DPS Meter Megathread

Dygz wrote: »

"Improve for the sake of the team..." means that isn't truly a team.
In an RPG, the team should be figuring out how to synergize their abilities to shore up weaknesses and enhance strengths.

If your weakness as a DPS is that you don't do enough DPS, it shouldn't be up to others in your raid to attempt to cover that up.

Teamwork is primarily about performing your function within the team, and then working out who needs assistance with theirs.

If you are in a team based situation and you constantly need those around you to help you out, you are "that guy". You are the one holding the team back.

Teamwork really is about helping each other out, but you need to have your own shit sorted before you do that, otherwise you just make things harder for your team. As such, everyone should be independently capable of fulfilling their role, and should only need help when there is an uneven load.

The notion that "the team" should continually compensate for someone in the team underperforming is antithetical to actual teamwork.

If you have a weakness, you should work out how to reduce that weakness yourself, without needing to involve your team, so that your team can focus on what they need to focus on instead of having to focus on what you should be focusing on. That is being a good team player.

Noaani wrote: »

In games where you have an action to perform every 0.4 seconds and also require frequent movement/positioning, you simply don't have the time to watch what others are doing. You have to look at things after the fact.

And so far, to me, there's no indication that Ashes is that kind of game. Which is why I mentioned us not seeing any hardcore pve.

rikardp98 wrote: »

Good luck keeping track of 20-25 players in a raid where you also need to be active 90-100% of the encounter. It's not impossible but your own performance will suffer and you will never be able to see 100% of the data you need to come to a well educated conclusion.

This is why you have parties and not "a single dude is watching over an entire raid". Every party is its own unit and every party member is responsible for their mates, with PL being responsible for the unit.

Delegation of responsibility, and trust for those delegates, is an important part of party-based mmos. Obviously you have no trust for your team, as evident by this:

Xeeg wrote: »

should remain perfectly anonymous and undiscoverable by their team.

People that want their team to succeed won't be "anonymous and undiscoverable". This is only true in some random pugs or in guilds that invite every person they see. I guess there's also the chance of spies that ruin raids on purpose, but then the absence of a raid-wide tracker simply plays into the inter-guild politics and drama, and requires a bigger managerial skill from every guild to notice those kinds of spies.

rikardp98

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

In games where you have an action to perform every 0.4 seconds and also require frequent movement/positioning, you simply don't have the time to watch what others are doing. You have to look at things after the fact.

And so far, to me, there's no indication that Ashes is that kind of game. Which is why I mentioned us not seeing any hardcore pve.

rikardp98 wrote: »

Good luck keeping track of 20-25 players in a raid where you also need to be active 90-100% of the encounter. It's not impossible but your own performance will suffer and you will never be able to see 100% of the data you need to come to a well educated conclusion.

This is why you have parties and not "a single dude is watching over an entire raid". Every party is its own unit and every party member is responsible for their mates, with PL being responsible for the unit.

Delegation of responsibility, and trust for those delegates, is an important part of party-based mmos. Obviously you have no trust for your team, as evident by this:

Xeeg wrote: »

should remain perfectly anonymous and undiscoverable by their team.

People that want their team to succeed won't be "anonymous and undiscoverable". This is only true in some random pugs or in guilds that invite every person they see. I guess there's also the chance of spies that ruin raids on purpose, but then the absence of a raid-wide tracker simply plays into the inter-guild politics and drama, and requires a bigger managerial skill from every guild to notice those kinds of spies.

Delegationen of responsibility is the basis of a good guild. And I always trust my other officers and class/role representative because that's why they were given that role.

The problem with "every party member is responsible for their mates" is that party members aren't always next to each other and can have wildly different responsibilities on a fight. Usually you have a raid leader that is a ranged, healer or ranged DPS, since those types of classes have the best field of view and best chance see what is going on.

Another problem with only trusting people is that people make mistakes and miss things, that's just how it is. And alot of the time they dont know that they made a specific mistake, and think that someone else must have done something. That's why you have one raid leader that keeps an eye on the raid, and let the rest focus on their task. Then you discuss what happened and confirm or deny with the help of logs.

If you look at top top top raiders like ECHO and liquid, you will see that they even have their raid leader out side of the raid, like a coach in football. Sitting on the sidelines looking and making decisions based on what they see, having 100% of their focus on just that. I'm not saying that raids in ashes should be like WoW raids, but it's just an example how the best raiders in the world optimize and delegate responsibility.

