DPS Meter Megathread

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Yes. And to this point, @Noaani how much more info did you get from the tracker than you did from EQ's battle log? I feel like my bias might stem from my skewed L2 experience where I just had a "tracker" within the game itself, because my battle log would show dmg dealt/received and chance of debuffs on mobs (though not on all servers). And when I clicked on the mob/boss, I could see his current info (buffs, agro list, skill list).

This wasn't the normal L2 experience, so I guess, in a way, I was playing with a form of addon/tracker, but they were just built into the game itself. And I used all that info to make my calculations when I needed that.

I'd be fine if Ashes showed this kind of info in the game and had smth like a dps dummy in nodes just for people to train their rotations.

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To me it's just a "whatever the Admin/Dev decide - I'll go with it". As I stated above, I had L2 servers where I had a ton of info on stuff and I also had servers where none of it was present. In either case I just played the game and enjoyed it for what it was. And that's why I said that if Intrepid does have/allow trackers - I'd be fine with it, even if I wouldn't use them myself (though if they just had a good battle log, then I guess I would be using it ).

I prefer to play the game my own way and then find people who are ok with me playing like that. I'm not trying to push my own beliefs on others, but, exactly because of that, I don't like when others push their beliefs onto me, which has often been the case with addon/tracker/3rd party tools suggestions on reddit/forums in the past 2 years (not necessarily saying you're doing it here rn). And that pushing might've made me a bit more defensive on this topic.

And one more thing on the topic of PvX, how long were the raids in EQ(2)? And if short then could you run multiples of them in the same day? I know that wow/ff14 players usually run their dungeons for hours, but from what I understand it's just you repeating the exact same motions until you succeed at doing them in a very precise manner.

But in L2's "raiding" you'd usually spend from 1 to 12 hours pvping your enemies and then fight the boss for another 1-2h (longer on epic dragons), depending on your party composition. And because of the difference in pvp and pve combat, you wouldn't be repeating the same actions all that time, so by the time you'd get to fight the boss your brain would already be fried, so easier pve on said boss was justified.

And I find it hard to imagine how that kind of interaction would fit a super complex boss fight after a few grueling hours of pvp for that boss. I hope Intrepid gives us a few of their "1% beatable" bosses in the alpha2 and let us pvp for it, just as we would on release.

Now obviously some guilds would probably just have 2 separate groups of players for those kinds of raids, but we'll have to test how Intrepid's anti-zerg mechanics work out in that kind of setup.

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I wanted to know the mental taxation a raid would have on people. Even with easy pve in L2, the mental taxation of the whole process was high because you had to pvp for hours before the boss itself. And that was a single boss farm on a single day. You'd usually have several such bosses within a week, on top of all the other smaller bosses that helped you to farm gear that let you clear the epic bosses.

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What was you longest farm within one day? Was there ever a time where those 15h were all done within a day or was it always broken up into several days-worth of farming a location?

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And this is why I'm veeeery interested in how Intrepid's planning to tackle this issue. Especially considering that they want to have anti-zerg mechanics. I hope they manage to come up with smth good, but for now I highly doubt it.

The super obvious solution that I see is the L2's one. You have a semi-instance that has a door that only opens for some limited time once the boss has respawned. While the door is open, anyone can enter the boss room. Usually the doors would close once the boss "wakes up or is awaken by someone". Once the doors close, no one else can enter unless the boss is killed or everyone inside is dead. This type of system allowed to have pvp around the boss right up until his full farm and sometimes even after that, because the farming party might've wiped and you'd repeat the "pvp around the door, then inside, then boss farm" cycle again (the doors would close for a bit after the wipe).

But even if they decide to go with this mechanic, I can't even imagine how taxing it'll be to farm a top lvl "1% boss". You pvp for hours at the peak of your abilities and then you have to perfectly fight the boss at, potentially, even higher player ability. And if you fail, you repeat these actions all over again.

And even if you go with separate groups of people for pve and pvp, all that your enemies have to do is to PK your pve healers and pretty much stop you from farming the boss at that particular cycle (that is if there's no other ways to revive a player outside of a healer archetype).

