Note: This is accurate as of late 2019. Not much has changed since then other than how logs should be assessed and some of the details of how healing works. I’ll update this guide sometime soon to correct those items.

I’m sure that most players have seen or heard people talk about their statistics, how much damage they do, how much healing they do, and other metrics. While there are some people running private addons that are capable of extracting a lot more information, what I’m going to explain is how anyone can see some data.

Before you try enabling logs, the Recount addon, or any other combat metrics addon, please keep in mind that they may be very resource intensive on less powerful systems. You should consider running the same scenario with and without enabling logging or addons in order to accurately judge the difference in performance (if any).

There is a built-in function in the game that will create a file locally on your computer with the full details of everything that happens to you in the game. To turn this logging function on, all you need to do is type /encounterlog in the text chat window. Logging will then start for everything about your, your group’s, and your opponents’ activities to a file located at:

C:\Users\%username\Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live\Logs\Encounter.log

Note that new logs are automatically appended to the file, and it can grow enormous, so you should only turn on logging when you want to gather data. If you crash, log out, or sometimes even transit to another zone, the log may end. You can type /encounter log again to re-enable it.

The file will start by listing all the players in your (current) group. This is an example with myself and three others:

3,BEGIN_LOG,1594774326711,15,”NA Megaserver”,”en”,”eso.live.6.0″
3,ZONE_CHANGED,181,”Cyrodiil”,NONE
3,UNIT_ADDED,1,PLAYER,T,276,0,F,6,7,”Crown”,”@Crown77″,11052765831725045509,50,1359,0,PLAYER_ALLY,T
3,UNIT_ADDED,3161,PLAYER,F,277,0,F,1,4,”Alpha”,”@alpha”,0,50,1539,0,PLAYER_ALLY,T
3,UNIT_ADDED,11140,PLAYER,F,278,0,F,6,7,”Bravo”,”@bravo”,0,50,933,0,PLAYER_ALLY,T
3,UNIT_ADDED,3444,PLAYER,F,279,0,F,4,4,”Charley”,”@charley”,0,50,1518,0,PLAYER_ALLY,T

Note that your own name will be listed first, then everyone else’s. Lines for each player will be based on alphabetical order after your own. In this example, I’ve changed the names to alpha, bravo, and charley with those same @names. If someone has themselves set anonymous, then they will show up as empty quotation marks: “”,””. If you take a screen shot of your group members (open the party window and hit print screen), you can then later go back and edit the text file replacing all of the “” with the names of the people in your group.

Ensuring That You See Accurate Data For Each Player

In order to have everyone’s character names appear in the log without “Anonymous #” (saving you the time to manually enter them, then look up who joined the group in what order for later “UNIT_ADDED” lines that you would otherwise need to find and edit), they will have to make a change in their game settings. Open Settings, Combat, and under Encounter Log change the option to Appear Anonymously to OFF. If you don’t do this, your data will still show up in the logs, but it won’t add your name to it. Anyone in your raid can easily identify who you are based on your casts, gear, buffs applied, and activities during combat, so this doesn’t actually keep you anonymous, it just removes your character name so that if data is made public other people won’t identify which character was yours.

Once you’re done with a logging session, you should manually rename the Encounter.log file to something unique. I like to use the date and a short description, for example: 2020-06-18_Duel_With_Drace.log or 2020-06-18_PvP_Duo_With_Tiny.log.

Once you have a log, you then need to parse it. The contents won’t make any sense to most people as you can see in this sample line of healing:

34480,COMBAT_EVENT,HEAL,GENERIC,MAGICKA,714,3866,72143404,68401,1,
18450/18450,5533/32163,9918/10794,4/500,396/1000,0,0.6265,0.4477,1.3156,*

I’ve written some tools to do analytics for my own purposes. If you’re not interested in doing so yourself, https://www.esologs.com/ is a great site that can do it for you. The site (as of 2020/07) is more PvE than PvP oriented, and considers PvP fights to be “Trash Pulls” rather than boss fights, so just be aware that it may look confusing at first. It will separate all of your time logging into sessions or fights when you are in combat, making it easy to see what’s going on in each fight.

If you upload your logs to the ESO Logs web site, be sure that you set the session to private, or at least unlisted. There may be data in there that your guild considers proprietary, and that should not be shared with the public!