And why do I even give this example? Well to show that what the best players are doing, or need to do to be the best. Meaning that anything else is not optimized and not good enough. So not using logs, not using a raid leader, not having all the objective information isn't good enough.

Now will raids on ashes be difficult enough to need any of this? Probably not, but that still doesn't mean people won't try and optimize their game play. They will and if you don't like that then you shouldn't play with them. Let people play the game the way they want to play it, and everyone will be happy 😊

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

In games where you have an action to perform every 0.4 seconds and also require frequent movement/positioning, you simply don't have the time to watch what others are doing. You have to look at things after the fact.

And so far, to me, there's no indication that Ashes is that kind of game. Which is why I mentioned us not seeing any hardcore pve.

While true that we haven't, keep in mind that games have a habit of getting faster over time, not slower.

That "action to perform every 0.4 seconds" above was closer to 0.75 seconds when the game released, and about 1.2 seconds when the game was in beta.

rikardp98 wrote: »

Now will raids on ashes be difficult enough to need any of this? Probably not, but that still doesn't mean people won't try and optimize their game play. They will and if you don't like that then you shouldn't play with them. Let people play the game the way they want to play it, and everyone will be happy 😊

I will most likely not play with those people. But considering that open world stuff will supposedly be the stuff that people need to do their best on - we'll have to see how valuable a tracker is in an everchanging pvx situation.

If instances do end up getting the hardest content - I won't care for them for a long time, cause they won't give best gear.

Noaani wrote: »

While true that we haven't, keep in mind that games have a habit of getting faster over time, not slower.

I'll hope it does.

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

While true that we haven't, keep in mind that games have a habit of getting faster over time, not slower.

I'll hope it does.

Indeed.

The current pace of combat (which is not something I expect to be even remotely close to the intention for when the game goes live) is near glacial.

Butkus

Noaani wrote: »

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

While true that we haven't, keep in mind that games have a habit of getting faster over time, not slower.

I'll hope it does.

Indeed.

The current pace of combat (which is not something I expect to be even remotely close to the intention for when the game goes live) is near glacial.

Agreed.

RationalThought

In my opinion, dps meter and other mods are only necessary if the game design is flawed or the ui is unbearably oversaturated.
If it's a 10 or fewer people group activity, any decent player can tell what is going wrong. Healer can tell which players get hit the most and require emergency heals. Tank and support can tell if the healer is not doing a good job at keeping the group alive. Well, and basically anyone can tell if DDs are garbage. If it's a constant party or just well organized and disciplined players, there should be absolutely zero problems identifying mistakes and working to better themselves.
If it's a big raid, the raid leader is responsible not only for organizing everyone and issuing orders timely, but also for gathering information. Every raid consists of party groups. Party leaders give their reports to the raid leader, and he or she makes decisions depending on available info. There should be no issues to eventually have a successful raid, even if it would take several tries.

But this goes out of the window if the game is designed poorly and the only way you can gather reliable information is by having an active mod. Bosses should have clear audio and visual indicators of incoming attacks. They should not be a pathetic sponge with insane numbers of hp, and the only solution of beating them is by having half the party be fire mages with that one meta build (just an example). The mechanics should be many and with variety of complex and simple, BUT they should be intuitive and executed smartly. Let's say the boss have a reflection mechanic. Make the boss release big spikes or have spiky shield to indicate the activation and make him shout a catchphrase("Feel my pain" or smth) or make a certain pose/preparation so that the players can adjust in time. But if the only way to tell that your own fireball is gonna hit you in the face with 10x power is a small icon under the name of the boss ofc the mod would seem like a good solution.

The game should be enjoyable and fun, and not a diagram with numbers to get your ego stimulated.

