DPS Meter Megathread

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I should've made my point clearer. I'm against the high speed that trackers provide to the players who want to get to the "real" meta. The things you said literally tell me "once the people know who does more dmg - that's gonna be the meta and anyone who's not that class won't be welcome". And I want to delay that moment as much as I can.

Yes, there'll be some meta as soon as people start thinking about who's stronger. But it won't be cemented for a while because someone somewhere will be testing stuff and will figure out that someone else is stronger. But with trackers that "figuring out" stage will be super fast and after that you'll have a cemented meta that doesn't change at all.

And patches changing the meta is a thing that I've seen getting flack from people on this forum. I'm perfectly fine with it because that's how L2 balanced its classes, but I've seen people be against big nerf/buff changes with each patch. And if you meant that the new gear sets will somehow change class meta so much that people will shift classes, then I'd sure as hell be interested in seeing how exactly people would react to that kind of thing.

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I want none of that, I'm just being realistic about what's gonna happen despite Devs' wishes. No matter how well Intrepid balances their classes, there'll be some combination of them that will do the most damage compared to any other combination. And gear augments/builds will probably be enough to counterbalance any boss variability (unless Intrepid want people to have full accounts of alts to properly fight bosses).

I asked about lvl1 fighting the final boss because I was leading up to the thing I wrote in another post here - "the resource management in a fight". Knowledge being one of those resources.

I'm not a d&d player, but, from what I've seen about it, "perception check" seems to be a highly valued ability that boosts your "knowledge resource". So if a campaign has magic elements interacting with one another and you have, say, a lightning ability that is boosted by the target being wet - you might want to perceive a puddle behind the boss, push him into it and then zap him, in order to maximize your dmg output relative to your mana consumption (correct if my assumptions about d&d are wrong). That would be you "using your abilities in a proper order", in order to properly use your resources.

Same can be applied to mmo bosses. There'll be some general mechanics, but the boss' attack and hp pool will define how much dps you'll need to have in order to beat him before he goes through the entire mana/hp pool of your raid. And the harder the boss - the more resources and the better resource utilization you'll need to have to beat him.

And in order to achieve the things Steven alleged to be trying to achieve (mainly "only a few % of players will beat some of the bosses), they'll have to design the bosses in such a way that only the highest dps raid setups will be able to kill the boss. And the design has to be that way by definition. You can disagree with such a design, but that is what Steven said he wants to have in the game.

And just to repeat and reinforce my stance on the topic: I'm against any and all addons/meters/etc.

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I hope this design stays around and works out how they want it to, because to me this just sounds like "pvp on the boss to stop others from farming it, until the world setup makes you your strongest and you can kill the boss"

That's what I'd like to have in the game, but I'm not sure how many people would like that.

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I hope it's that way and I hope that Intrepid can balance their pve content in such a way that "each of every arch" is optimal, but could be tweaked a bit by replacing one or two people with some double class or simply by changing augments. But we'll have to see.

I'm used to having people in my constant party rather than just classes that are free to be switched out, so I'd be completely fine with Ashes going down the same balancing route. And I've made my main class work through several updates where it was nerfed, and I was still doing just fine in pvp.

And if those kinds of changes make it so that trackers don't exacerbate the meta issue - I'd only be glad about that.

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I was talking in the context of guild vs guild fighting for bosses, not just randoms gathering together.

And in that context it'll probably be same groups of people with the same classes knowing exactly their peak strength or building themselves for a particular world setup (i.e. fire mages waiting for a sunny summer day or lightning mages waiting for an autumn/spring thunderstorm). And they'd be fighting anyone else trying to kil the boss right up until the proper world setup runs around. At least that's the approach I'd take if I was trying to make a hardcore pve guild in Ashes.

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And in the context of open world bosses, you have to have speed on your side because you never know when your enemy will roll up on your raid and ruin it. If your non-meta raid takes 10 mins to kill a boss, that might be 2 minutes too late, because the enemy guild have come and wiped you all. But if your meta raid can kill the boss in 6-7 minutes - u gucci.

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I'd think so. If the first raid has a sub-optimal setup and had the first hit, but then the second raid with an optimal setup comes up and starts hitting the boss too, the og raid would have to decide: do they flag up and try their luck in pvp/pk or do they think they have enough dps to do the 40% required for loot before the boss dies.

I'd assume that with a tracker this wouldn't really be an issue because the og raid would've used said tracker to know what the best dps setup is and utilize it to kill the boss w/o a problem (well, unless the 2nd group PKs them).

And in case either situation devolves into pvp - the tracker wouldn't matter either way cause you'd no longer be just hitting the boss.

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By this point in my reading this forum, this is a Dygz classic. He seems to take a lot of things in their most literal way and if someone's argument doesn't quite fit his own literal take on some part of the argument, then the whole argument is invalid. And that's on top of him pushing the line of "if I don't play this way then you must not play this way either".

Like, yes, in theory you should be able to kill bosses w/o using META, but Intrepid literally wants pve competition (with boss loots being time-dependent), so you'll have to use the most effective way to kill a boss. Dygz will most likely not participate in those raids, because he doesn't like hardcore challenge, but that doesn't mean that others won't do this (mainly because Intrepid wants to design encounters around that).

And just to reiterate it once more. Dygz, we agree on this topic. I don't want meters either and want Intrepid to design bosses for a non-meter gameplay, but due to the overall design goals of competitive pve people will definitely make dps meters and use them to find the closest thing to an objective META, on top of a general meta of the game.