DPS Meter Megathread

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I'm sorry but I'm really not going through the whole thing again.

It's been explained multiple times, and I feel like I don't communicate with you very well as a generality. All I can do is hope that others understand that despite not 'meeting your challenge', I am not explicitly interested in Trackers for the DPS aspect.

If you or they choose to take my 'silence' here as admission, then so it must be.

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

I thank you.

Perhaps we can have a meaningful discussion in the other way, though. What do you consider a PvE challenge in a game like Ashes that does not have a component in which you need to check 'numbers vs time'?

I can see how one could make a game where the question is moreso 'did you hit or not', 'did you defend or not', and 'did you activate the correct mechanic' than 'did you do enough damage' or 'did you mitigate enough damage'.

Let's assume that a team member is counting on me to heal them and I keep getting frozen/stunned/knocked back when I try to, the Tracker tells them 'during this period no healing happened'. The Combat Log parser often tells them WHY no healing happened.

The challenge for me there is 'avoid being CCed', right? The issue is that if you make a game like this, generally the response will be 'just bring more healers so that you don't have to worry about one being CCed'. I consider this less challenge, in the same way that fights which don't 'punish DPS players for just going all out' are less challenge. "Just bring more DPS so the enemy dies faster."

The result is that the boss normally has to be 'tuned' so that you 'will not succeed if you have too few or too many' but this is still going to be a 'numbers' result.

What do you see as a PvE challenge where you can't just throw more of X class at the problem to get around the mechanics preventing the effectiveness of any individual one?

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

So would this be 'limiting DPS per person', or Limiting DPS the boss takes at all?

Because my first thought is the opposite. Bring more tanks. The moment you don't need the damage, that's what people do in my experience. They bring more tanks, they build more tanky. Since often, the utility of DPS, particularly on bosses, IS that they explicitly do more damage, taking that from them seems off?

There's also the fact that normally (for what I consider good design), 'damage' is the reward you get for 'not having to spend a lot of time recovering from or dealing with mechanics' or for 'taking a risk of attacking when a certain mechanic is possible'.

But honestly, it once again sounds like we just play different types of games. If Ashes manages what you're suggesting without it being a walkover for my group, I'll be glad. Been a while.

Azherae wrote: »

Let's assume that a team member is counting on me to heal them and I keep getting frozen/stunned/knocked back when I try to, the Tracker tells them 'during this period no healing happened'. The Combat Log parser often tells them WHY no healing happened.

One question though. Couldn't they just ask the healer? Like, I'm fighting the boss; the boss does some mechanic that brings me to low hp; I see that I'm at low hp and expect a heal; the heal doesn't come, I die and the raid wipes. I then ask the healer why the heal didn't come (assuming that I did everything correct and the boss mechanic wasn't avoidable at that particular moment). Healer just tells me that he was CCd.

I played a solo healer for a 36member raid a few times back in L2. The mechanics themselves weren't too complex, but because L2 didn't have any raid addons (or at least I've never used/seen them) - I had to know the voices of players in different groups so that I could heal individual players correctly (L2 didn't have raid-wide heals) and I needed to know mechanics to know when I'd be needed the most.

Theoretically, if it's not the very first attempt at the boss, you'd know the potential mechanics of said boss and would know which ones are the most dangerous ones (at least that'd be my expectations for the raid, if I was a RL). So if the raid wipes due to one member dying after a particular mechanic, I'd assume it shouldn't have taken up too much of healer's "ram" to remember that he was CCd during the last mechanic and that was the reason for the wipe. So he'd be able to answer my question w/o much trouble and w/o either side needing a tracker.

Now, I'll ask about the solution to the CCd problem below.

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

So what you're saying is that developers made a design that is literally unsolvable w/o an additional non-game-mechanic tool, but we're somehow supposed to just have said tool and accept that the design is good?

Maybe I'm just too elitist and selfish at this point, but why in the living hell should you have a tool that helps you beat smth difficult? It takes a guild months to figure out why they wipe? Great! It's a difficult content that requires them to try countless setups and pay attention to what everyone does during the raid. Fuck the tool that just shows you the most likely solution.

