A real-time, movable, transparent combat overlay for EverQuest Legends. It tails your
character log and turns it into live DPS/HPS, encounter breakdowns, melee-avoidance stats,
buff/debuff tracking, and big center-screen combat pop-ups — all in a click-through window
that floats over the game and matches the default_modern UI theme.
It reads only your own EverQuest log file (the game's built-in
/log), the same way parsers like ACT and GINA do. Nothing is injected into the game.
I play Kortanix on the Halas server.
- Features
- Screenshots
- Requirements
- Install & run
- Using the overlay
- Notifications
- Cooldown tracking
- Encounters & the fight pop-out
- Avoidance & survivability
- XP & leveling
- Settings
- Spell data
- How it works
- What it can and can't show
- Extending it
- Project layout
- Live DPS / HPS for you and your pet, plus consolidated incoming damage and enemy healing.
- Sparkline HUD — the minimized view is a stack of compact label-left / value-right bars; throughput rates (HPS, DTPS, enemy HPS) draw a live per-second sparkline, percentages read as plain text, and each tracked cooldown drains toward a gold READY.
- Encounters — fights are auto-segmented on a 10-second idle gap, with a rolling history, a per-second DPS/incoming timeline, and a detailed pop-out window per fight.
- Damage breakdown — per-ability totals, hits, average, max, crit % and miss %.
- Melee avoidance — dodge / parry / block / miss rates, damage taken, DTPS, biggest hit, stuns, and incoming-by-enemy. (Session and per-encounter.)
- Buff & debuff tracking — self-buffs are mapped from their flavor text via the EQL wiki, pet buffs and debuffs from their worn-off lines. Alerts on gain and on fade.
- Center-screen combat pop-ups that rise and fade — backstab, kick / round kick, strike, cleave (with double/triple attack and multi-target detection), Reave / Smite / Frenzy (with their multi-hits merged), hide/sneak success & failure, Mend, and more.
- Cooldown tracking for Quick Buff, SK Harm Touch and Paladin Lay on Hands — a live countdown box plus a "ready" pop-up, self-correcting off the game's own cooldown readout when you tap a skill early (see below).
- XP & leveling — live level, % into the current level, time-to-level and kills-to-level, XP/hr, average XP per kill, and a best-XP-mobs ranking. Projections self-calibrate off your level-ups (no manual setup), and it says so while it waits for the first one.
- Loot, coin, motes and AA tracking with per-hour rates.
- One-click spell-data update pulled from the EQL wiki (no PowerShell needed).
- Settings window to toggle any notification category, set transparency, pet name, and more.
- Themed to match the game's
default_modernskin (charcoal + gold), with your own data palette.
Minimized HUD — the headline DPS with a sparkline of the current fight behind it, then compact stat bars: throughput rates (HPS, DTPS, enemy HPS) carry a live sparkline, percentages and discrete values read as plain text, and each tracked cooldown drains toward a gold READY.
| Overview (maximized) | Avoidance tab |
|---|---|
|
 |
Rising combat notifications — each pops at center, floats up, and fades near the top; up to three at once.
Settings window — opened from the gear icon.
The images above are representative mockups built from the app's real layout and palette. Drop your own screenshots into
images/to replace them.
- Windows (the overlay is WPF / Win32).
- .NET 10 SDK — the same one you run
dotnetwith. (No separate runtime install needed if you have the SDK.) - EverQuest Legends running in Windowed or Borderless Windowed mode — an overlay can't draw on top of exclusive fullscreen.
- Logging enabled in-game: type
/log ononce so the client writeseqlog_<You>_<server>.txt.
git clone https://github.com/<you>/eql-metrics.git
cd eql-metrics
dotnet run -c ReleaseOr just double-click a launcher (both live in the repo root):
Run-EqlMetrics.cmd— builds (incrementally, so it's quick after the first time) and starts the overlay. Shows build errors if anything's wrong.Run-EqlMetrics.vbs— the same thing, silent (no console window). Nice as a desktop/taskbar shortcut. If it ever seems to do nothing, run the.cmdto see why.
Tip: right-click a launcher → Send to → Desktop (create shortcut), then pin it and give it an icon so it feels like an installed app.
On first launch the overlay tries to auto-detect your newest eqlog_*.txt. If it can't, click
the folder icon (or Settings → Log file → Change…) and pick it.
The window is borderless and always-on-top. Drag the title bar to move it. The top-bar icons:
| Icon | Action |
|---|---|
| 📁 | Pick your log file |
| ⚙ | Open Settings |
| ⊘ | Toggle click-through (also Ctrl+Alt+X) |
| ▢ | Expand / collapse (minimized HUD ↔ full tabbed view) |
| ✕ | Close |
Click-through makes the overlay ignore the mouse so clicks pass to the game — toggle it back off (the hotkey works even while click-through is on) when you want to interact with the overlay.
