not, for example.
4. The players that partook in the encounter. You can see their character names, classes, weapon sets and relative stats here. The stats are relative in the sense that the person with the highest amount of Healing Power, Toughness, Condition Damage or Boon Duration will be the one that everyone else is compared to. If the person with the highest Healing Power in the squad has 1000 Healing Power, then anyone with 60% or more of that stat would be flagged with a small icon.
5. Statistics about the encountered boss. Hovering over the small icons will reveal you health, toughness, hitbox width and hitbox height, respectively. If this has multiple different icons, it allows you to choose the target for certain statistics like target DPS and target CC.

General Stats

General stats contain information that you will typically find in all of the encounters.

Damage Stats

1. Sub stands for “subgroup”. In the squad window you can see a small number separating different subgroups. Subgroups affect boon distribution.
2. This column stands for “Target Damage”, which is your DPS over the whole fight against the target. Target is the boss, in this log it’s Vale Guardian. At the bottom, you can see subgroup 2’s DPS against the target, subgroup 3’s DPS against the target and the whole squad’s DPS against the target.
3. Same as previous, but only power (direct) damage.
4. Same as the previous two, but only condition damage.
5. This column shows the defiance bar (breakbar) damage done to the target. Damage to defiance bar is equal to hard CC that hit the target (missing hits do NOT count). This column does not include soft CC either.
6. Same as the previous columns, but includes all damage (also called cleave). If you have any adds on a fight (like Dhuum has Deathlings) and you hit them, that damage is added to your DPS in this section.

Gameplay Stats

1. Time wasted interrupting skill casts. Can be very useful to determine if you are wasting time interrupting your skills. High amount of time spent interrupting skills can indicate that you are intentionally cancelling skills due to not being familiar with the rotation or that you are lacking Quickness.
2. Time saved interrupting skill casts. A lot of skills have very long aftercasts that you can cancel by Stowing, using a different skill, or moving, depending on the skill.
3. Average distance to the centre of the squad. Makes it easy to see if someone is consistently far away from the squad. The second column shows the average distance to the commander. At times, useful, more often than not, it’s not useful.

Offensive Stats

1. This simply toggles the stats shown. If you have chosen target it will show these stats in relation to the selected target (more information in the preface). If you select all it will show the information in relation to all the enemies in the encounter that you've attacked.
2. Critical hits %. It shows the percentage of hits that were critical. If you look at Player 3, for example, around 95% of their hits were critical hits against the target. Useful information, especially for Power classes that benefit from having high critical chance..
3. Flanking hits %. This percentage shows many hits from you were considered a flanking hit for the purpose of traits or relics. Most notable ones are probably Ranger's in the Skirmishing Trait Line when fighting foes without a defiance bar.
4. The remaining stats are more situational but by no means useless. You should hover over the icons and find out what they mean once you get more accustomed to reading logs!

Defensive Stats

1. Damage taken during the selected period of the encounter. While the damage that you deal is shown as DPS by default, this column shows the total damage taken.
2. Damage absorbed by a Barrier. This column shows you how much of the incoming damage dealt damage to Barrier lifetype. There are certain classes that generate large amounts of Barrier passively, such as Scourge and Spectre.
3. This column tells you the amount of times a person went into downstate. Hovering over the number shows you how many seconds a player was in downstate. This is generally good information when learning encounters as it highlights people who go down more often, which could be caused by poor positioning or failing mechanics.
4. Times died tells you whether someone died completely or not (think binary, 0=not dead, 1=yes dead). Hovering over gives you an idea of how long they were out of the fight.

Support Stats

1. Condition cleanses on others and condition cleanses on yourself. It tells you how many times you cleansed conditions. Helpful information on some condition-heavy fights.
2. Boon strips on enemies tells you how many times this person stripped boons from the enemies. Useful information if the enemy has boons (which is true for a few raid encounters) and when you are trying to analyse fractals that have No Pain No Gain.
3. Resurrections tells you how many times the player resurrected someone. It doesn’t take into account resurrects that are NOT your F-key (or whatever you use for action). So res-bot Scourge or on a Druid won’t show up here.

Buffs

In the buffs section you can find all sorts of useful information to help you analyse the squad and the kill. Boons are a vital part of any group content in Guild Wars 2 and therefore you should be keeping track of them. In buffs section you will be able to see your boon uptimes as well as whom those boons were generated by.

