Tracking Incoming Damage

Over on the CoH forums, there was an interesting question posted:

Can HeroStats separate out sources of damage?

Short answer: In theory, yes. In practice, no.

Long answer: Damage messages have a ton of different formats. Some show mob names, some show the power the mob used, some show damage type, and various combinations thereof (including none of the above).

Because of all this variety, it would take an inordinate amount of effort to track every single variation of every damage message. So I made a decision a while back that the only thing we would try to keep track of is damage type (and amount, of course). There's always a few messages with "Unknown" type, but most are tracked.

Even with this approach, we have dozens of different damage message formats to maintain, and every new patch seems to add a few more. It's really not feasible to keep up with all the various possibilities.