DPS Meter Megathread

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Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Since the idea of top end content is to be aspirational (as in, people not running it aspire to run it), the entire function of that content relies on those that are running it actually enjoying it.

Does it though? If the 90% still can't clear it, then it's still aspirational, no?

Only if the 10% say it's good content.

If you know people that have done something you haven't, and they all unanimously say its shit, how excited would you be to give it a go yourself?

That leaves the gear as the only reason to want to do that content, and people running content just for the gear is why so many people in WoW hate on the game while still logging in every day.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

If you know people that have done something you haven't, and they all unanimously say its shit, how excited would you be to give it a go yourself?

I guess I'm just a unicorn when it comes to stuff like that

I'd be completely fine with doing mundane boring stuff if it meant I'd get smth good for doing it.

Well, I'll just keep hoping that Intrepid can make a ton of bosses for every expansion then.

Mag7spy

Because while i love to find out strategies on bosses, i dislike to spend too much time to find out how to maximize my DPS.

~I don't like to spend time learning and getting better at the game I want dps meters to do that for me.~

Exactly what I have been saying, people don't want to think they want to do the content and turn their brain off without spending their own time learning all aspects to improve, and having social discussions with people learning more elements of the game. + the toxic element.

Aerlana

NiKr wrote: »

One of the reasons why people blindly follow guides and try to push any non-top-dps person from the party is because they're trying to clear the content as fast as possible. They want to consume the content immediately and then, I dunno, do some other shit and complain that the game become boring cause they already beat all the interesting content (even if they just followed a guide instead of figuring it out themselves).

(did edit previous message for other part if you want.

)

yes combat tracker as i said will help a lot to master more the game mechanics and the classes/builds. so a faster progress early. and will be a help for each balance patch, and a small help on bosses (mainly to adapt your build/rotation for this specific boss with its specific timing, etc etc)

And i can understand you think sad/problematic to have this speed up. But the slow due to lack of data can be considered a false difficulty.
Personally, i hope to have the fight designer able to generates fights like the hardest we saw in other MMORPGs. Because those really hard fight were not only about strong DPS but a really good personnal analysis from the players. It would reduce the impact of combat tracker to master the fight to really low, but ALSO would reduce impact of guides a lot.

To answer to what i quoted :
From my own experience : top guilds (not top world but top server, and one of top in my language, french) then casual guilds...

Those kind of people are those under the tops that dreams to be at top without understanding the long term investment... Those are the gold/plat players in LoL, but also those silver or lower complaining about "Elohell"
they dream about summit, and think they are good, the other are bad. They also consider that they are good enough to just have to follow a guide.

Yes you are right, they are consumers and not players. But it remains a big problem this is where most toxicity in PvE environment is generated. They don't want to lose time : kick anyone low in DPS, or kick tank in FFXIV that don't do door to door pulls. They will ask their guildmate to follow the last guide for their class on icyveins blindly. and to learn the strategy, watch videos before the guilds goes to the boss.
they are a problem for a simple reason : they are those younglings will encounter soon enough when they want to progress in the game, and they will force into them this way to play that could be fun for them... but absolutely NOT fun for lot of people... I won't say "majority" or "minority" but most people i know that don't want to be "in top" literally hate to have to watch video before going to fight, and many prefer to learn fight... while doing it (this is what with my FC we did for all people who didnt care about "top content" and just wanted to progress at their pace.)

They simply forgot that at first people come on a game to play a game. not to read guides or be spoiled fight before doing it

Ludullu

Aerlana wrote: »

yes combat tracker as i said will help a lot to master more the game mechanics and the classes/builds. so a faster progress early. and will be a help for each balance patch, and a small help on bosses (mainly to adapt your build/rotation for this specific boss with its specific timing, etc etc)

And i can understand you think sad/problematic to have this speed up. But the slow due to lack of data can be considered a false difficulty.
Personally, i hope to have the fight designer able to generates fights like the hardest we saw in other MMORPGs. Because those really hard fight were not only about strong DPS but a really good personnal analysis from the players. It would reduce the impact of combat tracker to master the fight to really low, but ALSO would reduce impact of guides a lot.

