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Buffs Tab

910 words·5 mins·

**Contents:

First lets see what we can get out of this tab. Obviously, everything which counts as a buff, which includes:

  • buffs applied by active and passive abilities, and also core combat abilities (dodge/block/break free)
  • buffs applied by sets
  • food and drinks
  • buffs applied by CP
  • mundus stones
  • buffs applied by potions
  • synergies effects and cooldowns
  • uncleansable debuffs from trial bosses/trash (yes, you heard it right)

While we’re gonna see countless buffs, only some of them are interesting to us as healers/raidleaders, and they are gonna be in next categories:

Major group cooldown:

  • Major Courage
  • Major Sorcery/Brutality
  • Minor Sorcery/Brutality/Prophecy/Savagery
  • Major Force
  • Major Slayer
  • Minor Berserk
  • Powerful Assault
  • Empower (prior to U35)

Major individual cooldown:

  • Minor Toughness

Damage buffs:

  • multiple components of already mentioned major group cooldowns

Defensive buffs:

  • Major Resolve

Healing buffs:

  • Minor intellect/Endurance
  • Enlivening Overflow

Movement buffs:

  • Minor and Major Expedition

Food, drinks and munduses can be in any of mentioned categories, or under “uncategorized buffs”, depending on their impact on your stats.

Synergy effects and cooldowns will most likely be in uncategorized buffs.

Symphony of blades resource restore is falling under uncategorized buffs aswell.

It is important to remember that the buff can have several different sources, like Major force can be sourced by Agressive Warhorn (skill) and Saxhleel’s Champion (set), or Major Slayer can be sourced from 4 different sets, 3 of them are common support ones: Roaring Opportunist, Master Architect and War Machine or Minor Berserk can be sourced by Combat Prayer (skill) and Kinras (set). This is also the case if you have people of same class in the group which bring same group utility like 2x Sorcerers - that would mean their Minor Prophecy uptime will overlap and rewrite each others. Of course there are more examples to that, but I hope the idea is clear.

This overlap makes checking of individual impact most of the time pretty pointless and wrong, and having multiple sources is confusing. However sometimes its still required for example in building correct ultimate rotations to align Warhorns and Saxhleel procs better.

Every individual component and total uptime of the buff will have a unique ID, like this:

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On this example, those 3 IDs correspond to Major Force from Warhorn (40225), Saxhleel (154830) and total (61747). If you are ever in doubt which is which, but you know who is wearing and doing what, you can select a group member in “All Friendlies”, “Cast by friendly” in top right corner and limit it to one ID (or in some cases two - component + total) at a time.

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If sourcing comes from same type of proc but different people it is much simpler, as you will only have one ID.

Now, that we know how to correctly select a buff we want to check, time has come for another rule of reading logs #3: that line and % you see in “Buffs” tab is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT. If you saw 80-100% there and think you’re doing great don’t be so quick to celebrate because this is a wrong way to check uptimes.

THIS IS WRONG:

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This yellow line, in fact, indicates the % of time when buff is active on at least ONE person from the group, while we actually want damage and defensive buffs to be active on as many people as possible simultaneously.

If you want to check general uptime of a buff on each group member you have to:

  1. select “Gained by friendly” in top right corner of the tab
  2. find the buff in the list with correct ID in the list
  3. click on the buff This will give you the next picture:

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If you want to check uptime contribution of performance of a separate group member, you have to:

  1. select “Cast by friendly” in top right corner of the tab
  2. find the buff in the list with correct ID
  3. click on the buff This will give you next picture:

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Either of that works for different cases and different buffs, and is the only correct way to judge performance and same principle applies to everything you would ever need to check as a healer or raidleader.

TLDR version of how to correctly check most common uptimes will be in common-uptimes

And as cheery on a pie, few words about special debuffs. Because ZoS code is we all know.. very special, uncleansable debuffs are actually buffs. Just with a negative effect. A very bright example of that is Maim in vAS from Felms Jumps and his light attacks. It can be found under “Damage buff” category, and however unrelated to healing can be useful for raidleader 🙂

Another important tip, remember that some fights have “dead time” where you don’t have anything important to hit, for example Nahvintaas when adds are dead but boss didn’t land yet, or Assembly General, when he is sitting in the middle and terminals are already dead. In that case you should compare numbers to effective uptime on all important targets (boss + big adds). Easiest way to do that is to compare your buff uptime to taunt uptime, as it will always be up on major targets. But thankfully, most of the fights are full-uptime ones so it is advisable to aim for highest possible uptime.