The minimized HUD shows the headline DPS (with a faint sparkline of the current fight behind it) and a you/pet split, then a stack of compact stat bars: HPS, DTPS (incoming), and enemy HPS each carry a live per-second sparkline; avoid %, XP/hr (with your level and % into it), and damage-shield reflect read as plain values; and any tracked cooldown shows a draining bar with its countdown. Expand for the tabbed view:
- Overview — consolidated totals, an XP & leveling section (see below), session rates, top damage & healing, biggest hits.
- Breakdown — party damage and full per-ability breakdowns, healing, incoming.
- Avoidance — melee survivability (see below).
- Encounters — pick from recent fights, see the DPS timeline, open a detailed pop-out.
- Loot — recent drops, coin, and motes.
Combat events surface as center-screen pop-ups that spawn near the middle of the screen, float upward, and fade out near the top — up to three visible at once (extras queue). They're click-through and never steal focus from the game.
What flashes, each with its own color and icon:
- Skills — backstab / kick / strike / Reave / Smite / Frenzy hits with the damage, styled gold on a crit; double and triple attacks (and Frenzy's extra-weapon swings) are merged into one pop-up ("DOUBLE FRENZY"), and multi-target cleave / round-kick shows the target count ("ROUND KICK — 3 targets"). Reave and Smite fold in their magic rider (Reaving / Smiting Strike) so the number is the whole hit. These proc constantly, so only landed hits flash — misses stay silent.
- Cooldowns ready — a "ready" flash when Quick Buff, Harm Touch, or Lay on Hands comes back up (see Cooldown tracking).
- Buffs — green "gained" when a buff lands, red "faded from you/pet" when one drops (a mass cast coalesces into one "N buffs gained").
- Hide / Sneak — success in violet/teal, failure in red with a ⚠.
- Mend — a green confirmation (the log carries no heal amount).
Every category can be toggled in Settings, and the max-on-screen count is adjustable.
EverQuest Legends never logs a line when an ability becomes ready, and its custom-UI system can't be scripted — so, like every other stat here, cooldowns are reconstructed from the log. EQL Metrics tracks three long-reuse abilities and shows each as a live countdown box in the HUD that flips to a gold READY, plus a center-screen "ready" flash:
- Quick Buff — fixed 10-minute reuse.
- Harm Touch (Shadowknight) — 20-minute base, but every landed Reave shaves 60 seconds off it.
- Lay on Hands (Paladin) — 15-minute base, and every landed Smite shaves 60 seconds off it.
The countdown starts when it sees you activate the ability (mob casts of the same name are ignored), then counts down — subtracting time as your Reaves / Smites land, shown as "-3m via reave".
Tap the skill while it's on cooldown to keep the timer honest. There's no proactive "ready" message, but the game does print an exact remaining time the moment you try to use something too early — "You can use the ability Harm Touch again in 4 minute(s) 20 seconds." EQL Metrics reads that line and snaps the timer to the game's exact value, correcting any accumulated drift. It even works if the app started after you'd already cast — one early tap and it starts tracking from the real remaining time. When a timer has been synced this way it shows a small "✓ synced" tag. So an occasional tap on a cooldown skill is all it takes to keep the countdown dead-on.
Each of the three has its own toggle in Settings → Notifications; turning one off hides both its HUD box and its ready flash.
Fights are segmented automatically: a new encounter starts after a ~10-second lull in combat, and the last 20 are kept in a rolling history. The Encounters tab lets you pick any recent fight and shows its summary, a DPS/incoming timeline, your party's contribution, healing, and the enemies — plus a scrollable "recent fights" list. Click any fight to open its full detail window.
The pop-out is a large, review-oriented window that snapshots everything about that one fight:
- Summary — your/pet/combined DPS, total damage, HPS and overheal, damage taken, biggest hit, enemy healing, and enemy count.
- Avoidance — the same melee-avoidance breakdown, scoped to this fight (great for "how did I do on that boss?").
- DPS over time — a line chart of your outgoing DPS vs. incoming damage, second by second.
- Your side — abilities — every party member (you, pet, group) with a full per-ability breakdown: hits, average, max, crit % and miss %, and each ability's share of the total.
- Your healing — per spell, with overheal.
- Enemies — each enemy's damage to your party and its own attack breakdown, plus enemy healing if any healed.
Because it's a snapshot taken when you open it, you can leave it up and keep fighting — it won't change underneath you, so you can review a fight while the next one is already underway.
The Avoidance tab reconstructs your melee survivability from the log: how often you avoid incoming swings (dodge / parry / block / mob-miss) versus how often they land, plus damage taken, DTPS, biggest hit, stuns, and which enemies are hitting you hardest.
Honest limit: the log only records the final damage of a hit, never what it would have been before armor, so mitigation / AC can't be measured — this is avoidance, not defense. Likewise there's no HP/mana in the log, so there are no health bars.
