Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
How can I immerse myself in a game when half my screen is taken by DPS meter, pops up telling me the next ability the boss is going to make or what debuffs are affecting me in flashing neon lights?
If want want to improve yourself, that's great. Now, to know how much you've improved, do it like in real life. When something takes less time or less effort to complete after all of your training, then you know you're on the good road.
Well... No one would force you to use an addon? xD
Players like me love advancing at our own pace and are capable of doing it without help. Maybe since I am not in a hurry to get to a specific power level I havent looked into these tools.
Like most things Ashes, a DPS meter will be nice and desired by some, but annoying or pointless to others.
I'm sure they will have tracking on stats and stuff, but every player will constantly be streaming data. It's like a gigantic statistic you have to sieve through for patterns and then u nderstand why it's the way it is.
A dps meter provides a community sieve that takes away a lot of that work. Hence a lot quicker and more prominently.
It is not just enrage timers itself, but as a holy trinity game you have 3 parameters. DPS survivability and healing.
If you want to create engaging content and want it to have a certain difficulty you need to balance all 3 together somehow.
If there is no dps "requierment" per say then the burden falls on the healers and the tanks.(I think it's logical that bosses wil take longer because of lower dps, hence higher burden on the other 2 parameters. I hope I can assume you all follow me on that right?). If they can heal and tank indefinitly to support the "whatever dps" attitude, then the whole boss is trivial with absolutely no risk involved, it just takes more or less longer. I VERY STRONGLY believe that noone likes bulletsponges or wants to be in an 8 man Group/ 40 man raid that has absolutley no danger associated with it.
It doesnt matter if its designed as hard enrage or what not. Bottom line is there has to be some balance between player vs monsters as well as parties/raids vs bosses to ensure engaging content.
DPS meter provides a tool to see where you are right now and where you need to be to challenge something.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther
Can you calculate your raw dps during a fight? What can be done is recording the fight, taking all your damage numbers, and averaging you dps. Instead of doing that though I would rather just have a system do it for me so its faster. You also seem to forget that when using a dps meter you should only ever use it in a group against a boss. If you factor your dps against adds then you are falsifying your information and doing nothing for yourself or your team.
Another problem you have to be aware of when running with a team is sometimes they can be better or worse than your previous team before you changed some stats to try and min/max and without that dps meter you have no way of knowing for sure if you are doing better or worse because of all the factors that need to be accounted for such as cooldowns and DoTs.
Why are u assuming that without dps meters there would be more of "whatever dps" attitude?
For important and difficult content you would obviously prefer guild mates and players with good reputation, just as you would with dps meters.
We have to trust IS on creating bosses that require u to be smart and innovative instead of blindly following max dps meta..
The arguments ure giving for dps meters are mostly qol and are not mandatory but a subjective preference.
From an objective pov dps meters dont seem to be adding anything into the game.
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther
Using min/max to try to figure out whether you were better or worse at defeating the boss really has no meaning when you can't repeat that boss fight.
Where and when has IS ever stated we won't be able to repeat any bosses?
"Combat itself will be pretty intricate mechanics-wise. We're going to have different phases of the bosses, there's going to be a lot of adds stuff, there's going to be random oriented skill usage. We're not going to have telegraphed templates on the ground, but we will have telegraphed animations, so it's going to be location, mobility, strategic. It will be something that can not be repeatable in the exact same way from raid to raid, but has a variance between the combat, so raiders are going to have to be fluid in thinking on their feet".
– Steven Sharif
Hence, we will be thinking on our feet each time.
The winning strategy isn't going to be based on comparing min/max dps from previous encounters with that boss.
If a utility doesn't tell you what ability a mob deals damage to a given player with, it is not a full combat tracker. If it does tell you what ability the mob damaged a player with, you should then know what went wrong.
If the encounter attacked the dead player with a regular attack, you know that player pulled aggro.
If the encounter killed the player with an AoE, you know what went wrong based on the encounters design and your raids plan for the fight.
You don't need to know a players location in order to know how they died, you simply just need to know what ability caused them damage.
