DPS Meter Megathread

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

What if the difficulty didn't go up? It was still only <10% of the playerbase who can farm it, but for said 10% it was super easy because they used trackers and everyone else didn't.

Would you, at that point, see the game as boring? Cause at that point the content's general difficulty didn't change, while you yourself brought the boredom onto the content through the use of a tracker.

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

I mean yes, but the whole point of Noaani's eagerness to have them is the fact that Steven wants to have a raiding scene with his "we'll have <10% bosses" statement. And Noaani sees dps meters as the main tool that will let you beat those bosses and keep beating them, even if Intrepid increase the difficulty in whichever way.

But what if the 90% of players still couldn't beat the bosses, but the 10% that were using the meters could beat them easily? The generally perceived difficulty would remain the exact same, while the "true" difficulty for the 10% would now be super low, because they made it easy for themselves with their objective super meta.

We have not received permission from Aerlana to share the quoted post.

Well Noaani disagrees with you there, cause he's been saying that some EQ2 bosses never got guides because people wanted to be the only one who's able to beat it. AoC's bosses will most likely have a similar attitude, because bosses will be super contested, and if you know a mechanic that lets you beat the boss while any other guild hasn't even attempted the boss (cause you won in pvp against them), they wouldn't even know where to start and you'd have a huge upper hand.

But even outside of that. Why do you need meters then? If boss difficulty comes from visuals, you have no need for meters. But meters will allow you to figure out the best objective approach to the boss, so the boss will become trivial much faster and now you'll require Intrepid to make a "more difficult" boss, otherwise the content becomes easy for you.

Also, guides don't give every viewer the ability to beat the boss because there's still the high physical requirement to be able to push buttons correctly, move in a timely matter and have the ability to track everything and remember the whole guide. So even with guides, bosses could be <10% cleared.

But once the "meter people" clear them - they'll need better faster harder bosses or it'll be boring. Absence of a meter for the masses would delay this boredom. But obviously people will still use them and get bored and leave, if Intrepid doesn't make content just for them. I'm fairly sure that's the situation with WoW's current bosses, where most people don't even clear basic difficulty bosses cause after years of making bosses for "meter people", the skill floor was way too high.

Now obviously that's more of a WoW issue than an EQ2 (or maybe some other pve mmo) one, but even here Noaani said that people with meters will just clear difficult content and will need more.

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

Does it though? If the 90% still can't clear it, then it's still aspirational, no? They still can't clear it so it can't just suddenly become non-aspirational. The gear from that content will still be super rare in any group of people outside of the very top of the server.

I can see that point if you mean it in the way "if the hardcore top people leave - everyone else will follow", but definitely disagree with the aspirational part of the equation.

We have not received permission from Aerlana to share the quoted post.

And I agree with all of those points, but my main counter to dps meters is the increased speed of going through the content. And while I understand that EQ2 was able to introduce enough content for all those hardcore people to eat while the devs made more (and I hope Intrepid can copy that pace), I'd personally prefer if that process was longer.

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).

Now, if Intrepid can prove to me during alpha2 that they can pump out several super complex bosses, that also can be farmed in the context of open world pvp, every other month - I'd have fewer problems with dps meters speeding up content clearing, just because there'd always be enough of it. But until then, I'll keep thinking that meter people are just ruining the game for themselves.

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

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.

We have not received permission from Aerlana to share the quoted post.

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).