DPS Meter Megathread

Yeah, I'd definitely like to have a few legendary bosses with long respawns, but you'd need to either have the same semi-instance as in L2 or at least have the bosses in underground rooms or smth, so that the competitor couldn't just look at how the boss fights then interrupt the og farmers and then clear the boss themselves because they figured it out.

NiKr wrote: »

Now obviously me playing a solo game is nowhere near the same thing as fighting an mmo boss with 39 other people. But the core principle remains. I want a game that gives you all the info you need right during the fight and it's then on you to see and recognize that info during the fight , be it the very first fight (if you're a pattern-recognizing savant) or your 100th fight (if you're a plain dude who's bad at puzzles and with no mechanical skill).

I think this is the thing I want to address that might actually move this conversation meaningfully forward for one of the first times (aside from all the times where people just chat with Noaani until they see).

The very definition of 'gives you the info you need right in the fight' is the 'problem' here. I believe we can now agree that all the information you need to defeat the Tree Sentinel is visible in the battle. I would say the same is possible for the now-famous Malenia.

The difference if any is that Malenia requires one to 'put a bunch of abstract data points together'. Still fine. But here's the thing, Malenia is not necessarily mechanically very difficult if you can sorta 'see exactly her weakpoint' at the 'savant' level.

So my question is technically 'is the skill to know what to look for something they can balance around?'
I end up at the opposite concern. I would be happy if the game's top was maybe 4x as challenging as Malenia is, it would solve almost all the problems, and would change the discussion from 'Combat Trackers' straight to 'HitBox Scanners' instantly.

This post isn't about me challenging your point, I'm really just agreeing, while acknowledging that we as a community will still need some way to deal with the people who are looking for the shortcut, particularly those who don't want to bash their heads for 10 hours because they want to catch up, and we don't have one.

Azherae wrote: »

This post isn't about me challenging your point, I'm really just agreeing, while acknowledging that we as a community will still need some way to deal with the people who are looking for the shortcut, particularly those who don't want to bash their heads for 10 hours because they want to catch up, and we don't have one.

Here I'm mainly on the elitist side. If only the tools can help you win - that's bad for you. If the design circumvents the tracker use and pretty much requires you to have the skill to execute the seemingly plain but difficult actions - only the skilled will be at the top, and imo they deserve to be.

Ideally you'd need for that design to account for potential bot use too, but I don't really know if that's even possible, cause any kind of hardcore mechanic could be distilled to pure input sequences and, in theory, those inputs could be synced up for the whole raid, so I don't really know how you'd go around that.

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Yeah, that's why I made the separation between the single player and mmo raid. If the raid required the same amount of understanding of the fight from each member and had the same difficulty of action execution for each member - I'm sure it'd take months to beat the fight.

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And that is exactly what I've been talking about when I said "I need concrete details from Intrepid". What if they change their mind and go back on their promise of hardcore pve battles. The fights would still be difficult for the majority of "normal" players, but the true top lvl ones would not even play.

And I think that either showing a full boss fight or just presenting their current design direction would indicate
if they're still sticking to that promise and in what way they mean to realize it.

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And if it's shown in the log - it should be seen in the fight. That's all I'm asking, but Noaani said that this stuff would be too easy, because some mechanics should only be seen through log/tracker parsing.

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WoW bosses are at that point because the devs know that everyone will be using those assisting addons. It's one of the problems I have with the "design around trackers" argument (except in the way I understood it as presented by Noaani).

WoW devs know that players will literally have a program telling them where and when to stand/move, so they can make the mechanics so unreasonably difficult that you can beat the encounter only with the help of such programs. One could argue that it's the "true difficulty" of the game, because it's that hard, but I just personally disagree with that kind of thinking. Iirc FF14 tells players where to stand through their own UI, right? So if you wanted to make a boss whose mechanics gotta be dodged like a dance (as you pointed out) - you're free to design it that way and people will have to have the skill to do so. I'm all for those kinds of fights, but against the type of fights where the game tells you literally nothing, yet presents an impossible fight.

And that line mainly refers to the pace of such mechanics rather than the mere fact that they exist. If the pace is "you gotta make 5 very precise moves within 5-6 seconds (as a whole raid), or you wipe" - I think the game should tell you where to stand and just make you react to it.

And if the pace is "you gotta move twice within a 6 second window" - I'd be fine with the game not showing you how to move and letting you wipe on the fight and then remember how you need to move.

And as I see it, the first example would most likely be a stationary scripted place, while the second example could be dependent on where the boss is facing, so the raid could control the mechanic to make it easier for themselves. And if the devs don't want to have that - make the boss have randomized agro and give tank a few tools that would counteract that.

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Oh, for sure. But they should at least give a rough example of what they can produce. If they do intend on appealing to the hardcore pvers and don't want to lose them after the first few months of the game, I'd assume showing a cool boss fight in alpha2 would accomplish that.

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I think Noaani is talking about top lvl raiders from games that have raiding as their main attractor. So kind of an "elites of the elites" type of deal.

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I have no real preconceived notions about what the content should be, outside of that it should have pvp somewhere around it (before/during/after). I expect to see a wide range of difficulty of bosses, but if there'll be only one super high one - I'd be fine with it.

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My only problem with the suggested difficulty (mainly by Noaani) is the "invisible" mechanics that can only be figured out by parsing a tracker. Those feel unfair to me.

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There's a high chance that I won't consume even mid-lvl difficulty content because I dunno if my planned casual guild will even be doing pve content. I will make a hardcore character later on, once I establish myself as the best crafter around and have enough influence to get myself into a guild that would be clearing hard content. And if the game survives up until that point - I'll be fine with whatever difficulty that content has.

I have literally all the free time a person could possible have, so no content is a problem for me.

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I dislike this suggestion. There will be trackers on both of those servers, but the ones on the "no trackers" server will then actually be biased to only toxic users (the non-toxic ones will be on the "yes trackers" server), which will create a selection bias effect that will cement the false association between trackers and toxicity in many players minds.

If there are the same ratio of toxic tracker players to non-toxic tracker players as there are toxic players to non-toxic players in general, but you put all the non-toxic ones on a specific "trackers allowed" server, you're making all the "no trackers please" players lives unnecessarily difficult, and giving a normal community an undeserved bad reputation with those players.

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

That's the main contradiction for me though. If tracker is not impactful why have it? And if it is impactful then why not design fights where you don't need it.

Noaani says that devs can't make a truly difficult piece of content w/o accounting for players using trackers. That leads me to believe that trackers are wildly impactful on the content and its potential difficulty.