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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
DPS Meter Megathread
StevenSharif
Member, Avatar of the Phoenix, Kickstarter, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
This discussion was created from comments split from: DPS Meter Megathread.
I’ve instructed the mods to focus any dps meter threads into a single mega thread to help focus and centralize the discussion 👍
I’ve instructed the mods to focus any dps meter threads into a single mega thread to help focus and centralize the discussion 👍
38
Comments
DPS meters have a place in games in my opinion, as long as you dont get isolated because you do mediocre dmg. Group/Raid leaders need dps meters to weed out the weak (people who dont carry their own weight if you know what i mean aka those that dont even do mediocre dmg and bring nothing else to the table)
I'd prefer they stayed out of the game unless we absolutely needed them.
If I can't check what's wrong I can't improve and get ready. Especially if there is a multitude of ways to build, distribute stats and so on. Ideally everything is in an acceptable similar range and it's all more a question of how the damage is delivered and situational strong points. (high burst phases, slowly ramping up damage, constant sustained damage, aoe, dot damage, magical, physical whatever), but there is only so much balancing you can do, the more variables you enter the harder it gets to check them all. (which again is an argument for dps meter, it provides nonstop contextual community statistics to aid the balancing progress)
Imo there HAS to be a way to check your performance and imo there HAS to be a way to quickcheck if someone is ready for whatever content. You can't expect to sucessfully run a level 50 dungeon with level 25 gear (this is examplatory for a game designed this way).
If I take a person like that anyway it's because I made an informed desicion and I understand that I put a handicap on the group. In contrast if we just go in without knowing anything there is no way to understand why it's not working and why we can't progress. (exluding obvious reasons of failure like standing in hellfire for a minute)
Is it me? Should I use skills differently? Am I oom because I overhealed? Or is the tank not reacting properly to attacks? Is the fight taking to long because we lack the damage output?
Every role is interdependant, you can't just eliminate reasons and know when there isn't anything obviously wrong like the hellfire example.
I could put 50 questions on that and have no way to eliminate any of them.
Some games don't need it, they have very linear progression were you progress through levels and at max level you progress through tiers of difficulty. You just have more or less the gear of the last 2 tiers and you are good to go. Same with skills, you have them, you use them, it's that simple.
Ashes is, according to IS, not one of them, crafting is important and brings randomness into the equation. What mats are available? What can the server craft with it? You have a whole range of stat combinations/weighting through it, lot's of skills to build your skill kit from, augmentations, unlocks, ability/weapon progression and so on.
It needs a simplyfication to check if your particular way of building all those components together gets you anywhere you want to be.
People find ways, they always do, it only needs one video of one guy showing how his build absolutly murders that monster/those players. People will flock to that if it goes unchecked and stays "unbalanced" wether dps meter is there or not. I'm sure most of us have read class guides at one point to see what "is good".
Quote on quote because you can't even be sure if that is considered good or just a bit better than all the bad ways before.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
I think a good compromise would be that only the group leader could see the overall damage/dps meter for everyone.
While I am pro meter in any form, this wouldn't really solve the elitism issue that Intrepid is trying to avoid by not allowing dps meters. It would stop a lot of the toxicity that comes from other players knowing they are doing better than you though.
You know, the funny thing is that despite the name, the dps number of the dps meter is probably the least useful part of a modern dps meter. Unfortunately it's also the part that most people look at the most and causes so many problems.
"you only did 13k dps on that last attempt...."
Great, that information alone is completely worthless without context. That is another reason why I don't like dps meters, because so many people don't know how to use them properly.
If the game has DPS meters, they should not be visible to the public. There should also be a healing equivalent.
Overall, I think the game would be better off having a DPS number attached to the weapon.
Come take a look at ashesofcreation.wiki!
Sure there are going to be some instance raids/dungeons but most of them will be open to anyone any way and if someone you're trying to shut out can just follow you in, why use dps meters.
I know that the DPS in itself is useless, but they also have a "total damage done" meter, which in turn is incredibly usefull.
Elitism is always something that should be avoided but we should also consider another thing: Raids in general were once only doable for the best geared/skilled PvE players (the "elites") mostly.
I led Raids from WoD through Legion to BfA, and the total damage done meter was immensely helpfull to root out those that were either doing something very wrong or just didnt carry their own weight.
It is always easy for normal raiders to say that the raids became too focused on elitism, but if you cant do the modicum of damage to the boss and dont bring anything else to the table (buffs from the paladin, off heal from the druid, heroism/windfury from shaman, ability to soak aoes etc (thats all froma classic perspective) ) then you just cant do the raid.
Whenever a player gets the debuff they are going to have to stop dps'ing the boss to go and drop off the cloud, and the further away a player moves, the safer the cloud will be. Of course, the further a player moves to drop off their cloud, the less dps they will deal. Since these clouds stay until the end of the fight, if you are greedy with your dps and put the cloud in a bad spot, you can screw over someone else who then has to move to avoid the cloud you dropped.