And this is kind of my point. If you require a tracker to figure out how to beat a boss - to me that's a badly designed boss. Why would I need a separate tool to figure out which % of damage I'm missing on top of all the other mechanics that I need to do?

And from what I understand, all boss designs usually come down to just dps gates. Yes, you can have countless cool mechanics, but there's always gonna be some form of dps gate, because that's where the difficulty comes from in the fight. If the boss is on an arbitrary timer (or especially a literal one) that counts down to its ultimate raid wipe ability - of course you'll have to squeeze out your raid group until the very last drop of dps comes out, because you gotta beat the timer.

And the more bosses you make and the more stronger gear you give to the players - the more those players will have to use the tracker to figure our where they're lacking. And I dearly hope that Intrepid can somehow find a way to avoid this pitfall of endless boss hp/atk growth, but I somehow doubt they can.

And if the pitfall remains, so will the vicious cycle of trackers that increase the speed of content clearing that increase the "difficulty" of content that increase the requirement of the tracker. I see this as very sad indeed, but I guess that's partially because I don't see pve as the final frontier of great content in mmos.

And as for toxic people - they'll always be toxic, no matter what features the game has. And there'll be more toxic people in Ashes purely because it's gonna be a competitive game rather than a cooperative one (at least in most places).

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Aerlana wrote: »

yes combat tracker as i said will help a lot to master more the game mechanics and the classes/builds. so a faster progress early. and will be a help for each balance patch, and a small help on bosses (mainly to adapt your build/rotation for this specific boss with its specific timing, etc etc)

And i can understand you think sad/problematic to have this speed up. But the slow due to lack of data can be considered a false difficulty.
Personally, i hope to have the fight designer able to generates fights like the hardest we saw in other MMORPGs. Because those really hard fight were not only about strong DPS but a really good personnal analysis from the players. It would reduce the impact of combat tracker to master the fight to really low, but ALSO would reduce impact of guides a lot.

And this is kind of my point. If you require a tracker to figure out how to beat a boss - to me that's a badly designed boss. Why would I need a separate tool to figure out which % of damage I'm missing on top of all the other mechanics that I need to do?

And from what I understand, all boss designs usually come down to just dps gates. Yes, you can have countless cool mechanics, but there's always gonna be some form of dps gate, because that's where the difficulty comes from in the fight. If the boss is on an arbitrary timer (or especially a literal one) that counts down to its ultimate raid wipe ability - of course you'll have to squeeze out your raid group until the very last drop of dps comes out, because you gotta beat the timer.

No, this is just, unfortunately, again, your limited experiences.

Part of the reason this is a problem, is that there are some people who have more mental... 'slots', let's call them. They can calculate and simulate and track many more things that the average person.

For those people, everything is happening too much and too fast. The DPS meter is 'taking the place of those extra slots', for those people, so that they can attempt the content by spending time reviewing the outputs, instead of using 'mental slots' they may not have.

I'm not sure what is worse, personally, bosses that a certain subset of people can't beat because they literally don't have enough focus basically 'no matter what they do', or the frustration of people who don't want to be subjected to DPS meters, but there's another outcome, the one you were suggesting.

If Intrepid could somehow completely prevent DPS meters, either by design or by ... I dunno, magic... they could make bosses that only the people with enough 'focus slots' could beat. The problem would be that those people would find them easy, other people would find them hard, and there would be less ways to understand why in both cases.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

If Intrepid could somehow completely prevent DPS meters, either by design or by ... I dunno, magic... they could make bosses that only the people with enough 'focus slots' could beat. The problem would be that those people would find them easy, other people would find them hard, and there would be less ways to understand why in both cases.

Yep, and this is why I think that it's gonna be just the regular vicious cycle. And if those people at the top say that the content is super easy and boring, it'll be just like Noaani said, everyone (or at least a lot of people) below will believe them and might not even attempt the content. Or even if they do attempt it - they won't be the ones with huge capacity, so they'll find it super hard or even impossible. At which point the top people are bored, the aspiring people can't beat the content and you have both sides of the spectrum either leaving your game or endlessly complaining about the content in question, which would only confuse Intrepid cause you obviously can't appeal to both groups at the same time.

