Encounter Lab replays one Mythic boss mechanic from your group's own Warcraft Logs: the room drawn to scale, every pull you pick replayable, with the mechanic's hidden rules laid out and your own raid's numbers filled in. It ships with two studies today, one per boss, and it is still an in-house experiment: most groups will not see it yet.
What The Lab Is
A study picks one boss and one mechanic, then reads every Mythic pull of that boss from the raid nights you choose. It draws the room to scale, replays your raiders and the mechanic across the time strip pull by pull, and opens with a findings brief that states the mechanic's rules in plain language with your own raid's numbers filled in, not a generic description.
Still in-house
Encounter Lab has no settings toggle. A team gets it switched on by hand while it is being polished, so it will not show up under Logs for most groups yet.
The Two Studies
Manifestations of Dread
The Coiled Altar's Dreadmarch charms raiders, and each charm spawns a Manifestation of Dread that fixates on that player and walks at them. A ghost holds still while its carrier faces it and walks when they do not, so the actual danger is two ghosts reaching each other: Malevolent Resonance burns both carriers, and it snowballs, since the ghost passes to whoever is standing nearby when a carrier dies. Soul Sever is the boss's cone that clears ghosts, and it aims at the tank rather than wherever the boss looks. Gloombomb runs the whole time alongside it, a quota that always hits two melee and two ranged or healers, and never a tank.
- Map replays a pull on the room to scale: ghosts, Dreadmarch charms, the two Soul Sever cones, and every moment two ghosts overlapped, with a time strip to play or scrub through.
- Incidents lists every ghost overlap with the chain of events that produced it (who walked, why, who it burned), and every timestamp jumps straight to that moment on the map.
- Players breaks overlaps down per raider by scenario: how much of the time they faced their ghost, how often it walked because they were charmed or had just been charmed, how often they died to a resonance overlap. It is read for insight, never a fault ranking.
Malignant Totems
Two Tumor Stalkers plant 28 totems at once on Vashnik the Malignant, and do it again every 84 seconds. A totem that survives 87.4 seconds finishes its channel and starts hurting the raid, a leak. Plague Froth lands on five raiders and expires twice a batch; when it does, each carrier fires four waves out from wherever they are standing, and a wave kills any totem near its line. Totems spawn in the same spot in the room no matter where the boss is tanked, so a shape your raid rehearses once works every pull.
- Map shows the totems, the Plague Froth wave lanes, and the batch ledger for the pull you are replaying.
- Plan is an interactive planner: spawn 28 totems from the measured spawn pattern, place your five carriers, fire set 1, then use "cross two" to place set 2 on whatever survives. Every layout carries stats worked out over 500 practice spawns, so you can see how a shape performs before your raid tries it live.
- Evidence shows the real numbers from every raid night you have read, plus the leak cloud: the totems that actually finished their channel and logged where they stood.
Running A Study
Open Logs, then Lab
From your group page, go to Logs, then Lab. The catalog shows one card per study: the boss, the mechanic, and the last run's state and freshness.
Open a study
Click a card to open its study page. The header carries the boss identity and one Run study button.
Pick your raid nights
Only nights your group has already synced from Warcraft Logs that hold a Mythic pull of this boss show up. Admins can also paste extra report codes for logs outside your synced history.
Run the study
Click Run study. It only reads pulls it has not already processed, so a rerun after a new raid night spends time and Warcraft Logs requests on the new pulls, not everything again.
Read what the logs say
Once the run finishes, the What the logs say brief at the top states the mechanic's rules with your raid's own numbers filled in.
Switch lenses
Use the tabs to move between the study's lenses (Map, Incidents/Plan, Players/Evidence) to dig into the pulls behind the numbers.
Reading The Map
Both studies draw their room the same way, so the glyphs carry over once you know them:
| Glyph | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Class-coloured marker, role-shaped | A raider, coloured by class, shaped by their role (tank, healer, melee, ranged) |
| Skull | The boss |
| Diamond | A ghost (Manifestations of Dread) |
| Triangle | A totem (Malignant Totems) |
| Red | Danger: a charmed raider, a ghost overlap, a miss |
| Amber wedge | A damage cone that reaches and hits raiders (Soul Sever, on Dread's map) |
What It Will Not Tell You
- It does not rank anyone by fault. The Players lens counts scenarios per raider, like how often their ghost walked because they were charmed, not because they were careless. It is insight, not blame.
- Some positions are the mechanic's model, not the log. A ghost logs its spawn position once and nothing after; a totem only logs a position if it survives to finish its channel. Everything else drawn between those points is the tested movement model or the measured spawn pattern, and the map marks it as such.
- It is Mythic only, and only these two studies. Neither study covers Heroic, and there is no cross-guild comparison. A third study is planned but not built yet.
See also
- Log Sessions: the raid nights a study reads its pulls from
- WCL Review: compare a whole night's cast usage against your cooldown plan