This to me just sounds like "devs made a shitty encounter, so it's completely fine to "cheat' and solve the encounter by being omniscient and knowing every detail of the fight". I consider that weak.

And this ties to the "CCd" problem from Azherae's example. The raid failed because the healer got CCd? Well then make several runs where the healer tries different char placements or resist buffs against the CC or multiple other potential solutions. It takes you several weeks to do this? Great! You have the whole rest of the game to play between those attempts, while having a difficult encounter to do in-between the rest of the gameplay.

This is what I was talking about when I said that trackers speed up content consumption. Except the issue is even deeper, because with the kind of mechanics Noaani wants, literally no one would be able to beat the bosses unless they were using a non-gameplay tool.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Let's assume that a team member is counting on me to heal them and I keep getting frozen/stunned/knocked back when I try to, the Tracker tells them 'during this period no healing happened'. The Combat Log parser often tells them WHY no healing happened.

One question though. Couldn't they just ask the healer? Like, I'm fighting the boss; the boss does some mechanic that brings me to low hp; I see that I'm at low hp and expect a heal; the heal doesn't come, I die and the raid wipes. I then ask the healer why the heal didn't come (assuming that I did everything correct and the boss mechanic wasn't avoidable at that particular moment). Healer just tells me that he was CCd.

I played a solo healer for a 36member raid a few times back in L2. The mechanics themselves weren't too complex, but because L2 didn't have any raid addons (or at least I've never used/seen them) - I had to know the voices of players in different groups so that I could heal individual players correctly (L2 didn't have raid-wide heals) and I needed to know mechanics to know when I'd be needed the most.

Theoretically, if it's not the very first attempt at the boss, you'd know the potential mechanics of said boss and would know which ones are the most dangerous ones (at least that'd be my expectations for the raid, if I was a RL). So if the raid wipes due to one member dying after a particular mechanic, I'd assume it shouldn't have taken up too much of healer's "ram" to remember that he was CCd during the last mechanic and that was the reason for the wipe. So he'd be able to answer my question w/o much trouble and w/o either side needing a tracker.

Sure, I don't have anything to say anymore.

There's just some conversations you can't have without faith.

That's why I said that to mcstackerson. I can't 'give you an example' that would be countered by simple responses like that, so either that means I'm wrong, and no one ever needs meters, or there's some fundamental disconnect in our perspectives.

Hopefully Noaani won't tire, but I'm out. Doesn't affect me anyway.

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

It is still a weaker "cheat" than the one you were talking about, but yes, I do find the required omniscience a bit silly. And then you have a closed loop of "the design requires me to know things that I can't know w/o a tracker and the tracker lets me know literally everything so the design should implement even more things that I wouldn't be able to know w/o the tracker".

I feel like this kind of pve design is the same copout as L2's "just let the pvp be the difficult part" one.

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

The issue to me is that if "make a drawer" is your goal, the tracker is the IKEA, because it gives you everything you need to figure out how to make that drawer. While "making it with what you have w/o any instructions" would be the non-tracker gameplay. You'll probably waste twice as much wood, if not more, but you'll do it with your own hands (while, yes, using multitude of tools) and figuring out what goes together the best and what doesn't.

Making a drawer is a difficult process, but if you have an instruction/manual - it's way easier. You still need to know how to read the manual and how to follow it (some people still fail at this, so I feel like this parallel does apply to tracker use as well), but it's way easier than just having the tools and some wood, but having no instruction on what to do with them and then figuring out what you can do.

To me, all the tools you listed is your class, gear, your own skillset and the same stuff from each raid member. And you then use all those "tools" to figure out how to "make the drawer". And a tracker is the external omniscient tool that makes the whole process easier and faster.

But like I said, I'm too selfish/stubborn/elitist when it comes to this topic. And as we've agreed before, the convo itself is useless because people will definitely make trackers and make the encounters easier for themselves, no matter how difficult those encounters are. So sorry for wasting yalls time again

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Let's assume that a team member is counting on me to heal them and I keep getting frozen/stunned/knocked back when I try to, the Tracker tells them 'during this period no healing happened'. The Combat Log parser often tells them WHY no healing happened.

