Downs, deaths & kill credit in WvW logs

“How many did we down, how many did we kill, and who got the killing blows?” is the core scoreboard question for a WvW log. The events that answer it are documented individually in the statechange payloads and enum reference pages; this page connects them into the WvW workflow, with counts observed in a real revision-1 WvW .zevtc log (arcdps build 20260114) inspected while writing this page.

The two event families

There are two independent record types, and robust parsers use both:

State transitions — CBTS_CHANGEUP (3) / CBTS_CHANGEDEAD (4) / CBTS_CHANGEDOWN (5) statechange events, where src_agent is the agent that is now alive / dead / downed. These are facts about an agent’s state, with no attacker attached.

Skill results — ordinary damage events (is_statechange == 0) whose result field is CBTR_KILLINGBLOW (8, “target was killed by skill”) or CBTR_DOWNED (9, “target was downed by skill”). These are facts about a hit: src_agent is the attacker, dst_agent the victim — this is where kill/down credit lives.

Enemy downs and deaths are recorded

The key WvW-relevant observation: state transitions fire for enemy players too, not just your squad. In the test log (13 squad players, 31 enemy players — see allies & enemies for the split):

Event	Squad players	Enemy players	NPCs
CHANGEDOWN (5)	11	32	13
CHANGEDEAD (4)	1	28	26
CHANGEUP (3)	11	32	1

Alongside those, the log contained 66 CBTR_DOWNED and 71 CBTR_KILLINGBLOW skill results.

A few patterns worth noting in those numbers:

• Downs ≠ deaths. 32 enemy downs but 28 enemy deaths — some downed enemies got back up (rallied or were revived). Count CHANGEDEAD for kills, CHANGEDOWN for downs; don’t infer one from the other.
• CHANGEUP pairs with CHANGEDOWN for players (32/32 for enemies, 11/11 for squad here): a player who recovers — by rally, revive, or respawn appearing in the same log — emits CHANGEUP.
• The two families won’t match exactly. 71 killing-blow results vs. 55 total player+NPC-relevant deaths in this log — killing blows also land on agents whose state transitions fall outside what the log captured (despawns, NPCs, timing at log edges). Treat state transitions as the count of record and results as the attribution layer.

Attributing kills and downs

For “who downed/killed whom”, use the skill-result events: the damage event with result == 9 names the downer in src_agent, and result == 8 names the killing-blow dealer. Remember src_agent may be a pet or minion — resolve to its master via src_master_instid (see cbtevent) before crediting a player.

Anything beyond the literal killing blow — “damage contribution”, per-player kill participation, tag range credit — is not in the log as a first-class concept. Community tools derive it by summing damage to the victim in a window before death; that’s a convention, not arcdps data.

Caveats for WvW counting

• Agents can leave the log while downed or dead-adjacent. Enemies who despawn (run out of range/leave combat) stop emitting events; a fight at the edge of the logged area undercounts. The official log lifecycle (“stops when all players exit combat” — see when a log starts and stops) bounds what you can see.
• Respawns within one log show as another CHANGEUP; a player can legitimately die twice in one long WvW log, so count events, not unique agents.
• NPC deaths mix in. 26 of the 55 CHANGEDEAD events in the test log were NPCs (guards, etc.) — filter by agent class first (allies & enemies) or your “kills” number will include camp guards.