As many of you probably have figured, I’m a big fan of the Lua Plugins in LOTRO and just started to check out one of the newer ones that’s out there.  The Combat Analysis plugin is a revamp of the CStats application that ran outside of LOTRO, but this now runs inside of the game, and essentially works as a DPS/Healing meter.  There are some potential issues I can see that would bring out the “Gearscore fear,” but for the most part this is a useful tool to help understand how you’re playing your character.

First off, the specifics of the plugin are quite like many others in that you extract it into your plugins folder and launch it when you launch the game.  You also need to enable the Combat Chat logging (select the Combat chat tab, right click and select “Start Logging” under the Chat Logging option) but unlike CStats you don’t need to know where that file lives.  There’s one last thing you need to do is kick off the executable that comes with the plugin to start the log parsing.  This is all explained in the page on LOTRO Interface, but it is a pretty painless and well set up process.  So yes, this does require a little bit of setup but for people like me, it is WELL worth it.

Once you have it up and running you’ll have a movable GUI element that shows you damage output and taken, healing output, and power sharing.  The fact that this is all in-game really allows you to better understand what’s going on and more quickly keep track of how things are going.  It will break out your stats as well as soldiers and pets, but remember that the combat log only has your information so you won’t have access to any other player data.

The main use for this kind of data is understanding how you can improve your characters’ performance either through rotations, items, weapons, legendary item legacies, or traits.  It allows you to look at things on a per-pull basis as well as overall.  So you can do mob comparisons or even instance comparisons.  I for one have used it quite a bit to compare rotations as well as better understand how helpful it would be to buff certain skills versus others.  Take a look at the screen-shots below to get a feel for how it looks.

Damage DoneDamage TakenHealingDone

Now I will point out that all three of these are expanded with the normal UI for this widget only showing the top portion with the more detailed data being hidden until it is selected.

I know some of you might not like the plugins, but I’ve really enjoyed using it and wanted to share my experience with it.  If you want to see more examples of this plugin in action, check out my recent videos up on my LOTRO YouTube show as I’m running with this on all my characters.

One thing I also wanted to point out (although I haven’t tried it) is the option to share your data with others.  An option of the application is to stream the data to a server, which would allow for a group and/or raid to share their data.  The idea behind this would be that someone could look through this data and make suggestions for people to either update their rotations or maybe tweak their gear.  Now I’m sure some people will claim this could be used as a “GearScore-like” tool, the amount of work it takes to get this set up pretty much prevents it from being used by anyone outside of the dedicated “hard-core” folks.  One other caveat I wanted to toss out that I’ve heard in-game is that the “server” application can be a huge resource hog and is not recommended to be running on the same machine that you’re trying to play on.

 

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