The only real solution I could see to this is some form of a catalyst item that you use on bosses during the raid, which would change how the boss behaves. It could be awarded through quests of some particular actions.

For example, a catalyst that's tailored for the "meter people" would boost the boss' overall complexity (and randomization of mechanics) and bump up the chances of certain drops by some amount.

The "layman's" catalyst would make the boss more of a dmg sponge with fewer mechanics, so people can just concentrate on their own rotations rather than both the dance of mechanics and dps. And there'd be no boost to loot.

The casual one would decrease the stats of the boss and would decrease the mechanics variety. Obviously would have the lowest drop with maybe even some drops missing.

In order to fully activate any of those 3 versions of the boss, you'll need to use all 40 catalysts of the same type during the fight (that is if we only apply this to raid bosses). If the boss wasn't killed after the usage - the catalysts go back to their users. If the boss was stolen (killed by a non-og-raid people) - same shit.

This way you'd have open world tailored experiences that are also "equalized" in their complexity, while also accounting for the skill lvl of the players. The pvp for/around the boss still remains. The encounter itself can still be repeated, and maybe even in a different version if so desired. The top rarity drops are still mainly farmed by the people who can farm them (the <10%), while the boss itself can be content for more people if they manage to catch its spawn in time.

What's the glaring cons of this suggestion that I'm missing, cause I'm sure there's some.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

If Intrepid could somehow completely prevent DPS meters, either by design or by ... I dunno, magic... they could make bosses that only the people with enough 'focus slots' could beat. The problem would be that those people would find them easy, other people would find them hard, and there would be less ways to understand why in both cases.

Yep, and this is why I think that it's gonna be just the regular vicious cycle. And if those people at the top say that the content is super easy and boring, it'll be just like Noaani said, everyone (or at least a lot of people) below will believe them and might not even attempt the content. Or even if they do attempt it - they won't be the ones with huge capacity, so they'll find it super hard or even impossible. At which point the top people are bored, the aspiring people can't beat the content and you have both sides of the spectrum either leaving your game or endlessly complaining about the content in question, which would only confuse Intrepid cause you obviously can't appeal to both groups at the same time.

The only real solution I could see to this is some form of a catalyst item that you use on bosses during the raid, which would change how the boss behaves. It could be awarded through quests of some particular actions.

For example, a catalyst that's tailored for the "meter people" would boost the boss' overall complexity (and randomization of mechanics) and bump up the chances of certain drops by some amount.

The "layman's" catalyst would make the boss more of a dmg sponge with fewer mechanics, so people can just concentrate on their own rotations rather than both the dance of mechanics and dps. And there'd be no boost to loot.

The casual one would decrease the stats of the boss and would decrease the mechanics variety. Obviously would have the lowest drop with maybe even some drops missing.

In order to fully activate any of those 3 versions of the boss, you'll need to use all 40 catalysts of the same type during the fight (that is if we only apply this to raid bosses). If the boss wasn't killed after the usage - the catalysts go back to their users. If the boss was stolen (killed by a non-og-raid people) - same shit.

This way you'd have open world tailored experiences that are also "equalized" in their complexity, while also accounting for the skill lvl of the players. The pvp for/around the boss still remains. The encounter itself can still be repeated, and maybe even in a different version if so desired. The top rarity drops are still mainly farmed by the people who can farm them (the <10%), while the boss itself can be content for more people if they manage to catch its spawn in time.

What's the glaring cons of this suggestion that I'm missing, cause I'm sure there's some.

For me, in my experience, no glaring 'cons' exist. This is the only way I know that this is normally achieved. MMOs just have to jump through more hoops to do the same sort of thing that other games do by changing difficulty or encounter 'type'.

However, Ashes is Open World Contested bosses, so I guess we could count that as one.

Back to the DPS Meter issue though, the only problem I'd see with just making the bosses 'hard to beat due to overwhelming focus' is that the actual thing a DPS meter does (let's use the example of me 'having the Combat Log and then parsing it using literally Excel) is keep track of a flow for you.

