A look at Ask Mr. Robot's combat log feature

I finally got the chance to dive into the new operation last night. Check out these awesome guides by Trooper Commando if you're going to be diving in yourself. Had we made more progress, I'd probably be writing an article about the operation itself. That's the bad news - we didn't make it very far. It wasn't because of the guides, though.

Here's how to enable it in-game.

The good news is that, thanks to Ask Mr. Robot's new combat log tool, we were able to find out why. If you want to do this, you'll first need to enable combat logging from your preferences menu. Be advised that this can decrease system performance. I didn't notice any slowdown myself, but my system is fairly robust when compared to the system requirements.

Mr. Robot recommends that your entire operations group disable and then enable the in-game combat logging feature at the start of a raid to ensure that your timestamps more or less match up.

Once you're done the raid, you need to head to http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/combatlog. There, you'll be able to upload your combat log, which is stored in My Documents/Star Wars: The Old Republic/CombatLogs by default.

Once you've selected the log, it is crucial that you fill out the rest of the information it asks you for (character, server name, guild name, time zone) appropriately. We had an issue where one of our guild members uploaded the log but with the wrong time zone - as a result, Mr. Robot did not know that they were in combat at the same time as us, and the logs looked strange. If you have any issues, you can head to http://blog.askmrrobot.com/2012/04/combat-log-merging-help/. There is plenty of support available and you can even ask Mr. Robot directly if you still need help.

After that, Mr. Robot will look to see if similar logs have been uploaded by the rest of your raid. If so, you'll have the option to merge into those logs, so all the data will be in the same place.

Once everyone's uploaded and merged, you've got yourself an in-depth look at what happened in your raid.

Example log, courtesy of Ask Mr. Robot

I'm quite impressed with the detail and flexibility, and based on Mr. Robot's past track record I have no doubt that this feature will only become better with time.

The only issue I had was that we could only have one person merging at a time, which meant that it took a bit of time to get it done. Again, I have no doubts this will be addressed an improved, given time. UPDATE: I've received word from the official Mr. Robot twitter that the one-merge-at-a-time issue is being addressed already! Can't wait to test the new version!

Overall, a great start by Mr. Robot, and when more functionality is added and it is optimized for multiple merges, I bet it will be one of the go-to tools for SWTOR combat logging.