Phase Duration Vs. Phase Active Duration

While these two have very similar names, they are rather different in the stats that they show. If you have a log where someone dies midway and you select “Phase active duration” you can see that they have better boon uptimes. The reason for this is that when you have only “Phase duration” selected, it shows the boon uptimes for the phase that’s currently selected (from the phase menu that’s always visible). If this person is dead in the phase that you have selected, they will have 0 % boon uptimes.

When you select Phase active duration, it shows the boon uptimes on the players for as long as they lived. So if they had quickness for the whole phase and just instantly died, they would have 100 % uptime with “Phase active duration” selected. It also takes into account someone disconnecting.

Uptime Vs. Generation

• Uptime - The uptime of that certain boon in the selected phase. If you select “Phase 1” and check the boon uptime for Quickness and you see 54.4%, you had Quickness for 54.4% of the encounter. For stacking boons (namely Might and Stability) it shows you the average amount you had and the uptime when you hover over the number.
• Generation Self - Shows you how much uptime of a certain boon you produced on yourself.
• Generation Group - Shows how much boon uptime you generated for your subgroup. If it shows 50% uptime on Quickness for example, it means that the average uptime of Quickness generated by you in your subgroup was 50%. This selection excludes your personal boons.
• Generation Off-Group - Shows you how much you generated a certain boon to people outside of your subgroup. Not particularly handy information for the most part, but in some niche cases it makes sense. This selection excludes your personal boons.
• Generation Squad - Shows you how much boon uptime on average you generated for your whole squad. This selection excludes your personal boons.

Wasted, Overstack & Extension

These are all words that you can see when you are looking at any of the generation parts of the logs. What do these words exactly mean then? If you ever need a quick reminder, the orange/yellow tile with a white question mark is there to remind you! When you hover over it, you will see:

• The value shown in the row is "generation + extensions you are the source"
• With overstack is "generation + extensions you are the source + stacks that couldn't make into the queue/stacks"
• By extension is "extensions you are the source"
• Waste is "stacks that were overriden/cleansed". If you have high waste values that could mean there is an issue with your composition as someone may be overriding your stacks non-stop.
• Extended by unknown source is the extension value for which we were unable to find an src, not included in generation.
• Extended is "extended by unknown source + extended by known source other than yourself". Not included in generation. This value is just here to indicate if you are a good seed.

With all this in mind, we should dive into the different categories for buffs. Before we do that, though, I would like to say a word about unique boons/buffs. These are buffs that are generated by a sole profession (sometimes just one single elite specialisation can provide your squad with this particular unique buff!) and they are usually strong and have a target cap of 5 people.

Boons

In the boons screen you can see, well, all the boons that at least one person in the squad had at any point of the encounter. The uptime part is important to look at when trying to resolve issues with the compositions problems because it tells you exactly how much uptime you had on each boon. It is advisable to select a certain phase on some bosses where giving boons to everyone is rather difficult, like on Vale Guardian for example.

For more information on what the numbers in the generation sections mean, read Uptime Vs. Generation.

Offensive Buffs

Unique buffs were briefly mentioned. The unique buffs are something that aren’t stripped from you when you start an encounter in raids, strikes or Fractal 100 (Sunqua Peak). They usually consist of consistent damage buffs or something that gives you attributes. They will be divided between the sections according to what they do. Some buffs that you can see through this view are for example or , to name some examples.

Support Buffs

In the support buffs section you will find a variety of different buffs that are similar to the unique buffs provided by different classes. These include auras, stealth and Superspeed, and , to name a few. These buffs are usually not quite as relevant as other class-specific buffs or encounter-specific buffs, but can provide important insight into your composition or how the individual players played out.

Defensive Buffs

Unique defensive buffs are occasionally worth looking when you consider how strong certain defensive buffs are. In this view you will be able to find a couple of defensive buffs and their uptimes on the players of the squad. Some buffs that you might find in this specific section are and .

Conditions

Conditions section is very similar to the ones mentioned later in this guide in section Buff Status. In this section you will find the average stacks and uptime of different conditions. This information can prove to be useful if some encounters are condition-heavy and seem to tear your group down. Fights with lots of conditions could be Slothasor or Matthias, for example.