If an aspiring group has to attempt the boss 60 times because they 'can't pass the focus check', they may still eventually get lucky. If the 'high focus' group can farm it after 6 attempts, they will move on. Not everyone is a 'winner' in Ashes, so it's unlikely to matter as much.

Steven's choosing between two forms of frustration, and slightly choosing between two 'target groups for that frustration'. It's probably fine either way.

Aerlana

NiKr wrote: »

And from what I understand, all boss designs usually come down to just dps gates. Yes, you can have countless cool mechanics, but there's always gonna be some form of dps gate, because that's where the difficulty comes from in the fight. If the boss is on an arbitrary timer (or especially a literal one) that counts down to its ultimate raid wipe ability - of course you'll have to squeeze out your raid group until the very last drop of dps comes out, because you gotta beat the timer.

This is true, but you see it from the bad side focusing on "you have to do enough DPS" becoming => "DPS is the main issue"

Lets take one of most famous "hard boss" Arthas 25 HM, was at the biggest spike of wow golden age, and was really a big fight a really challenging one. the NM mode was already a tough fight also.
Did Arthas need an insane DPS around 90%+ of the "perfect" DPS people could bring ? yep. Was it enough to kill boss ? absolutely no, even a raid 25 team with the good raid comp and all people doing their 100% damages could totally wipe and wipe again.
Because this fight has LOT of mechanics, which are hard to deal with, and where the mistake of one is the wipe of all.

And a good way to explain all is taking just a little (really) part of this fight : 2nd val'kyr + defile.
Valkyr : 3 winged lady spawn, grab one random character (out of the 25) and travel with them to the closest border (circle arena with border being empty so you fall). They had many life and you had to burn their life asap. it already asked a little mechanic : have all 3 valkyr getting the same way, so the raid had to gather middle "slightly" on a side (enough to be sure hte 3 valkyr goes the same way, to have them gathered to make this big DPS easy)
Defile : one character is targetted by arthas and a black area spawn under his feet, after 1 second, all people in take damages and the area grow for each people hit. So again, the raid gather at same area, and move at once far from the defile area.

Separate each mechanic are not so hard (even if each can easily be source of death or even for defile a wipe). but at 2nd and 5th time of the fight they appear it becomes really tricky : they spawn nearly together... so you have to be all in middle (where the mistake on defile will be the biggest problem) move as late as possible (to have valkyr have the most travel to do so most time to kill them) BUT as soon as possible to avoid any little tic of defile (most of time it was enough to have a snowball effect and in the end get it in most if not all area)
it was a BIG DPS check, which was hard to do because mechanics were hard to deal with

reduce the life of valkyr (so DPS check) this part become easy.

Now lets take soul's bosses they are mostly 100% around avoid (we can consider "mechanics" due to the design of the games) ok, so you can play safe, wait your time to hit as safely as possible. the fight could last 30 minutes, or more, you still do it. just long, full of pressure.
Now lets take a limit for example of 20 minutes, meaning that each time the boss does a skill that is its best time to hit you HAVE TO go to hit him, the fight gets harder, you can't allow yourself to play perfectly safe.
reduce this limit to 15 minutes, now even skills where hitting will need a hard avoid just after, or a "perfect frame" to be allwo to go to hit the boss... the fight is even harder.

Just because i added a timer limit to a fight, i made it harder.

Combat tracker in WoW or FFXIV (2 MMORPG currently considered with the most challenging PvE) are not so usefull to understand the hardest fight.
I did "high end" on both...
and for FFXIV i even was in a team of people that wanted to build from fresh their own strategy : no one of us watched any kind of small information about bosses before we killed them ourselves... FFXIV is far more around "DPS gate" than wow in my opinion, but what makes us struggle to fight was mostly understand mechanics and find how to deal with... The DPS was always our last problem, and in fact because we all mastered well our class, and due to building step by step strategy... when we manage to see the last part of fight, trying to get the "most damages we could" was clearly not a problem.
The need of DPS forced us to play "as perfect as possible" no more no less. (and we speak about a game were 2/3 if not 3/4 of Global Cooldown of healers are spent in... damages ^^" for healers the difficulty was timing their heal perfectly to soak the high spike of damages while keeping as much DPS as possible)

Azherae

Please let us never speak of Absolute Virtue or Pandemonium Warden...

