What's Missing
In any other expansion, adding a dedicated damage meter to the game would have been an objectively good move, but coming at the same time as addon restrictions forces us to compare what features we've lost from third party tools such as Details.
There are no ability breakdowns. You can see the total amount of damage or healing each ability did, but you cannot see the number of hits, crits, misses, or any other associative information. It won't even tell you which targets the ability dealt damage to, in the case that Cleave made up 33% of your damage but only 8% of it was dealt to the primary target.
Buff and debuff uptime is no more, making it more difficult to quickly evaluate who was affected by what effect or a specific DoT or beneficial effect was maintained.
Resource information is completely absent, as are resurrections, crowd control breaks, friendly fire damage, and so on.
The Death Recap only records incoming damage, with no regard for healing or mitigation. Upon relogging, that information is wiped completely, making it impossible to look at past segments. Do players tend to die to the same mechanic? Who knows, that information is gone now.
No review for you.
While Details still technically works, it now functions as a skin instead of a distinct tool. Half of its features are no longer available, and because of new rules restricting addon functions during combat, it will not update at all until after combat has ended. As a result, players are pushed even further towards using external logs.
That's a whole lot of former features now greyed out.
What's Broken
Not only are some features missing, others are broken outright. In addition to the historical Death Recap being cleared upon relogging, the personal post-death recap will also swap to the most recent player to die, although nothing on the screen informs you that you're now looking at a different player.
Clicking the big red Recap button causes the tank's to appear, as they were the most recent to die.
In fact, a lot of segments forget their information after relogging. Simple things like dispels and interrupts no longer display their proper ability names or numbers. This probably isn't the biggest problem in the world, but does reduce confidence in the tool as a whole.
Healers aren't exempt from these issues either, as absorbed healing appears to be counted twice on the damage meter, amounting to a significant deviation. Previously, this is something that could be cross referenced using Details' dedicated Heal Absorbed meter.
Something doesn’t add up.
While the damage meter helpfully shows which specialization each player was in, starting a new combat after changing specializations will also overwrite previous segments, resulting in some odd looking group combinations.
Going to link this when people say I don't play Arms.
On top of that, some raid bosses aren't captured correctly, with Alleria and Chimaerus being the two most relevant in Midnight Season 1. Both encounters will begin a new segment after their intermissions, despite being part of the same combat.
Note the new 13s duration, despite being more than halfway through the fight.
Mythic+ also has some problems, as turning off the option to automatically reset the damage meter when entering a new instance will cause the end-of-dungeon segment to combine the Overall report instead, with no way to decouple the two!
That's a lot of players for one key!
Mismatched Attribution
While some of these issues can be forgiven, while others just leave us wanting more, there's also the question of accuracy. In fact, it was one of the selling points when Game Director Ion Hazzikostas first pitched the idea last year.
I think one of the exciting things, I think if we're doing that on our end, we can also have it be server authoritative. So you're not worried about who's in a different combat phase, who's out of range or whatever. It could just be like, this is official and going to be accurate all the time.
Yet despite this intent, correctly attributing the contribution of Augmentation Evoker's continues to be a thorn that Blizzard simply cannot excise. This doesn't just affect the Evoker either, but also every player affected by their buffs, immediately skewing any segment featuring the specialization.
Actual logs practically double the performance of Augmentation... while reducing everyone else's.
To be clear, this is a problem that also plagued Details, as the hooks required to properly attribute Augmentation Evoker performance is something that can only be changed on Blizzard's end. In both cases, players needed to use external logs (which can access those hooks) to determine the actual value of an Augmentation Evoker.... an ongoing issue for the better part of three years now.
Between all of these issues and more, using the damage meter for anything other than a novel (if not necessarily accurate) overview is a lost cause, resulting in an even greater reliance on external logs than before. Blizzard knows they're important to players, repeatedly emphasizing the importance of being able to evaluate performance, but in order to do that, the in-game damage meter still has a long way to go.
The single most popular add-on used across the entire game is a damage meter, by like a fair margin. The majority of players, the large majority of players have a damage meter add-on installed. And so that indicates that people want to see that information at least about themselves. We definitely want more nuanced measures of success and understanding, like how successful were you or how much did you contribute on this run?
Highlighting things like interrupts, highlighting things like avoidable damage to give a fuller picture of performance. But at the end of the day, you know, I think for someone who's trying a new spec, trying a new talent build, putting on getting a new trinket, and they want to see like how did this affect my performance compared to the last run? That's that's an important piece of information to have. And so I think, you know, we know that in any world where we were going to limit some of the ability of add-ons to like again, do that real time combat event tracking, we would need to provide a damage meter solution of our own.
