DPS Meter Megathread

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

But if the example I gave did in fact lead to a wipe mechanic, with the hint being the little feint that boss does w/o any audio cues - wouldn't that be a good "difficult" mechanic that still doesn't require you to have a tracker, but instead just pay attention?

That's my whole point. I understand that you're so used to having trackers for your pve, but I'm giving you a directly opposite pov. To me, that kind of mechanic would be fair. The hint is still there, but you gotta notice it to use it. The fight didn't suddenly become easier because the hint was there.

In other words, I want developers to do better. Which, afaik, is your wish as well. It's just that you want them to make encounters that would push the tracker-based difficulty, while I want them to design fights that would be as difficult as tracker-based content, but with subtle hints that require players to pay attention to different things during the encounter and learn to recognize patterns within the fight.

That small example was just the most basic one I could come up with. I'm sure there's countless ways to design a fight that's still really difficult, but has several hints to what you need to do to beat it.

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

You do realize that you just said "make mechanics only visible to those who use trackers", right?

Me seeing what I need to do during the fight is the same as you reading the tracker that shows you the same thing, except your does so in unreasonable detail, while I can only infer whether what I saw is actually the hint for what I need to do.

Again, that example was the very basic one. You could have misdirections, double or tripple triggered mechanics, ability pattern based mechanics (that would only show up if a particular string of abilities happened within the rng use of boss abilities), class combo mechanics (at which point every single raid would have their own mechanics and might never see different ones, if they don't change their raid setup). And of course you could have the combination of all of the above and more.

Again, what I'm asking for is "make the game that anyone could solve by just playing it, rather than looking at an external tool that gives you all the info about the fight. Make it still very hard and complex, but not to a point where you literally don't see mechanics that you're meant to solve".

That Azherae example of how agro worked in ff11 is great example of this. Devs made a completely hidden design mechanic, yet expected people to figure out how it worked w/o external tools. And if I'm recalling the explanation correctly, people could only figure it out after pretty much doing a hardcore parse of the whole system. In other words, they used a "tracker" to solve the problem.

To me that's just bad design from devs. Now I don't know which methods the players used before that hardcore parsing, nor am I saying that I could've somehow magically understood how the mechanic worked, but I'm assuming they've tried all kinds of stuff, so if there was ever any kind of hint as to how the system might've worked - they would've found it. But they didn't, so I'm assuming there was no hint and it was just a hidden mechanic for the sake of making the game more difficult. Which in turn pushed people to use trackers.

I want the game to just present us with our classes/gear/party combinations and say "you've got everything you need to beat anything in the game - go do it". And then base the difficulty off of those "tools", instead of giving us god powers and expecting us not to beat everything within a few months.

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

I guess my approach is just different. I want to see that and then apply what I thought I saw in the next fight. And then the next and the next and so on, iterating on my gameplay until I win. But do all of that with just the info that I and my raidmates see, instead of what the omniscient tracker sees.

Either way, we're back to running in circles w/o really changing anyone's mind. We comes from too different of a backgrounds to truly see each other's points. So I might as well just let Mag call trackers cheating and all the hardcore pvers toxic, even if I only semi-agree with one of those points

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I think that's called "create a problem and sell the solution", except in a more consumer-friendly way, where instead of selling, the creator of the problem just gives you the solution

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Nah, I'm just too far on the other side of the spectrum. I don't see invisible mechanics as fun, nor invisible puzzles as interesting.

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I mean, if you are trying to appeal to the audience that will make and use them - yes. So the only thing remaining to be figured out is whether Intrepid is trying to do that. Which brings us back to the discussion of promises and alleged design choices And that's a neverending story until we see alpha2, at the very least.

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Alright.