Ludullu

Aerlana wrote: »

Combat tracker in WoW or FFXIV (2 MMORPG currently considered with the most challenging PvE) are not so usefull to understand the hardest fight.

The need of DPS forced us to play "as perfect as possible" no more no less.

From what I know both WoW's and FF14's raids are scripted, is that right? And from what I remember, at least some of FF11's bosses were quite randomized.

Now the question I have, are the ff14/wow bosses interesting because they have a proper "culmination" to the battle (especially in ff14's case), with the intensity of the fight growing throughout the fight, or was it just the fact of overcoming the peak difficulty of the boss?

What I'm trying to get at is this: would those bosses still be interesting if their skillset was completely randomized right from the first second of the fight? Or am I wrong and they were already randomized?

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Aerlana wrote: »

yes combat tracker as i said will help a lot to master more the game mechanics and the classes/builds. so a faster progress early. and will be a help for each balance patch, and a small help on bosses (mainly to adapt your build/rotation for this specific boss with its specific timing, etc etc)

And i can understand you think sad/problematic to have this speed up. But the slow due to lack of data can be considered a false difficulty.
Personally, i hope to have the fight designer able to generates fights like the hardest we saw in other MMORPGs. Because those really hard fight were not only about strong DPS but a really good personnal analysis from the players. It would reduce the impact of combat tracker to master the fight to really low, but ALSO would reduce impact of guides a lot.

And this is kind of my point. If you require a tracker to figure out how to beat a boss - to me that's a badly designed boss. Why would I need a separate tool to figure out which % of damage I'm missing on top of all the other mechanics that I need to do?

To me, it is a well designed boss.

However, this is only true if you consider a boss to be part content, part puzzle.

That said, I agree with your point that we shouldnt need tools outside of the game - this is why the tracker should be built in to the game.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Aerlana wrote: »

Combat tracker in WoW or FFXIV (2 MMORPG currently considered with the most challenging PvE) are not so usefull to understand the hardest fight.

The need of DPS forced us to play "as perfect as possible" no more no less.

From what I know both WoW's and FF14's raids are scripted, is that right? And from what I remember, at least some of FF11's bosses were quite randomized.

Now the question I have, are the ff14/wow bosses interesting because they have a proper "culmination" to the battle (especially in ff14's case), with the intensity of the fight growing throughout the fight, or was it just the fact of overcoming the peak difficulty of the boss?

What I'm trying to get at is this: would those bosses still be interesting if their skillset was completely randomized right from the first second of the fight? Or am I wrong and they were already randomized?

WoW and FF14 bosses are not randomized generally. It's almost impossible to compare them, a boss of the non-random kind is designed (for me personally) more as a spectacle or a speedrun.

I don't find them interesting, so I don't play those games. I believe I can see why others find them interesting (you can see it in Monster Hunter, a sufficiently 'overgeared' player can defeat certain higher level Monsters just by 'playing perfectly' but if you're not overgeared ENOUGH you still have to deal with its 'Rage' and 'Desperation' mechanics, even more perfectly... or you could play with much less stats and have to use tools, terrain, and sometimes teamwork)

I want to play Ashes because I saw (and experienced) the FF11 type bosses within Ashes, and hope for more of those.

To each their own, really?

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

That said, I agree with your point that we shouldnt need tools outside of the game - this is why the tracker should be built in to the game.

Ahh, this is exactly why I said "separate" and not "3d party" or "outside"

And while you're here, I forget, were EQ2's bosses randomized or scripted? Or was the randomization tied to boss stage, so it always became harder throughout the fight.

I'm just trying to figure out if it's possible to have a fun boss fight w/o the timer of dps (the rising difficulty is that timer). Or would the hardcore pvers see such a fight cheap and boring (the fight being completely randomized and at peak difficulty right from the start)?

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

To each their own, really?