Gear Buffs

Gear buffs is very loyal to its name. In this section you will be able to find out more information about the buffs provided by different sets in your gear. These buffs are things such as or . Majority of gear buffs are extremely important due to their very strong nature. However, a lot of them are relatively easy to upkeep or have a good uptime on.

Debuffs

Debuffs are encounter-specific, which is why this tab does not appear on all, or even most logs. Debuffs can help you track how certain mechanics have been dealt with as well as how much they have affected your group. These debuffs could be something like Soul Siphon on Dhuum or Debilitated during the Dragonvoid strike mission.

Personal Buffs

Personal Buffs has information about the buffs that you had on your buff bar but aren’t boons. It can tell you about how you cycled through attunements on an Elementalist or stance on a Revenant.

It will only show those buffs that appeared on you in this collective table. If you didn’t have a boon that other player(s) with the same class had, it will simply show a “-” in place of a number or a percentage. It can provide you with good information regarding how long you spent in a certain stance or attunement or if your unique buff uptime was as expected.

Damage Modifiers

Damage modifiers are, well… damage modifiers! In this section of the processed log you can see exactly how much your DPS was increased (=modified) by different kinds of buffs, conditions and pieces of gear. Damage modifiers are EXTREMELY important because they are usually in percentages and can add quite a substantial amount of damage to your damage. Some might be especially relevant if your build depends heavily on having high burst damage with multiple different kinds of modifiers on top of it. Most notable examples are Unnatural Signet on Deimos, where Deimos takes 100 % increased damage (despite the tooltip stating 200 %) or Exposed, where the target takes 10 % increased strike (power) damage and 20 % increased condition damage after their defiance bar has been broken. Playing around different encounter-specific damage modifiers can increase your DPS by a huge margin.

On top of these damage modifiers, it will also tell you how much damage modifiers from your traits and gear have increased your DPS. The different statistics can offer you an important view on how you played on the encounter and whether you played with the different modifiers in mind. For example, playing with relies on using skills with a long cooldown and spreading those out.

Gear Based Damage Modifiers

As you can see in the image above, the damage modifier table shows most of the sources that are available to you. In this section, you only need to look at the modifiers that apply to you specifically. For the most part, you are focusing on the and . These are the two most common damage modifiers on the first section (“Gear Based Damage Modifiers”). Here I recommend practising some hovering, since you can get a lot of additional information about the relics, sigils, and runes on older logs. This section shows all the theoretical buffs but it cannot know which buffs you were affected by. On encounters where the enemy gets stunned (Fractals, Keep Construct to name a couple) you want to take a look at the damage increase from ! It is a notable buff with the additional 7% increase against stunned targets.

This is what you see, when you hover over the in the log. It tells you what modifier it takes into account (the 6th passive in this case), what damage it affects and what it is compared against.

When you hover over the number in the log, you can see how many hits out of all of your hits that are counted for this specific relic/sigil hit under the circumstances that count. What this basically means is that in this particular log, this person hit the target 392 times when they were over 90% HP, dealing 129 691 extra damage.

Shared Damage Modifiers

In this section of the dps.report you will find damage modifiers that are shared (so they affect basically everyone in the squad). The list of modifiers you can find here are:

• Exposed
• Vulnerability
• Violent Currents
• Unnatural Signet
• Compromised
• Erratic Energy
• Fractured
• Blood Fueled

For more information on how to read these numbers, look at the previous section. Here you can see certain statistics about uptime of certain skills (like is the Renegade using , Soulbeast sharing ). Alternatively, you can take a look at how much damage a specific mechanic on a boss increases your damage.

Class-Based Damage Modifiers

This section shows all[^1] the available options to your specific class. It does not, however, mean that you had these buffs; simply showing them as if you had those buffs. However, you should know your traits well enough to know which of these affect you to see how much they affected your DPS. Same basic knowledge applies here, hover over to see important stuff. “Target” and “All” are the same as “Target” and “Cleave” in other windows.

[^1]: Possibly missing some.

Mechanics

The mechanics window is sometimes really useful, at other times it doesn’t really tell you all that much. Some mechanics you intentionally fail and others just aren’t impactful, whereas some are extremely impactful. Let’s take a look at the image below.

The mechanics log isn't especially helpful if you are not familiar with the encounter and abbreviations or nicknames associated with its mechanics. Don't worry, keep at it and you'll learn them eventually. Other good sources for information are the Snow Crows Discord server and the Official Guild Wars 2 Wiki. You may also want to try hovering over the names of the mechanics.

