DPS Meter Megathread

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

Agreed. Anyone who says this to someone who has even a chance of saying no, it shows a lack of social skills.

And ofc there's those who say it to people who aren't in a position to say no, which is a different set of social 'skills' but not the good kind...

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

But my point is - how can you deal with an ability that you don't even know about? If a 3rd party tool has to parse the game for you and tell you when the boss is doing a thing - that's not "dealing with the ability", it's "dealing with a 3rd party tool outside of the game".

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

The visual representation of cast bars that I suggested would allow bosses to cast other stuff while the bar is progressing. If anything, it feels like my suggestion is exactly what you're talking about. And it could also be very encounter-specific because it could be linked to surroundings or mob designs, or whatever else.

In other words, I simply want WoW's addon features, but cooked into the game itself. Proper audio feedback, proper visual feedback, proper base UI settings, holistic difficult encounter design that requires each player in the raid to pay attention to their own game window that gives them all the information they'll need w/o any outside tool.

I support battle logs, because that was always what I used to see what ultimately killed me in a big fight. And that very support is the reason why I say that trackers will be inevitable.

NiKr wrote: »

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

But my point is - how can you deal with an ability that you don't even know about? If a 3rd party tool has to parse the game for you and tell you when the boss is doing a thing - that's not "dealing with the ability", it's "dealing with a 3rd party tool outside of the game".

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

The visual representation of cast bars that I suggested would allow bosses to cast other stuff while the bar is progressing. If anything, it feels like my suggestion is exactly what you're talking about. And it could also be very encounter-specific because it could be linked to surroundings or mob designs, or whatever else.

In other words, I simply want WoW's addon features, but cooked into the game itself. Proper audio feedback, proper visual feedback, proper base UI settings, holistic difficult encounter design that requires each player in the raid to pay attention to their own game window that gives them all the information they'll need w/o any outside tool.

I support battle logs, because that was always what I used to see what ultimately killed me in a big fight. And that very support is the reason why I say that trackers will be inevitable.

It's SLIGHTLY complicated to explain why this works out.

In a multiplayer setting, you can approach this in one of three ways.

1) A player is in charge of 'seeing' everything
This is the most common method, and is my role in things like Elite Dangerous Conflict Zones. Shot-caller, who may or may not also be tactical commander depending on the game.

2) Everyone is in charge of seeing what they are supposed to be the one dealing with
MOBAs and mid level PvE, most games fall in here, you benefit from comms but as you get more in tune with a group you can theoretically train to synchro well enough to not need much comms.

3) Take as many people immune to the mechanics or able to shut them down without being able to see everything, as possible.
This is often the response that mid level players have, and because guides from top players post-analysis tend to be efficiency related, what happens is that someone tells the mid level players 'if you want to just win, get X class, 3 Y, a healer, and a Z, and that should make it easy.

The idea being that for mid level groups that have some number of Dumbass Casuals, many don't want to have to understand mechanics or coordinate. They want to just clear the thing.

The issue here for high difficulty stuff is simply that 2 only works in the absolute tightest of groups, where 'everyone is at the skill level/type where they could be the shot caller that day if needed'. And even then, it's well known that you'd STILL be better off having a single shot-caller who ISN'T EVEN PLAYING, if possible.

As for why you still 'need' the trackers beyond that, it's related to it. Figuring out 'who isn't seeing what they need to be seeing' in games that are not binary, can be hard. I believe that given this, you would still want the game to be so hard that 'you have to get that group of Shot-caller tier high level players' together in one place to win.

But at the end of the day, someone has to 'work out that we're failing the encounter because you don't know your Ricochet range'. How exactly that happens, is up to the group, but without the tracker or the 'savant', it's possible that it doesn't happen.

The game will either be built for 'the savants' (which, I should warn, tends to happen because the DESIGNERS are in this category, hence the nerfs in AC6) or 'so that you don't need them' in which case they blow others out of the water, which is fine in single player games but not MMOs (for me).

Or if you care we can discuss Karkinos which is super easy as noted whenever I talked about it.

Karkinos isn't about dodging the abilities. It's not about 'seeing'. It's about 'this has happened, choose what to do about it, you have 2 seconds to commit to a single course of action as a group, failure to synchronize will lose this fight'.

But the problem is that your list of 'single courses of action' is like 16 'choices' long and depends on 20+ datapoints, most of which you should not all (sanely) have been tracking. So you lose.

Then comes the combat tracker part.

"Given the datapoints that we now have to go back and check, why did we lose? Who wasn't on board with the chosen option, or whose datapoint did the shot-caller(s) drop?"

You can do it by reading a log or watching the fight if you recorded it and can see everyone else's damage and buffs status. It just takes long. Doesn't matter to me. If you can prevent the trackers and I knew this was definitely true...

Then I'd just feel sorry for all the people who don't have time to rewatch a 15 minute fight from 5 different perspectives. Not really my concern at all.

EDIT: This is also why I don't care whether the mechanics are 'you must do these things to prevent dying to the big HP damage' or 'you have been affected by statuses that prevent you from being able to clear this enemy in some other way', except in PvPvE games.

I care a little bit because I somewhat like the second more, and Action players tend to complain a bit more about 'unavoidable damage' which does 'unavoidable damage' to the game's reputation. but overall, the experience is similar.

Victory! Good job everyone. It was getting dicey at the end there with all the running around and derailing, so it wasn't our best run.

I'll put it through the parser and see if we can do better on the next hundred pages.

And thanks to George for shot-calling in that last 10% and getting us there after that 3 month break. Was beginning to think that Alpha-2 might hit before we made it.

Azherae wrote: »

I believe that given this, you would still want the game to be so hard that 'you have to get that group of Shot-caller tier high level players' together in one place to win.

Yep I'd like a #2 large with large fries

So in the context of such levels of difficulty, how much you or @Noaani would be upset (as analytical players) if the game literally told you what you did wrong at the end? In other words, we'd jump my entire damn argument by, like, a hundred lvls, make me a complete hypocrite in the process, and completely circumvent the tracker usage by the game simply giving you the result of said tracker's analysis.

This would only apply to instanced encounters and those instanced encounters would only reward cosmetics/titles.

And an additional question for Noaani. Would you still use your own tracker on top of that for ow stuff, even if it was way easier to parse on the fly?

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

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

Maybe I'm mistaken in this take (and I'd ask @Azherae as a third party to check me), but it feels to me that I want a much more difficult and complex design than you, Noaani

To me, "reacting to the ability post-factum" and "every mob has the same basic set of features" seems like the laziest possible game design ever. Maybe I'm just still misunderstanding Noaani's point? Or missing (forgot?) some context?