One question though. Couldn't they just ask the healer? Like, I'm fighting the boss; the boss does some mechanic that brings me to low hp; I see that I'm at low hp and expect a heal; the heal doesn't come, I die and the raid wipes. I then ask the healer why the heal didn't come (assuming that I did everything correct and the boss mechanic wasn't avoidable at that particular moment). Healer just tells me that he was CCd.

I played a solo healer for a 36member raid a few times back in L2. The mechanics themselves weren't too complex, but because L2 didn't have any raid addons (or at least I've never used/seen them) - I had to know the voices of players in different groups so that I could heal individual players correctly (L2 didn't have raid-wide heals) and I needed to know mechanics to know when I'd be needed the most.

Theoretically, if it's not the very first attempt at the boss, you'd know the potential mechanics of said boss and would know which ones are the most dangerous ones (at least that'd be my expectations for the raid, if I was a RL). So if the raid wipes due to one member dying after a particular mechanic, I'd assume it shouldn't have taken up too much of healer's "ram" to remember that he was CCd during the last mechanic and that was the reason for the wipe. So he'd be able to answer my question w/o much trouble and w/o either side needing a tracker.

Maybe in some games it's that straightforward.

But if the reason is that the Healer had to heal the Summoner because a Summon fell at the wrong time, and they took an extra hit before they could resummon it due to ability cooldowns, and in that time the boss used a CC ability on the DPS which needed to be cleansed afterward. Then you the Tank took a decent hit but the big heal wasn't off cooldown yet so you used your own, at which point the Healer didn't need to heal you right away, and could prioritize other (originally) less injured party members and finally get around to dealing with the extra Poison effect from the boss that was busy ticking while they were saving the Summoner from a cooldown issue.

Five minutes later when you finally reach the end of the fight, win or lose, the question you the Tank are wondering isn't "Why couldn't you heal me, so we wiped just now?". It's "Why was it so hard to keep my MP up in the last half?"

You don't remember the missing healing, because rhythms shift, and because it's natural to sometimes have to heal yourself.
The summoner never associated them taking that hit with you spending MP in the first place.
The boss just happened to use Poison Aura more often today.
And you, at the end, don't even remember that extra healing beat or two that fell on you, because you were focused on the actual fight for the next 3-4 minutes before things finally broke down, and that self-healing requirement is normal , it just came up a few times too often.

In the end, the ANSWER, wasn't even any of that. The Bard missed an ability speed buff on the Summoner because someone's positioning was a bit off, and the Summoner eventually got unlucky as a result (and maybe that happened twice).

Who do you even ask?

There's not much reason you would remember those specific extra self-heals.
The Healer doesn't know for sure why the Summoner got hit.
The Summoner feels like it was just bad luck on timing.
The Bard didn't notice that the Summoner got knocked back while they were singing the "Speed Boost" buff that was supposed to have fixed the timing.
And the Boss may have even used more abilities later on that also made you spend more MP, as a red herring.

Literally no-one even knows, and those who do don't remember, because to NOBODY was their part of this chain of events more than 10% of what they had to focus on in fight as a whole.

But you could ask a tracker:

Tank: "Where'd my MP go?"
Tracker: "You self-healed more frequently than usual during this period."

Healer: "Then how much was I healing at that point, and who?"
Tracker: "You healed the Summoner 5 times in that part of the fight."
Healer: "Hm. Odd. I should only have needed to heal them two times."

Summoner: "Why'd I have so much trouble getting that summon off? Was the boss just extra lucky today?"
Tracker: "You only managed to heal each summon 3 times today instead of 4, due to cooldowns."
Summoner: "Wait, that's not right, why was I slower than ususal?"

Bard: "Hm? I sang the usual things."
Tracker: "The Summoner was out of range for the third recast of Speed Boost."

Party, after all of this: "Oh."
Summoner: "Well that sucks. I'll watch for that and call out if I get caught by cooldowns again."
Bard: "Hm. Okay, then that means I probably need to stand over here instead, even though I'm more likely to get hurt."
Healer: "I can afford to heal you at that POINT in the fight. The problem only comes up later on, after you're done with your buffing."
Tank: "Okay, cool. I won't fix it, cause it ain't broke, and I'd only end up making things worse."

A difference of perspective.

Maybe Ashes will be simplistic. "You wipe right away." instead of "This problem cost you some of your ability to adapt, and you didn't have enough left later on."

If every mistake instantly ends the raid, rather than demanding adaptation and allowing the opportunity to recover through skill, resources, or luck, I'm going to be a bit disappointed.

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

No, I'm on the FFXI side.

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

No, FFXI. I've never touched FFXIV. (I'd hate for you to end up trying out the wrong game and missing out. I can only vouch for the one.)

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

No, it's exactly because trackers push the content beyond reasonable design is what leading me to have issues with them.

My main issue with the tools analogy is that trackers are an external tool, that give you omniscient information that you wouldn't have had otherwise. And that is why I related them to the manual of an IKEA drawer. The manual gives you all the information that relates to the "encounter" and then it's on you to figure out what and how to do in order to succeed at completing said encounter. You were not the one who made the manual through knowledge or repetition or collaborative work. You were just presented with the manual.

The content can remain as complex as the developers want it to be. You can hide hints behind several mechanics and only if those mechanics stack onto each other in a particular way. And players then would have to play in exactly the same way, while looking out for any abnormal changes in the overall fight.

We stood in spots 1-4 and the boss used a poison aoe that wiped us. Let us now stand in spots 5-8 and see what he does. He used the poison aoe again, but now we didn't wipe. We did everything in the exact same way, but this time the rng of the boss abilities made him use a vertical slash before that poison aoe, let's stand in the same spots the next time and see if we didn't wipe because of the vertical slash or because of the positioning. And so on and so on.

And in the context of an open world pvp contested boss, you'd be doing these kinds of test under potential pressure and probably only once a day if not way rarer. So it'd take you months to figure out any given pattern. The same would apply to other guilds.

And this kind of approach would still allow for the "human" part of the equation. Maybe some player slipped up on some action and that was the reason for the wipe. If the player didn't realize it and if no one else noticed that he slipped up - imo that's a totally valid reason for your raid to have failed. Everyone still did their personal subjective best, but in that particular encounter it wasn't enough. Maybe you'll get it next time because the same player will not slip up that time.

The tracker would remove that human factor completely, because it gives you god powers of objectively knowing everything that has happened. And when developers are trying to design some encounter for people with trackers, they're literally going up against godmoded players. The dev hid a small attack feint in-between two big abilities that sometimes goes off and triggers a third ability? W/o a tracker at least one player during the raid would have to be observant enough to notice that little feint movement. With a tracker you'd just get a read out:

"During fight 1 the boss used two abilities. These were their cast times, this was the delay between the casts."
"During fight 2 the boss used 3 abilities. These were their cast times, this was the delay between the casts."

You'd see that the delay between the first two abilities in fight 2 was different from the first fight and would know to pay attention there and would be already better prepared for that change in your 3rd fight. That is even in case the tracker doesn't literally just tell you that boss used the ability "feint" there.

In other words, you'd literally get a manual of "if this screw is missing, you can use this other one w/o problems" instead of thinking "hell, I'm missing one screw, what do I do".

SongRune wrote: »

Bard: "Hm? I sang the usual things."
Tracker: "The Summoner was out of range for the third recast of Speed Boost."

Party, after all of this: "Oh."

I dunno how bards/UI worked in other games, but in L2 you could see other people's buffs in your UI, so, when you were casting your buffs, you'd at least glance at whether everyone received your buff. And if you saw that someone was missing it, you'd look at them and see that they were out of range.

So unless even the class abilities have some hidden interactions unknown to the player or the UI doesn't provide you the info you'd need for your class to operate correctly in the moment - I feel like every player should be able to do their job properly w/o needing a tracker to tell them what they did wrong/right after the fact.

On my last L2 playthrough I was a bard and a guild leader. During sieges I needed to give orders to my guild, track where my party was and where the other bard was (because of how elf bards worked in L2). And all of that on top of tracking enemies on the horizon or directly in the battle, glancing at chat for any positional callouts and listening to/talking in VC for party callouts of target assists.

My buffs had a 2 min cooldown with a ramping cost. The cost would pretty much double (for me and the other bard) if, instead of staggered buff application with the other bard, I gave my buff first and then he gave his on top of that. Due to flow of the battle, you'd sometimes have fights that lasted 10+ minutes, so you had to recast your full buff 5 times, while your whole party was together (the range was fairly limited), while you still had the previous buff (you'd match animations to the buff countdown so that your buff would replace it as soon as it went down) and while staggering your casts with the other bard.

All of that would be in the middle of fights with potential stuns/silences/agroes/movement. And I managed to do all that throughout a 2h siege with constantly changing variables.

Now I'm obviously not a top lvl pve player, nor do I know how truly difficult it is to participate in top end pve content. But if you're saying that each and every player has an attention requirement higher than what I had, during such sieges, and is pretty much unable to track the proper use of his abilities and what the boss is doing - then yes, I'll agree that trackers will be required for that kind of pve.

NiKr wrote: »

SongRune wrote: »

Bard: "Hm? I sang the usual things."
Tracker: "The Summoner was out of range for the third recast of Speed Boost."

Party, after all of this: "Oh."

I dunno how bards/UI worked in other games, but in L2 you could see other people's buffs in your UI, so, when you were casting your buffs, you'd at least glance at whether everyone received your buff. And if you saw that someone was missing it, you'd look at them and see that they were out of range.

So unless even the class abilities have some hidden interactions unknown to the player or the UI doesn't provide you the info you'd need for your class to operate correctly in the moment - I feel like every player should be able to do their job properly w/o needing a tracker to tell them what they did wrong/right after the fact.

On my last L2 playthrough I was a bard and a guild leader. During sieges I needed to give orders to my guild, track where my party was and where the other bard was (because of how elf bards worked in L2). And all of that on top of tracking enemies on the horizon or directly in the battle, glancing at chat for any positional callouts and listening to/talking in VC for party callouts of target assists.

My buffs had a 2 min cooldown with a ramping cost. The cost would pretty much double (for me and the other bard) if, instead of staggered buff application with the other bard, I gave my buff first and then he gave his on top of that. Due to flow of the battle, you'd sometimes have fights that lasted 10+ minutes, so you had to recast your full buff 5 times, while your whole party was together (the range was fairly limited), while you still had the previous buff (you'd match animations to the buff countdown so that your buff would replace it as soon as it went down) and while staggering your casts with the other bard.

All of that would be in the middle of fights with potential stuns/silences/agroes/movement. And I managed to do all that throughout a 2h siege with constantly changing variables.

Now I'm obviously not a top lvl pve player, nor do I know how truly difficult it is to participate in top end pve content. But if you're saying that each and every player has an attention requirement higher than what I had, during such sieges, and is pretty much unable to track the proper use of his abilities and what the boss is doing - then yes, I'll agree that trackers will be required for that kind of pve.

I don't actually need a tracker most of the time because my group leader is borderline superhuman. That's what all the anti-tracker people want. For the 'superhumans' to win. That's fine, I've got mine.

SongRune wrote: »

I don't actually need a tracker most of the time because my group leader is borderline superhuman. That's what all the anti-tracker people want. For the 'superhumans' to win. That's fine, I've got mine.

Pretty much I'm all for superhumans winning over normal players. And I don't even consider myself one of such superhumans. I might get up to their skill lvl through endless repetition, while they'd be up there by default, but it's exactly because of that that I want every player to play their role as they would play it w/o omniscient knowledge of what and where to do.

In other words, let gods be gods. If everyone is a god - no one is.