On a side note, a small story. In early patches of AION (when the game was great) playing as a Summoner and trying pve content was a pain. To explain further, there were two major problems. First is ignorance and bad reputation of summoner because of bad apples. SM controlled mobs with fear and root, while SORC used sleep and transformation into a tree. You can see the problem? Bad SMs feared mobs into other mobs and wiped the parties. The second problem was that for some f-upped reason any mob or boss at the same time could be affected by only a small limited number of the debuffs. And all of SM's DPS came from strong dots. Yeah.... . As SM, you were an absolute king of solo pve (elite mobs in zones only parties of 2+ could handle) and 1 on 1 pvp and group pvp because of nasty cc. So in conclusion, everyone hated you. Allies hated you in dungeons (it was normal to see in chat people gathering parties looking for a mage and ending the message with a "no SM". Ouch, every time), they hated you in solo pve because of envy of free elite mobs farming. And the enemies hated you in pvp for obvious reasons (god I loved jumping rifts while lvling up running around and killing enemies of similar lvl and gear only to end up hunted by a group of players like a wild animal. ah, good times).
ps. playing with friends or guild was totally fine and discrimination was not common.
So time passes and developers finally lift the limit of debuffs. You go and join the raid of one of the top guilds, and they take you only because of connections, and it's the last slot (don't forget you are a godless abomination with a pet). You are the only SM in the whole raid. Raid ends as a success. You are the 2d top damage (some people had DPS meter) and you are a filthy-no-damage-SM in a pvp gear.
Moral of a story: I knew from the start my single target DMG during a long period of time was insane, and my rotation was decent. I didn't need a DPS meter to know that. All I needed was to look at others farming elites in parties of 2 slower than me and my earth elemental. The problem was game design and stupidity of some other players.

RationalThought wrote: »

If it's a big raid, the raid leader is responsible not only for organizing everyone and issuing orders timely, but also for gathering information. Every raid consists of party groups. Party leaders give their reports to the raid leader, and he or she makes decisions depending on available info. There should be no issues to eventually have a successful raid, even if it would take several tries.

And how exactly do you propose a raid leader gathers this information?

When there are 40 players in just your raid, and potentially three or four other raids all taking on the same encounter at the same time, what information do you think is available to the raid leader other than who in the raid is getting hit?

Bosses should have clear audio and visual indicators of incoming attacks.

This method of indicating an encounters intentions limits encounters in terms of how many individual abilities they can use. If every ability requires an animation, then at the very least you can only have bosses use abilities at the speed of the animation of those abilities. Using sound by itself is not a good idea, as many people are not in a position to have game sounds on while playing - they are fine as an added touch though.

RationalThought wrote: »

The problem was game design and stupidity of some other players.

No, the problem was just game design.

As soon as the game design was fixed to the point where summoners were not a liability, they were bought along on raids to see if they were viable. They were, and so they became a fixture of most raids.

The thing that is perhaps going over your head with this is that the reason summoners were fixed is because players spent thousands of hours proving where and how they were broken - using combat trackers to prove it. It wasn't that the class itself was broken, the problem is that the mechanics within which the class was bound were broken.

This is the aspect of combat trackers that many totally forget. They aren't just for raiding and understanding encounters, they aren't just for coming up with character builds, they are also the only tool players have with which to collect data in order to present issues in game mechanics to the games developers.

I've yet to play a game where this hasn't happened - and summoners in Aion was just one of the cases in that one game of it happening.

Essentially, your class was fixed because people like me used combat trackers.

You're welcome.

Lithxd

No addons/Damage Meters or combat logging is an extremely bad idea IMO for an in development game, Literally just removes all competitive nature from the MMO, WarcraftLogs and FFLogs and Raider.IO are the reason there is stuff like MDI and World First Races. Without them there is no Hardcore player base and no long lasting competition. No one would push high mythic keys or world first races for mythic bosses in WoW if there wasn't any of those. It also gives reason to continue to run repetitive dungeons instead of just sitting AFK once you get all the gear and items you need, This keeps group content alive and the player base thriving.

Little UI nuisances that players have are easily fixable with small addons majority of the time and there's no way to make a default UI that will appeal to all player base (which can cause player base to fall), text size or coloring or any other minor customizations shouldn't even be a question in games in this genre and the MMOs that are still alive years and years after release all have them.

Also without ways to see how to improve in damage or healing or anything puts a Cap on difficulty that can be designed in raids and dungeons or removes possibility of challenge modes or harder content.

Aszkalon

My Damage Meter is longer than yours !! 28cm at least !! (lol)

And everyone else who claims otherwise, is just envious of the massive Numbers my Damage is dripping with !! I do as much Damage as the remaining People of our top Five Damage Dealers together !! Without even trying. I do it Day and Night and even when i am on the Toilet or while eating in Reallife !!

Damage Meters were not invented to keep track of how well everyone in the Group performs. They were made for me !! Did you hear me ? FOR ME !!!

* falls out of the Bed *

God damn it. The worst Memories of WoW which aren't even mine but i simply happened to watch on YouTube are catching up to me ... ... ... x'D

Lithxd wrote: »

Little UI nuisances that players have are easily fixable with small addons majority of the time and there's no way to make a default UI that will appeal to all player base (which can cause player base to fall), text size or coloring or any other minor customizations shouldn't even be a question in games in this genre and the MMOs that are still alive years and years after release all have them.

And why exactly is it impossible to do the very same thing that an addon would do, but by the devs? If UI is gonna be as customizable as Intrepid are promising, I'd imagine that its backend will also be quite fluid, so Intrepid should be able to fix those "nuisances" fairly quickly.

Addons are only a requirement when the studio is trash and doesn't listen to direct feedback.

But having said that, UI issues are not nearly the same as trackers imo, because one relates to issues of input, while other relates to issues of output.

Oh, and if you were talking about UI addons that do in fact solve output issues, then I'm simply against those

Dygz

Ashes is supposed to have a highly customizable UI - so add-on UI should not need to be a thing.

NiKr wrote: »

Xeeg wrote: »

the raid leader and the other team members can't tell what they are doing?

And why exactly can they not do that? You can see mobs not being CCed, you can see people not being healed, you can see buffs not being on when needed, you can see pretty much all the things you've mentioned - especially if they were called out by the party leaders.

The only thing that would be somewhat "invisible" is the personal dps of every character. But that'll be apparent in the result of the encounter. You lost, while everyone played perfectly? Means you didn't have enough dps. And you'd then need to see who does what dmg and see what can be improved (I did this with my L2 guilds even w/o trackers).

And until we see hardcore pve and general encounter design (especially in the context of pvx), I'm not even sure dps tracker would even be important.

I'm passing on some questions to you, here, NiKr. You probably know why.

Does L2 have many sources of DoT?
Can they be an aura around the source?
Can multiple sources of the same DoT aura apply to players in a large PvP fight, i.e. if two different people have 'Inner Fire' or whatever, does their opponent get burned twice?
Can the DoT itself have any random statistical element where it sometimes does extra damage?
Can the DoT damage be altered while the DoT is happening through a buff or debuff?

Thanks.

Azherae wrote: »

Does L2 have many sources of DoT?

Nope. Maybe like ~10, with half of them being "poisons" and half "burns" (with a very few exceptions). Sources might be different, because they come from different classes and spells (iirc you can theoretically stack them all), but they ultimately do the same thing.

Azherae wrote: »

Can they be an aura around the source?

No (unless I'm forgetting a fairly big skill).

Azherae wrote: »

Can multiple sources of the same DoT aura apply to players in a large PvP fight, i.e. if two different people have 'Inner Fire' or whatever, does their opponent get burned twice?

I think the same spell, even if coming from different players, will just renew the duration. But considering that there's no auras - no, this can't happen.

Azherae wrote: »

Can the DoT itself have any random statistical element where it sometimes does extra damage?

I thiiiiink crits might apply here? But I'm really not sure, cause dots are barely noticeable in fights, due to their dps compared to the dps of any other source.

Azherae wrote: »

Can the DoT damage be altered while the DoT is happening through a buff or debuff?

I think there's only one debuff that might influence one type of dots (poisons). But due to dots being barely used (in my experience at least), that debuff is never even mentioned, let alone used.

Some dots were used in 1v1s, because those were more about avoiding as much dmg as possible, so proccing a dot was a nice way to do dmg while you yourself avoid direct one, but even then, only certain classes had such dots, so it was a fairly rare occurrence.

I'd definitely like if Ashes had a deeper system than this, cause I love dem spell/effects interactions.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Does L2 have many sources of DoT?

Nope. Maybe like ~10, with half of them being "poisons" and half "burns" (with a very few exceptions). Sources might be different, because they come from different classes and spells (iirc you can theoretically stack them all), but they ultimately do the same thing.

Azherae wrote: »

Can they be an aura around the source?

No (unless I'm forgetting a fairly big skill).

Azherae wrote: »

Can multiple sources of the same DoT aura apply to players in a large PvP fight, i.e. if two different people have 'Inner Fire' or whatever, does their opponent get burned twice?

I think the same spell, even if coming from different players, will just renew the duration. But considering that there's no auras - no, this can't happen.

Azherae wrote: »

Can the DoT itself have any random statistical element where it sometimes does extra damage?

I thiiiiink crits might apply here? But I'm really not sure, cause dots are barely noticeable in fights, due to their dps compared to the dps of any other source.

Azherae wrote: »

Can the DoT damage be altered while the DoT is happening through a buff or debuff?

I think there's only one debuff that might influence one type of dots (poisons). But due to dots being barely used (in my experience at least), that debuff is never even mentioned, let alone used.

