DPS Meter Megathread

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

I'm parrying your leap.

You didn't make a point, you did the same thing you always do, so I did the same thing I always do in response.

If you prefer, I can ask someone else to take over 'calling out your nonsense' for me, for a change of pace. I know you can't easily stop doing that thing, so I won't request that.

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

The only way I see them succeed at this is to give every class several unique cross-class synergistic abilities and make the class change requirements so damn expensive and difficult that people have to find new members instead of just changing the class of their current stack.

The meta will be the "1 of each archetype" setup, as you yourself like to say. So they'll need to vary it up with gear and augments. There's a chance they could go veeeeery deep into social org augment requirements on bosses (which imo would be quite interesting), but outside of that I really dunno how they'll design their encounters, considering all the promises/statements they've made.

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

What exactly is the source of confusion there? Cause "what?" doesn't really tell me anything about the reason behind your post.

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

You said there'll be no meta, but the design goal of "1 of each archetype" immediately implies a default preference and a potential benefit to having 1 of each archetype in your party. That's the basis of a meta.

In order to vary it up to a point that it's not just "you have 8 archetypes - you have best dps output for your party" you need to design each class' augments in a way that they feel different enough and have different lvls of synergy and dps outputs. And in order to avoid an objective "meta", you'll need to make those augments codependent in some way and give those dependencies different functions/values that would all be roughly equal in power.

For example, tank/rogue can put poison on the agroed target and rogue/ranger could exacerbate that poison with his "nature school" augments (this is a complete theoretical, before you start saying that it's not ranger who has nature as a school). And let's say that poison now provides a value equal to 500dps. Alternatively the tank could've had cleric as his secondary and use the "death" school of augments to cast a debuff that boosts any life-draining abilities, so that the fighter/bard's vampiric self-buff boosted his overall dps by 500 points.

Both examples give equal amounts of value, while coming from different classes. One could call that an anti-meta design. But when we add mob resistances and weaknesses to the equation, such augments can become more valuable. An underworld boss might have a high resistance to poison, but a weakness to death effects, so now, if we take the same example, the tank/rogue wouldn't provide any boost to the party, while tank/cleric gives +1k dps to the party. Now everyone who wants to kill said boss will just bring a "death schooled" player and easily win the encounter.

And this is why I said that the cost for switching classes would have to be really high, if you wanted to avoid people just constantly switching their classes to adjust to the upcoming encounter. I'd imagine any given raid wouldn't have 10 bosses to kill each day, so if they have a "Nature boss" on today's agenda, they'll tell their members "go switch to the fire school augments and we'll go clear that boss real quick". And even if the quest for class-change takes 1-2h - they'll easily do that.

And once people figure out the best approach to each valuable boss - there'll be a set meta of switching to appropriate classes on appropriate days (depending on boss respawn timers). To me this sounds like complete self-sustained farming meta where your raid never needs any changes in their core setup, because everyone can do everything.

But if Intrepid makes the class-change super expensive/long or if they add social org based augments as a requirement for boss fights - you'll have raids needing more/different people in order to maximize their dps output. And in the context of "boss rewards in a dungeon scale off of how fast you cleared the previous boss" - you'll need that dps.

In other words I'd like to make it harder for a set group of people to clear all the content in the game. Obviously you couldn't give fewer shits about any of this, because you don't care about peak dps numbers or anything of that sort. And there's a high chance that no one else would see the things I described as META, simply because there's internal change happening in-between farms so there's no one way to beat everything. And maybe my preference of the design described above goes directly against Steven's vision of "let people change classes every other day, or even daily, if they want". And if that's the case, well, I'll just let it be and play the game in my own way.

Yes, those are all the currently planned designs and I hope they work out exactly how they're currently planned. And if the do, there's a good chance that even the tracker/meter people won't care about those tools as much as they would've in other games, purely due to the volatility of content and variability of group setups.

But I'm assuming we're at least 2 years away from knowing if that'll be the case.

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

Yeah, they'll obviously use them to figure out their own best rotations and stuff, but that's why I said "not as much as in other games". A completely scripted game can be "solved" through proper tracker use. A completely random game would require you to know what to do in each possible combination of mob abilities, as Noaani said. So, in theory, a game that's in the middle and that is balanced as well as Dygz sees it to be - the tracker use would probably be fairly limited (on top of Intrepid's "no addons" rule).

NiKr wrote: »

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

Yeah, they'll obviously use them to figure out their own best rotations and stuff, but that's why I said "not as much as in other games". A completely scripted game can be "solved" through proper tracker use. A completely random game would require you to know what to do in each possible combination of mob abilities, as Noaani said. So, in theory, a game that's in the middle and that is balanced as well as Dygz sees it to be - the tracker use would probably be fairly limited (on top of Intrepid's "no addons" rule).

It's not that the tracker is needed.

It's that the 'benefits' being claimed that we will get due to not having it are not REAL, and people like me see 'losses', however small, from not having ANYONE having one, and even worse, the outcomes of people thinking that other people have them.

I can play a game without Trackers, I don't even use or usually need them. But the point being made over and over is simply "Banning these will never do what you think or hope it does, on top of being 'legally' borderline impossible".

I've got:

"The Bard who writes Parsers to make sure abilities are working correctly/understandably because Bard is definitely the class/Archetype where if there is sufficient depth you will nearly always be unable to do this yourself."

"The Synergistic Summoner who doesn't have the 'slots' to manage all the summons, positions, and still keep track of every other random thing happening in a massive combat log."

"The 'hateful' PvP-er who dislikes Metas but also knows that artificially hiding information leads to massive misconceptions and long stretches of poor balance."

"The one who seeks truth who usually just wants to call out the baseless lies and misunderstandings about how things are done ("FFXIV doesn't allow trackers"? please.)"

And my own tiny opinions/concerns which are actually the LEAST relevant here:
"I don't care about the trackers, I care about the combat log, but if I have the combat log, am I allowed to parse it if I write the parser?"
"Is this game going to have stupid damage numbers that can't be eyeballed and even I will want a parser for?"
"If it doesn't, and I operate at my usual level of skill, do I have to worry about being accused/investigated for being this fast because people say that I must be using one? Are we going to end up with an entire 'counter-toxic' community where guilds have to worry about members being banned for being too GOOD at READING?"

But Noaani, Tragnar and Aerlana will make all those points because those are the foundation of the argument anyway. That said, since apparently 'more people talking' is somehow meaningful to this discussion, rather than my preferred 'Let Noaani engage each new person on the merits of their perception and see what happens'.

I will take the 'days off' since my concerns are the least (mainly because depending on how mine are answered, I just won't play).