Often times you can simply ask the raid what went wrong, and sometimes that is faster. However, sometimes players simply don't know themselves what went wrong, and sometimes it is good to have an objective overview of the encounter rather than relying on the subjective view of your raid members.
Also, many players simply don't want to say that their healer wasn't doing a good enough job, and I can fully understand why. However, if you have an objective overview of the encounter, raw facts and numbers that are not friends with that healer, will always know what happened, and will always be truthful then that is invaluable.
Finally, I have never said a combat tracker should be mandatory - in fact, I've said the opposite. A combat tracker should be an option, and if Ashes ever got to a situation like WoW and Boss Mods, I'd quit playing in an instant.
Spoken like someone who truly doesn't know what they are talking about.
DPS on raids isn't about speed, it is about success or failure.
Even encounters without a hard DPS check still require a reasonable amount of DPS - that is why guilds don't simply take raids full of tanks and healers.
It may be that the encounter spawns adds that will overwhelm the raid if not killed fast enough. It may be the the encounter has a mana drain. It may be that you have a specific window between pathing encounters. None of these are hard DPS checks (which could exist as well), but all of them require DPS in the raid to be on point, and the raid will fail if that is not the case.
All of the above are perfectly applicable to single group content as well, not just raid content.
This though... this I totally agree with.
If all we get is a DPS meter, it is near worthless - and that is coming from a raid DPS player.
I totally agree they can be community breaking, which is why the suggestion I've said all along is that they should make it an optional perk for guilds.
While the community as a whole is somewhat divided as to whether or not these things are good or bad, in my experience, people within any one given guild usually have similar opinions on things like this. If it is added in a way where it is optional and only tracks people in your guild, I can see almost (not all, I'm not that naive) of the community conflict drifting away.
I was under the impression that Intrepid said they were still considering it, but leaning (heavily) towards no - rather than it being a hard no. However, even if they have said a hard no, it is still a worthwhile debate to have, imo.
We have the right to bicker with each other, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THAT FROM US!
I desperately need a LOL button!
And I'm saying that there should be other ways to ensure that those adds do not overwhelm the raid than just how fast those adds are killed. By focusing on different abilities than DPS abilities.
Pretty sure the same is true with pathing encounters.
When I soloed group dungeons in NWO, I still had to deal with timers - make sure that I killed the mini-bosses and bosses within a set window of time before certain actions were triggered, but that wasn't about damage per second. That was about damage within a range of minutes.
And I accomplished that through strategic snaring and kiting - which are types of strategies I enjoy devising with the folk I fight alongside, rather than relying on DPS meters. I prefer learning what abilities the people I fight alongside like to use and then devising tactics that succeed from there, rather than using metrics to determine the quickest and most efficient - cookie-cutter strategy to defeat our opponents.
And I don't mind wiping many, many times before we figure out the winning strategy as long as we're having fun using the abilities and tactics that conform with our roleplay visions.
If I'm playing an Ice Wizard, I don't want people telling me I need to use Repel abilities because the DPS meter indicates that's the most efficient way to defeat the boss. Nor do I want people telling me that I need to switch from a Feral Druid spec to a Moonkin Druid spec. I'm roleplaying a Cat; not a frickin' Tree.
In Ashes, I would rather figure out how the Tank can best place Bulwark and provide Cover than worry about the Tank's DPS. If the Mage is min/maxed to be awesome at Black Hole, Ice Prison and Ice Sheet rather than DPS, that's great too. Let's find a way to make that work.
I don't expect to need DPS meters to do so. And... we shouldn't have to rely on DPS meters to do so.
Rather, the info may be something the devs can fulfill or just hopeful hype they aren't able to implement.
It's not always enough knowing how someone died, but why. ACT cant tell if someone couldve done something or did something wrong that doesnt show, like walked past eggs that break into adds.
I can understand that, but that is where we can adapt and develop as humans.
Give good criticism and guidance, learn to kick players unable or unwilling to learn even when it makes u feel bad.
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther