Tracking Damage

While I've admitted that I'm not a huge fan of knowing who's on top of the damage meters, I think I may have under stressed the importance of knowing who can deal serious damage when needed. If two people of the same class are dead and I only have one battle rez, who am I going to rebirth? Did the mage who went from quest greens to full Spellfire set really increase their DPS that much? So, while I hate them (for the pissing contest they can be sometimes), it's one of those necessary evils I suppose. Furthermore, I've probably had a damage tracker installed as an add-on since my first toon hit 25.

So, where do you go? What do you install? The time honored favorite from what I've seen seems to be DamageMeters. It's pretty simple and straight forward. It shows up as a little box that fills up any time somebody in your party or raid does damage or heals. You can have it show up as Healing Done or Damage Done. I'm fairly certain it will track all healing though. So, overhealing could certainly pad the scales quite a bit. Meanwhile, killing rats with Pyroblast could also be a way of cheating the meters, but not really the point I'm trying to make. lol. You can right-click on the meters to bring up a whole list of options. This is also where you tell it to report the meters to raid/party/whisper/whatever.

There are some limitations with DamageMeters however. It only tracks the damage you see, so there's a distance issue. If you die and are corpsing back while the rest of the party is still blasting/healing away, they don't get credit for all of that fighting. Or in some fights where people have to be spaced out, there may be some issues as well. I believe by default, the distance limitation is 50 yards, but I could be mistaken on that one. So, if you're on one side of the dining room fighting the adds for Moroes, the tanks on the other side may not get credit.

SW Stats, however, seems to overcome that limitation. You'll notice the same basic structure as DamageMeters. You get to see who's on top of the damage/healing charts. There's some nice, easy ways to report the stats to any channel you wish. But the difference is that SW Stats works behind the scene to synchronize the data between everyone that's running the mod. They recommend having 5 people using the mod will more than cover your entire raid. So, once a sync is requested by a player, all "members" that use the mod are asked to alloy the sync. (Usually would occur at the beginning of a raid or boss fight, but whenever.) That resets the meter from that point. It's technical, but it uses some type of time line, so your data isn't technically erased. At any rate... it tracks data, and it tracks it well. ;)

Now, to be fair to DamageMeters, there is some synchronization going on. But it doesn't work quite the same. If I recall correctly, all members have to have it set to allow syncs, and even then you sometimes get old data, or data from other players' alts. So, it seems that they've got the basic concept down, but I've never seen it work as well as the first night (and every night) that I use SW Stats.

So... If you want a damage/healing tracking tool, my recommendation is to download SW Stats and tell all your friends about it. lol. Does anyone know of any other tracking tools like these two? Who knows... maybe there's something better out there.