If you use the ESO Logs site, you can see detailed info about everyone in raid. For example:

Example Data from a Test Duel
Your own character gear and skill bars.
The gear and skill bars from people who are in group with you. In this case Drace was my opponent, but we were grouped up so I could see his info.
Skill, ability, buff, and debuff up-time. In this example (duel) you can see that my Shadow was up for the second half of the fight, and I cast a Sap just after the Shadow came up.
Who did damage. In this case, I did 92.05% of the damage to the target, and my Shadow did 7.95% of the damage.
Graphs that show damage and healing over time. In this example, it shows my damage over the (approximately) 37 second duel.
How much damage and the percent of total damage done by ability. You can also see healing done by ability.
If you want to get even more details, you can see the number of casts, hits, crit percentages, up-time, and DPS.

Some of the ways to analyze logs aren’t very obvious. Here’s an example of two players’ Radiating Regeneration statistics over a fight. Although the image sizes don’t match perfectly, it should be relatively easy to compare columns.

• In this example, we’ve confirmed that the number of players healed by each healer averaged 5.4 and 5.5. This means that the cast likely hit the same person twice a few times, so sometimes casting it twice applies the HoT (Heal over Time) on five people, other times six people. In some rare cases it may only be four people.
• The uptime of both healers is very close (63.34% vs 64.58%). This means that they had Radiating Regen up for about the same amount of time during the fight.
• The average cast value including overheal was 2.1k for the first healer, and 2.3k for the second. This implies that the second healer had slightly higher stats (max magicka and/or spell damage) than the first, or perhaps has the Ritual mundus whereas the other healer didn’t (which should be corrected).
• The amount of overheal is very close (92.05% vs 92.39%), implying that both healers were likely keeping their casts up around the same times. If one healer let their HoTs lapse during big damage moments, the numbers would be different with one healer having less overheal. Good healers think alike!
• The first healer cast it 102 times, and the second 72 times. This is an issue. If both healers had very similar number of targets, uptime, and overheal, the likely conclusion is that the first healer cast the spell 30 times while their regen was already up, either refreshing it part way through, or moving it to another player. The spell lasts 10 seconds per target, and at the time this guide was written, a maximum of 6 targets could have one healer’s regen at the same time, it should have been cast twice every 10 seconds (now the cap has been lifted, so this isn’t accurate anymore). 30 wasted casts during a fight of about 7.5 minutes is a lot. If we look at the rest of the statistics for these two healers, we can see that the first healer has a lot less casts of energy orbs, illustrious healing, and hasty prayer, resulting in the overall healing and value to the group of the first healer being a lot lower than the second healer. This is something very simple to address/improve/correct.

Did this affect the group’s performance?

Probably not significantly, as most healers overheal a lot (80-90%), so that particular healer’s drop in performance (wasting 30 casts in the fight that could have gone to other skills) wouldn’t have made a difference to the group’s success. If another raid has less healers, where every one makes a difference (to match incoming damage or if the group is spread), it would have definitely impacted the group. If damage was ever greater than healing output, those extra 2 casts per 10 seconds from one healer could have changed a wipe into a win.

Another challenge arises when different healers each have a weakness like the above, but each one is different! Without logs like this, it’s not realistic or feasible to identify what they may be. If almost every healer is under-performing by 25% and all for different reasons, more healers will be needed to achieve a baseline and that takes away from other roles in the raid.

In this particular scenario, a simple solution (and one that I’ve been using for months for myself) is to add a buff widget showing Radiating Regeneration in an obvious icon on your screen. Since the spell will usually prioritize the healer casting it, with a double cast there’s an almost certain change of you casting it on yourself. When the icon disappears or the timers on the buff icon is down to 1 second, it’s time to double cast it again. Since I started doing that (and paying attention to it), my own Radiating Regeneration efficiency has increased significantly.

For most people, looking in this much detail will be more effort than they want to spend. For those who seek to be the best that they can be, analyzing information like this is very important.

If all of these logs are too much effort, you can also use the Recount addon to show you real time numbers, as well as graphs of total damage, healing, and distribution. It takes a lot less effort to click the button on the Recount window than to load up logs! Here are two examples:

In this example, you see a templar’s healing.	In this example, you see a warden’s healing.

There is an enormous amount of information available in these logs, and if you would like to analyze your own play to better understand what you’re doing, what happens, and how you can better improve, using these logs is a great resource!