Yes, that is always true. I'm just trying to find the single middle ground, if there even is one

Most likely this is a pointless endeavor, but that is why I usually mostly ignore this thread until I find a new way to try and suggest a middle ground for participants of this discussion

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

That said, I agree with your point that we shouldnt need tools outside of the game - this is why the tracker should be built in to the game.

Ahh, this is exactly why I said "separate" and not "3d party" or "outside" And while you're here, I forget, were EQ2's bosses randomized or scripted? Or was the randomization tied to boss stage, so it always became harder throughout the fight.

I'm just trying to figure out if it's possible to have a fun boss fight w/o the timer of dps (the rising difficulty is that timer). Or would the hardcore pvers see such a fight cheap and boring (the fight being completely randomized and at peak difficulty right from the start)?

I consider myself hardcore ENOUGH at PvE to be an answer-er here.

I don't need rage mechanics, other people need rage mechanics. Lemme explain.

If the boss does not rage, it's just '100% from moment one', then I have to be 100% from moment One. I have to learn and adapt in timeframes on the order of seconds, and react to things and UNDERSTAND what happened because of my reaction in fractions of seconds, right down to 'individual frames'.

Bring it on.

It's other people who don't enjoy this, it certainly ain't me.

If anything, it's the opposite, because I don't want to have to go through the entire easy first part every time I want to practice the harder second part. It's not there for me. It's there for a different player type.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

Bring it on.

So while we wait for Noaani to answer with his pov, here's a question for you. Would you need a dps meter for such a fight, considering that there's no "timer" for the fight? The enrage isn't coming so it's not necessary for you to have the most perfect build that puts out the most perfect dps.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Bring it on.

So while we wait for Noaani to answer with his pov, here's a question for you. Would you need a dps meter for such a fight, considering that there's no "timer" for the fight? The enrage isn't coming so it's not necessary for you to have the most perfect build that puts out the most perfect dps.

It's not a DPS meter, it's a Combat Tracker.

A Combat Tracker is a way to 'watch the replay' of a battle, skipping unnecessary parts, and sometimes with more info than a player might have had from their perspective unless they read at significantly above average human speed (Combat Log).

The DPS part of this is often more relevant to me to find out (in FFXI for example) when someone did TOO MUCH DAMAGE, not when they didn't do enough.

Why did my Black Mage die? Their big spell hit at the end of an accidental Magic Burst and the boss now decided they looked tasty. Now we have no Stunner and everything's gone to hell. Oh well, ok, let's change the Weaponskill the Ranger uses so that this won't happen.

Parsing for damage is easy, you can just use a dummy or similar at-level mob for that. 'Watching a Replay in full' is harder.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

That said, I agree with your point that we shouldnt need tools outside of the game - this is why the tracker should be built in to the game.

Ahh, this is exactly why I said "separate" and not "3d party" or "outside" And while you're here, I forget, were EQ2's bosses randomized or scripted? Or was the randomization tied to boss stage, so it always became harder throughout the fight.

I'm just trying to figure out if it's possible to have a fun boss fight w/o the timer of dps (the rising difficulty is that timer). Or would the hardcore pvers see such a fight cheap and boring (the fight being completely randomized and at peak difficulty right from the start)?

They were a mix of both types (the only game I know to do so).

Top end content doesnt need DPS checks, but they do need fail conditions. DPS checks are just one option for adding a fail condition to an encounter - there are many other options, and a good game will take advantage of as many of them ad they can.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

Why did my Black Mage die? Their big spell hit at the end of an accidental Magic Burst and the boss now decided they looked tasty. Now we have no Stunner and everything's gone to hell. Oh well, ok, let's change the Weaponskill the Ranger uses so that this won't happen.

Parsing for damage is easy, you can just use a dummy or similar at-level mob for that. 'Watching a Replay in full' is harder.

Ok, this would probably go a bit too deep into the "middle ground searching" territory, but at this point I'm just curious about a pov other than my own on this topic.

If I understand correctly, you needed to see that course of events in the fight in the tracker in order to understand boss logic at that moment, right? What if there was no logic? What if the boss wouldn't have any particular triggers and would just use random shit from his skillset and switch his targets randomly - would that still be interesting for you?

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