Some dots were used in 1v1s, because those were more about avoiding as much dmg as possible, so proccing a dot was a nice way to do dmg while you yourself avoid direct one, but even then, only certain classes had such dots, so it was a fairly rare occurrence.

I'd definitely like if Ashes had a deeper system than this, cause I love dem spell/effects interactions.

Thank you, I feel like the person will understand your perspective better now.

For your clarity, these DoTs and auras and 'DoT procs' are the primary reason one might not be able to track everything, they're the main thing that one can easily lose track of (without this information, I would not have been able to explain why Predecessor, for example, has a 'Combat Log/DPS Meter in it') and they are a large part of tactics in PvE, comprising a decent amount of the tools available to certain boss designs.

These sometimes don't show in an older MMO's damage log, partially because if they do, they cause the log to scroll too fast.

I will hope that Intrepid knows the better UI options for providing this information to players in large battles, since Ashes has more of these, they are affected by stats on both sides, and the damage was able to crit in Alpha-1.

I ask you in particular to keep it in mind going forward, that when someone 'says that they can't track everything', this may be a large aspect of what they're referring to.

Azherae wrote: »

I ask you in particular to keep it in mind going forward, that when someone 'says that they can't track everything', this may be a large aspect of what they're referring to.

I'm curious how hard would it be for Intrepid to give us a log filter, where we can assign feedback from our certain skills to only go towards certain log windows (I assume we can have multiple log windows btw).

Also, I'm not sure if you know, but L2's log never shows what other people are doing. It only gives you info about your own actions and the stuff that's happening to you.

I say this, because that ff11 boss video in your new thread had the log print every damn action that was happening around you. And I forgot to mention this fact about L2 waay back when we were first discussing stuff in the context of ff11 videos you provided.

I think that's another huge factor as to why I have such a strong bias against trackers. I didn't have to track my entire party (let alone raid's actions) in my log, so noticing smth like "my debuff failed to land" was waaaay easier than parsing the log from your ff11 videos.

Iirc BDO is somewhat similar, which might also be the reason why Mag is so against trackers. We're both way more visual parsers than reading ones.

And I feel like EQ2 might've also been similar to ff11, or at the very least ACT was so ingrained into the game that Noaani is also a "reader", cause his usual argument against visuals-based bosses is that you can't have more mechanics on a boss if all mechanics gotta have visual (or auditory) feedback. And to me that kinda implies that this info was simply written out to people in some way.

Azherae wrote: »

I ask you in particular to keep it in mind going forward, that when someone 'says that they can't track everything', this may be a large aspect of what they're referring to.

For reference here, in EQ2;

2 classes get the bulk of their DPS from DoT's.
2 other classes get a substantial amount of their DPS from DoT's.
Every class has at least two DoT's.
Some DoT's can have things like their damage amount altered after being cast.
Some DoT's can not.
Some DoT's trigger additional effects such as damage procs on each tick.
Some DoT's do not.
Some DoT's can stack on a target.
Some DoT's can not.
Some DoT's have the delivery mechanism of a dumbfire pet, meaning the DoT can be ended via killing said dumbfire pet.
Most DoT's don't have this.
Some DoT's have have their damage ticks sped up, making then deal their damage faster.
Some can not have this.
Some DoT's break CC.
Some DoTs do not.

I'm at the point now where I have to finish writing this post to get back to what I am doing - the above lost is not exhausting in regards to different DoTs in EQ2.

however, as just an example, when contrasted with DoT's in L2, it should be blatantly obvious how much more complex of a combat system we are talking about here.

The notion of "watching" to see what is going on is a joke in games with a good (complex) combat system.

The reason I bring this up, NiKr, is because DoTs, almost by definition, are poor candidates for visual or auditory feedback.

BDO actually does have a few like this, and when some of them were introduced, it made a large subset of the population convinced that a certain class was top tier. Because people were so used to watching for a visual cue, when the strategy of the class was to 'hide and misdirect you from those cues using positioning'. Players would die in fights and assume the class was overpowered in raw damage, when it was literally just 'you're standing in range of my DoT and summons and not noticing, and I'm defending'.

Now, because BDO does not show onscreen damage numbers, and because you can't actually know how the enemy built, some players of that class have very strong DoT that you must avoid, and some have weak DoT that you definitely should tank through, to avoid getting grab-comboed. So the game added a complexity level, but it was too much for certain people.

I'm not gonna name names, but I have information from a certain person we chat with, that they also think this class is strong. See what I'm saying? Or rather, don't?