As we have seen recently, Sigil has begun to tweak and balance the classes in an attempt to address the concerns of the Vanguard community.  Many players feel that their class is not where it should be, and that further attempts should be made to balance each archetype according to their role in the group, and the play-style of the players.  The primary concern for many monks (and other offensive fighters) is Damage Per Second (DPS.)

A couple of weeks ago, I began to play around with the idea of writing a DPS parser for Vanguard.  The original plan was to make it a feature of Vanguard Monks - but it became clear that a networked application would not be able to handle the bandwidth and CPU requirements that uploading and parsing large log files would require.  I have been looking for a reason to learn C# and the .NET framework for a while now (my professional background is on the Unix side of the pond - mostly Perl, PHP, C/C++, a little Java, etc.) - and I decided that this would be it.

The goal of this project is two fold:  First, to provide a tool that will facilitate accurate log file analysis - hopefully giving us more insight as to what does and does not work for our class.  And second, to help level the playing field:  If we are to provide good feedback to Sigil's developers, we need hard numbers.  We need to know exactly where we stand.  This tool will provide exactly that.

The first public version of the Vanguard Monks DPS Parser - version 0.2 beta - is complete, and allows you to quickly compare any source of damage in your client's vicinity.  You can compare your DPS with other players, NPC's, whatever.  I have plans to expand to other functionality, including Heals, Damage Taken, attacker vs target DPS (ie. X vs all, all vs Y, and X vs Y), graphs, bells, whistles, etc - but first I need Sigil to fix the log file format.  :)

Instructions:

1. Click Here to Download Version 0.2 Beta.
2. Unzip DPSParser.zip into any location on your machine.
3. In your game client, add a new chat tab (by right-clicking an existing one and selecting "New Tab") and give it a descriptive name.
4. In the settings for your new tab, enable *all* check-boxes.
5. within that chat window, type /log (or /autolog to have the game client log automatically every time.)  Verify that you get a message in the chat window that the log file is enabled.
6. Run DPSParser.exe and open any log file of your choice.  The log files can be found in <vanguard game folder>\bin\<chat tab name>_Log_<date / time>.txt

Known issues:

• DoTs do not parse correctly - the log file format does not specify the caster, making this difficult to match up (especially with more than one of a given DoT casting class within the vicinity of the logger. (ie. "Soandso casts BigDot on Target" - followed by multiple lines of "Target takes X damage from BigDot".)

• It is sometimes difficult to separate the attacker from the verbiage.  If you see any occurrences of "Soandso crushes" or "Soandso misses" in the entity list, please send me the relevant lines from your log file.

• Parsing speed may not yet be optimal - this is all possible through the magic of Regular Expressions, however, I need to do further analysis of very large log files to see if this can be tweaked for speed.

• Sometimes the client does not log both first and last names.  So, you may see "Soandso" as well as "Soandso Surname" in the entity list.  This is another limitation in the Vanguard client - and I cannot work around it unless I strip all surnames (which would be worse IMO - mobs named "Bone Crusher" and "Bone Smasher" would appear to be the same entity named "Bone".) 

I have attempted to handle the multitude of exceptions in Sigil's log format, but there may be other issues that I have not yet seen.  If you have a log that just won't parse, please e-mail a sample (as an attachment) to me at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it


Have fun this weekend!  ;)

~kaji

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