The Overview tab has an XP & leveling section that turns your experience messages into a
live picture of how the grind is going. It reads two kinds of log line: each You gain experience!
increment, and each You have gained a level! ding.
The catch is that the log tells you how much XP you just gained, but never where you are inside the current level. So EQL Metrics calibrates itself off your level-ups: the moment it sees a ding it baselines to 0% and starts the clock, and from then on it knows exactly how far into the level you've climbed. Until that first ding it shows a "waiting for a level-up to baseline" note instead of guessing — so the projections are honest rather than made up.
Once baselined, the section shows:
- Level and % into level — your live position in the current level.
- Time to level — projected from your XP-per-hour since the last ding.
- Kills to level — remaining XP divided by your average XP per kill.
- XP/hr and %/kill — your rate and how much each kill is worth on average.
- Best XP mobs — a ranking of which enemies are giving you the most XP per kill since your last level, so you can see what's actually worth killing.
AA is kept simple: the SESSION grid tracks AA gained this session and AA/hr (AA rolls in alongside regular XP, so there's nothing to baseline).
The gear icon opens a separate Settings window:
- Overlay — transparency slider, click-through.
- Notifications — a master switch plus per-category toggles (buffs, hide/sneak, skill pop-ups, Quick Buff, Mend) and a "max on screen" slider.
- Character & Parse — pet name, "read whole log on load", and a log-file picker.
- Spell data — current status and a one-click Update spell data now.
- Reset — clear session stats or learned buff timers.
Everything saves automatically to %APPDATA%\EqlMetrics\settings.json.
Self-buff apply/fade text and durations come from the EQL wiki. Click
Settings → Update spell data now and the app scrapes the wiki's spell pages directly (in C#,
with a live progress bar) and writes %APPDATA%\EqlMetrics\spells.json, which it loads on every
start. Re-run it whenever the game adds or changes spells. All user data — settings, learned buff
timers, and spells — lives in %APPDATA%\EqlMetrics\, never in the app folder.
EQL Metrics is split in two:
Core/— a pure, UI-agnostic parser (SessionStats+CombatAggregate) that turns log lines into combat/session stats and a rolling encounter history. It has no WPF dependency, so it can be unit-tested from a plain console harness.- The WPF app — the overlay window, the rising-notification layer, the encounter pop-out, and the settings window. It tails the log and feeds each line to the Core parser.
Timing comes from the log's own timestamps, so the same code works live or when replaying an old log. An external log parser is the only way to compute these stats — the game's custom-UI (EQUI XML) system is declarative and can't read files or do math, which is exactly why parsers like this exist as standalone tools.
Can (it's all in the log): every damage/heal/miss event, avoidance (dodge/parry/block), stuns, buff/debuff apply & fade, loot/coin/motes/XP/AA, skill activations and their crits, double/triple attacks, and multi-target splashes. Cooldowns are estimated from your activation line and can be synced exactly by tapping the skill early (see Cooldown tracking).
Can't (not in the log): your or the target's HP/mana (so no health bars, no "target at 20%", no Mend amount), armor mitigation / AC, spell-resist defense, and anything about other players' buffs or cooldowns. Some same-verb abilities are indistinguishable in text (e.g. Kick / Round Kick / Flying Kick all log as "kick") except when a multi-target splash reveals them.
Adding a new class skill is usually a one-liner once you know its log text:
- A skill that should get its own pop-up on every landed hit → add its name to
NotableSkillsinCore/CombatParser.cs. - A skill that can splash multiple targets (cleave-style) → add it to
BurstSkills. - A brand-new melee verb the game uses → add it to the
MeleeVerbstable so it's tracked at all.
Skills that log with unique phrasing (disciplines, feign death, taunt, etc.) get their own
detection line in SessionStats.Apply, following the existing patterns.
Core/ UI-agnostic parser (unit-testable)
CombatParser.cs SessionStats: line parsing, encounters, buffs, skills, avoidance
CombatAggregate.cs reusable rollup (session + per-encounter)
BuffTracker.cs active buffs, fade/gain events, learned durations
BuffData.cs self-buff message/duration table (seeded + wiki)
SpellCatalog.cs applies scraped rows to BuffData
SpellScraper.cs in-app EQL-wiki scraper (HttpClient)
Settings.cs persisted user settings
MainWindow.xaml(.cs) the overlay: HUD + tabs, notification routing
StealthFlash.cs CenterFlash — the rising center-screen notifications
EncounterWindow.xaml.cs per-fight detail pop-out
SettingsWindow.cs the gear-icon settings window
SpellStore.cs loads/refreshes spells.json from %APPDATA%
EqlUi.cs shared dark-overlay UI building blocks
images/ screenshots used by this README
Run-EqlMetrics.cmd double-click launcher (visible)
Run-EqlMetrics.vbs double-click launcher (silent)
EQL Metrics reads your own character log and overlays your own client. It doesn't read or modify game memory. Play by your server's rules.