Common Logging Mistakes That Ruin Your History

Most ruined parses are not ruined by bad play. They are ruined by a logging mistake that happened before or after the fight, often by someone else entirely. These mistakes are common, completely avoidable, and worth knowing because the damage they do to your history can be permanent. Here are the ones that actually matter.

Hitting a target dummy or banner during a logged fight

Any damage you deal to a target dummy, a training boss, or certain non-encounter targets while a fight is being recorded can be picked up and pollute that segment. The classic version is someone cleaving a banner or pet while the pull is technically still active, inflating or distorting numbers. Keep your damage on the actual encounter and do not test your rotation on a dummy in the raid instance while the log is running.

Mixed difficulties in one report

Killing the same boss on two difficulties in a single report — a Heroic clear followed by some Mythic pulls, or a split run — is the most common way good parses vanish. Rankings are difficulty-specific, and a messy report makes it harder to read and easier for the wrong segment to be the one people see. Start a new report when you change difficulty. This connects directly to why difficulties are ranked separately.

Starting the log late or stopping it early

A log that starts ten seconds into the pull misses the prepot, the opener, and the first cooldown usage — the most damage-dense part of the fight. The parse that results is permanently deflated through no fault of your play. The same applies to a log that stops before the boss dies. The fix is to start the log before the raid pulls anything and let it run continuously, which is exactly why live logging is recommended in the advanced logging guide.

Forgetting Advanced Combat Logging

A log recorded with Advanced Combat Logging off still produces parses, but it is missing the detail needed to analyze why anything happened, and some attribution can be degraded. You often do not notice until you try to investigate a problem and the data simply is not there. By then the raid is over and the log cannot be re-recorded. Confirm the setting once and it stays on.

Only one person logging — and it is not you

If the only logger in the raid disconnects, forgets, or sets the report private, the entire raid's parses for that night do not exist. Relying on one person is fragile. In a guild that cares about logs, having a designated backup logger is the cheapest insurance there is. If your parses are mysteriously missing for a night everyone else also lacks, this is almost always why.

Private logs and the "why is my parse not showing" trap

A private report does not contribute to rankings at all. Every season, players spend a week confused about why their parses are not appearing before discovering the guild log was set to private. If you want parses, the log must be public. If the guild logs private for strategy reasons, accept that personal rankings are off the table for that content — you cannot have both.

The pattern across all of these: the fight is rarely the problem. The container around the fight is. A two-minute pre-raid checklist prevents almost all of them — build it from the advanced logging guide and never think about it again.