The picture above is from Dhuum. You can see that it tracks people who took damage from golems and bombs, had the bomb mechanic (Arcing Affliction), if they triggered that bomb mechanic manually, if they had shackles... You can see the point I am trying to make. You can easily see whether people attended to their mechanics in the way your squad had expected. It is also important to notice that this tab can help you find out potential problems in your squad. If someone is constantly failing the same mechanic or if they are dealing with a mechanic poorly, it might be indicated here. Do not use this information to shame anyone, it is there to help you figure out problems!

If you want an in-game solution of this panel, you can look at the Mechanics Log add-on for ArcDPS.

Graph

There are in fact two different really useful graphs in the logs. I will be covering the graph that has its own tab. Let’s take a look at the graph below.

Here you can see the basic options (selecting a phase from the top of the log also applies here) as well as a few new ones. Let’s go ahead and further break down these choices, what they exactly mean, and how you can use them to analyse your gameplay and learn from your logs.

The selections on the right (Full, 4s, 10s, 20s, 30s, phase and custom) are a timeframe that you are setting for the graph. The selection in the middle is what the graph is showing (combined damage, direct damage, condition damage and breakbar damage). The last selection is on the right and it determines whether the values are per second (and centered per second) or the combined damage.

What do these mean in practice? First we should look at the selections on the right. Assuming you have selected “4s” on the left and combined DPS in the middle, it changes slightly between normal DPS and centered DPS, since centered just means that the DPS is centered on “now”. You can see the graph make a slight shift once you select the “centered DPS” instead of the default “DPS”. If you selected “Damage” instead of either of the DPS selections, it will show the damage that has accumulated over the past x seconds where the x is the time.

Now if we look at the time selection on the left, we have a few choices. “Full” means the full fight and “Phase” means per phase. However, selecting one of the choices with determined time will make the graph show you the average DPS or damage done x seconds prior to this point. So if you were to select 10s and “DPS” you would see the average damage done during 10s before now”. If you swap to “Centered DPS” you would see the same, but centered on now. Selecting “Damage” would tell you damage done in the timeframe of 10 seconds prior to the selected point on the graph (i.e. you hover over 15s, you would see damage done between seconds 5s and 15s of the fight).

You can also select and deselect certain lines from showing. If you take a look at the image below, the ones that are highlighted are on the chart, but those that are dimmed out you cannot see on the chart. It is a nice way to select what information you would want to see. In this particular case, for example, downed statuses on players. You wouldn’t be able to see breakbars on the chart because it is dimmed out.

Quick note on the usage of the graph. You can click and drag to zoom in on that part of the graph. To reset to the original zoom, double-click on the graph. You can move on the horizontal and vertical axes by hovering over the axis until a two-way arrow appears. Then you can hold and drag to move on those axes. These tips work across the graphs you can see on dps.report.

This handy bar you will see if you hover over a graph. It has many options for selection, zooming and exporting as a png-file, for example! They are pretty self-explanatory as you read their names when you hover over them. They are maybe a bit less intuitive to use compared to the controls shown before.

Rotations

The rotations tab shows everyone's rotation next to each other. This might be helpful to see what was happening during each phase, whether people were in sync in faster kills or perhaps to see at a glance how your group were using their rotations. It is great to see different mistakes in rotations and analysing how people were actually adjusting their rotations to the burst, for example.

Targets Summary

The Targets Summary lives up to its name. It is a very nice summary of the target of the encounter (in this case, the ).

Outgoing Damage

1. Min, Avg and Max help you tell how much damage a specific skill from the boss dealt to the group.

• Min - The minimum damage that this skill dealt. E.g. if Vale Guardian hit with for 100, 200 and 300 damage. This means that this column would show 100 as the minimum damage.
• Avg - Average damage that this skill dealt. Basic formula would be (damage dealt by skill)/(skill hits).
• Max - Same as minimum damage, but for the maximum. In the example seen for the minimum damage value (100, 200 and 300), this column would show 300.

2. The casts, hits and damage per time spent in animation. These will allow you to see where the damage is coming from during the fight.

