Ok, before everyone flips out about this, I’ll preface this post by saying everything below has been available in LOTRO for a long time via the CStats tool.

As some of you may or may not have noticed, a new Lua plugin was added to LOTRO Interface that allows for the display of your character’s DPS.  Now because of the way Turbine has restricted this data (on purpose) the actual implementation of this plugin is not quite for the faint of heart.  I’ll walkthrough what it does first, and then explain how to set it up.

Just like CStats, this plugin parses your combat log – notice the key point there, your combat log.  The plugin doesn’t have access to any other data for your opponents or others in your fellowship, just like CStats.  The real benefit here over CStats is that you can display the output inside of LOTRO as opposed to outside.  I actually envision using both this plugin and CStats as one gives more of an instant feedback while CStats provides more ways to slice up the data.  Anyway, I created a quick video that shows the plug-in in action but essentially you can choose to show instantaneous DPS or the DPS over the course of a fight.  As I mention in the video (another flawless commentary track provided by yours truly) the instantaneous display did seem to slow down my performance a bit so I’d suggest playing around with it some before using it while raiding 😉  Take a look at the video, and below it I’ll walkthrough the set-up.

[youtube kxIKGZZd2BI]

The setup is very well documented both on the download page and in a read-me, but after downloading it and extracting to your Plugins directory there are a couple other things you’ll need to do.  First up is copying the VBS file from the PluginData folder into your PluginData<account name>AllServers folder.  The other step is that before you expect this plugin to run, you’ll need to start up your combat log and kick off that VBS script you just moved.  So, if you right-click on your combat chat tab there’s an option to log the data.  It will provide a path which is inside your My DocumentsThe Lord of the Rings folder.  Then you’ll need to alt-tab and just double-click the VBS file and it will prompt you to point to that log file you just started.  After that you’re all set to go and can load up the plugin.  Once the plugin is up and running (I use the Plugin Manager like I talked about here) you can use the following options:

  • /dpsmeter show – always shows the meter and provides instantaneous feedback
  • /dpsmeter hide – stop showing the meter
  • /dpsmeter post – only shows the meter when you’re not in-combat and shows the overall values for that fight.

If you’re a stats geek like me, this is a must have!