Now I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a player with lower dps who is considerate about what they do with debuffs like this, than a selfish player who only thinks about getting to the top of the dps meter. Note, I'm not saying here that damage meters aren't useful. They are a very valuable tool when it comes to progression raiding. BUT! The majority of players I'm met don't know how to use them properly which results in toxicity due to their ignorance.
I did not mean that players should all do top damage. If you read my post then you also saw that i always wrote "mediocre dps". That means that players should of course always do the mechanics instead of staying and tryjng to get in another fireball
That is why i think that only raid leaders should get insight on overall group damage/damage taken/healing/overhealing meters (with dps totally left out).
Doesn't matter if you failed, the tank failed or the healer failed to keep you alive. You died you are the problem. Seen that a lot of times in games without parsers and instakicks without any words.
It's not a problem of elitism, it's just garbage human behaviour.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
Just because I don't min/max my character and use the 'optimal rotations' does not mean I am not having fun, I am not an engaged member of the group, I don't bring tactical insight to the raid, or that I somehow made my character "wrong."
I know the common response is along the lines of "what's best for the raid?" In my opinion, what's best for the raid is having players there (within an appropriate level) that want to engage positively with others. Also, it's a game so forcing some form of irl competition onto guild mates that just want to play and raid with their friends is odd... imo.
"Sorry guild buddy that is really cool, super tactical, and always a blast to have around, you didn't build your character the right way so you can't raid with us anymore. Get an alt." - Weird guy quotes
You are simply in the wrong guild/ -raid.
I have been part of both, the progressive raiders and the scrappy let's have fun and just see what we can achiev raiders. Both are fun, as long as everyone is on the same page. Nothing is more frustrating then people pulling in a different direction.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
Oh I definitely agree with you. I was on the top end of raiding for a while and was usually in charge of deciding what healers werent carrying their weight and kicking them. I do think it's extremely helpful to know who isnt doing their job, but that's also exactly why I dont think we will see meters. Theres no way to avoid that exclusion that comes with that knowledge. Intrepid wants to avoid that exclusion as much as possible.
I vaguely remember hearing the same a long time ago. Hopefully the stance hasn't changed.
If I am remembering correctly and there will not be any parseable data coming from the engine.. Then no point debating it, really.
If you are in a hardcore guild, you likely won't have these types anyways as you mention. But not all guilds are hardcore, and some that aren't still kick members from raids for not having the 'right' build. I do see your point, if you want to be able to exclude players because they didn't pick the one optimal build for their class, a hardcore guild is likely more your style.
I agree with @burnthefern as well. I would go a step further and say that not only does IS want to avoid that level of exclusion, they would probably like to avoid having their player base build the same 8 characters over and over because of optimization. Will this happen? Sure, but that doesn't mean IS has to implement the tools to help.
It's all very well saying "oh, that person did the lowest amount of healing/damage" but unless you know why that happened, the information is useless to you. In order to fix a problem you have to know the underlying causes, which requires you to not only look at all the information on a dps meter, but to see what happened in the fight itself. How many times have you seen a raid leader rage at someone for dying and yet the raid leader has absolutely no idea why the death happened? It happens so often and it comes down to pure ignorance, nothing more.
This video shows just how much information you can gain from both a dps meter and warcraft logs, information that is crucial for finding out why your raid team can't kill a boss. The thing is, the majority of people who install a dps meter never look past the "damage done" or "healing done" number, so they are only getting perhaps 10% of the amount of information available to them.
https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Defense
This is the wiki page for a single stat that used to exist in WoW. Do you really expect the devs to put all this information into the tooltips in game?
You do touch on a good point though, which is that in modern WoW combat there are tons of passive procs baked into each class that can only be tracked using a dps meter. It's physically impossible to tell where your damage is coming from without referring to a dps meter. I doubt Ashes will have this problem, at least in the very beginning.
I obviously don't know your personal experiences and I am sorry if those experiences lead you to such a negative view to focused raiding, because focused raiding is a lot of fun too and not at all business like.
I'll leave this topic be now either way.
So instead of fixing an obvious problem, imbalance, they just hope that the community won't notice it at all/for a longer time?
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
Again, this still leads to exclusion. I never mentioned exclusion based on a single metric, I'm talking about people not pulling their weight when all the metrics are considered. If someone's class cant perform to a certain standard, and as a player they are unable to mechanically perform at the skill level required, would you keep them onboard? I personally wouldn't. That's exclusion. You seem to be under the impression that every raid leader will act altruistically when given access to this data. People are pretty shitty, and while I believe you would use the meters to better the raid by figuring out who needs advice instead of a kicking, I firmly believe most wouldn't. Now, again, I do agree that there should be meters, however I dont think we will see them because of the exclusion that they bring.