The first tab is the "Outgoing Damage" tab where you can see how the target dealt damage and how much. Hover over the damage dealt to see the DPS of that particular boss skill. You can also see that there is another tab for Damage Distribution called Seeker. These are the red orbs that crawl towards you on Vale Guardian and deal some damage as well. You can see here how much damage they dealt to the group to analyse seeker control, since the damage from them does add up rather quickly.

Damage Taken

Damage taken section simply shows how much damage the target took and from which sources. It is helpful in determining where your group's damage came from and how effective certain damage modifiers actually were (like and ).

Targets Summary Graph

This graph is a bit different from the graph we saw earlier. It shows this encounter from the target’s point of view rather than the squad’s point of view. It is not the most useful graph for most encounters, but for encounters where the enemy can gain boons or certain unique buffs due to failed mechanics or other causes, it can show you when they got them which can help troubleshoot your group's failures. Read more about how to read graphs in the Graph section above.

Simple Rotation

Simple rotation tab shows the simplified rotation of the boss. This might be fun to see, as there are patterns for the bosses as well that you can take into account.

Buff Status

The buff status section is rather interesting and shows relatively useful statistics, especially for those aforementioned boons. As you can see, there is a “Boons” section to this Buff Status section now, which tells us that the boss had boon uptime, like Protection, on it. This is a good statistic to see how effective your group was in stripping the enemies of boons, as Protection is a large buff to one’s defence.

In raids there are a few encounters where the enemy bosses can get boons. These are, for example, Qadim, Qadim The Peerless, Xera, Adina and Gorseval. Here you can see whether the bosses are getting boons and if you know how they get them, you can deduct if something went wrong in the raids. For example, on Xera she gets boons if she stands in the fields generated by the shards while having conditions on her.

In the same view you can see the conditions generated on the boss by players. It is handy if you are trying to analyse, for example, the Confusion generation on a Mirage on a golem.

Player Summary

For Outgoing Damage and Damage Taken, read their respective articles above.

Graph

This graph is very (VERY) good for analysing your logs and your personal performance.

In this graph, you have an abundance of selections that you can make on the right to see your boon uptimes, unique buff uptimes, debuffs, consumables, cleave, target, breakbar… almost everything! Like other graphs, it is usable with the previous tips that you can find in the other graph section. I personally think that this is a good place to look at to see very important details about your own performance (as well as to get an idea of how well your supports and healers performed).

Simple Rotation

Simple rotation is there to show you your (almost) entire rotation throughout the encounter. Some skills are undetectable by the parser, especially instant cast skills. As before, selecting a phase from the phase selector will also affect this view.

This is an example of a Soulbeast's simple rotation. Teal outline denotes an instant cast, red outline denotes a cancelled cast and green denotes full aftercast.

Here you can select a few options. Let’s go through them bit by bit:

• Show auto attacks - Does what the name sort of implies. If you don’t have this selected, the second option doesn’t matter as there are no auto attacks shown on the rotation page if you deselect this one. Auto attacks are the attacks that are on your (by default) hotkey “1”.
• Hide interrupted auto attacks. You can see on the graph that there are auto attacks with a red outline. That means that they were cancelled. This can indicate a lot of things.
• Hide < 10ms - Does exactly what the name says. It will hide everything that is under 10ms cast time.
• Hide instant cast - Hides… Instant casts? Yes, it hides instant casts. Instant cast skills are skills that aren’t channeled and happen instantaneously after pressing them (i.e. ).
• Small icons - Makes the icons all small.
• Small auto attack icons - Makes only the auto attack icons small.

Consumables

The Consumables section shows you your consumables and if you swapped them in the middle of the combat, or if they perhaps ended while you were still in combat. It shows the consumables and their remaining times. This list is maintained by hand so if some of the food effects are missing, it’s due to them not being manually added to the list. The Elite Insights Discord will probably be able to help you if you notice a missing consumable.

The consumables will also show the Reinforced Armor buff as well, letting you know if it ran out or if you were lacking it entirely.

Death Recap

Death recap shows you the context of one's death. It tells you the damage taken over time leading to death and how many seconds the person was in downstate and the damage that they took while in downstate. The important part of this graph is probably the circumstances leading to death, as you can see if someone is failing mechanics or standing in the wrong place and soaking up a lot of damage. It will also tell you exactly which skill killed someone in case there is some uncertainty about it.

Credits

Special thanks to EliphasNUIT for advice and clarifications, Linus for the flanking image and Linkazzatore for the provided logs.