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Yep. And I think alpha2 will be one of the things that helps Steven to make that call. They'll have to be a toooon of testing of all kinds of encounters and in all kinds of setups with all kinds of players. And if Steven sees that some of those encounters work out much better in the context of his vision, he should definitely go for those (imo). But only Steven himself will know which kind of encounters will fit what he wants in Ashes.

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I mean, they don't need to know how well it'll work. They need to know whether their planned pve designs will work at all. Yes, a ton of games have failed at owpvp bosses or have failed at instanced pve (for one reason or the other), but Intrepid needs to show us at least what they have in mind so that we can give some kind of feedback on it.

Steven has made a ton of promises and claims, but, unless at least the base idea of those promises works on a small scale, none of them would matter if the game can't survive for a few years, to let players and devs figure out best PvE.

The main things I'll be looking at during the testing are their anti-zerg mechanics, their boss combat mechanics and the overall system of open world bosses. If the first one is great then I'll have more belief in the overall premise of their ow bosses. If the second one is good, I'll believe in their ability to develop good instanced bosses (though opinions of people like you would obviously be more important at that point). And if the third one has a few variables, I'll believe that they can make more good bosses in the future w/o running into content walls.

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In this particular context what I meant by a content wall is making the same, or very similar, boss encounters. There's only so many "there's a boss on a flat field surrounded by mountains" encounters you can make before your players grow tired of them.

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I treat it the same way I do with Intrepid's intention to somehow be the best pvp mmo out there. If they wanna hit 1 in a howevermany previous attempts chances of succeeding, then why couldn't they fail with boss design so much that they hit 1 in a 100s of games that have done good pve before. As Shia said "Nothing is impossible!"

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Ok, I should've said "mmo with ow pvp in it". I see their chances at succeeding the same as their chances at completely fucking up the pve part. But I believe that they can succeed at making a good mmo with owpvp, so I have to believe that there's a chance that they fuck up pve. Especially if we consider how high the standards for pve are for people like you.

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True. And I hope they manage to do that, because imo the pvp system is already as good as it can be and will just have to adjust some details to be its best self. So if they make the pve part of the game on the same lvl as the one you gush over, I'll be better off for it because that part of the game will keep more people playing which is good for my part of the game.

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And I think L2 had the best balance of the two. It just didn't go for the mechanically difficult pve in its semi-instances. Tweak a few features around those semi-instances or set them up in such ways that those people who're good at pve have a better chance of entering the location.

Hell, have a difficult solo instance that rewards you the item that you then need to use in order to enter the boss room. I'd assume all the PvErs would at least enjoy the extra content. And all the "true pro top lvl" PvXers can really prove their skill by being good at both pve and pvp.

You'd still have pvp around the bosses against other guilds that are trying to kill it, but the pve content itself could be completely separated from pvp. Though I guess the pve parts of those guilds would probably just stand around w/o flagging up, so that kinda kills the whole idea. You could maaaybe add some "the door requires both blood and *the item*"-type thing, so that you'd have to fight in that location and then you'd be able to use the pve-acquired items to enter the boss instance.

Either way, I think there's ways that can combine both sides to truly make the game pvx. Having instances give you good gear would usually just lead to people grinding those instances until you get all the gear you can get out of them. And if the only way to get BiS, after that, is only through open world means, then I'd assume pvers will feel fucked over because they'd now have to pvp to progress further.

Though I'm also used to people just farming both, people and mobs, so I might be really wrong with the assumption that "pvpers" would grind instances and that "pvers" wouldn't want to pvp to progress.

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

Guess Intrepid will have to get away from the label of "a raid game". Because they can't have a gear-giving daily instance that would satiate the hunger of all the raid wanters, due to that literally destroying the economy of the game.

They can't have the semi-instances that I suggested because the reward would be too limited (even though that's one of the core principles of the game).

They can't have complex owpvp bosses because, as you said, they'll never get killed.

So the only solution is to either have instances w/o gear, and have all your pvers be butthurt about having 0 gear, or to remove pvp entirely and just make a ton of bosses that people will fight whenever they can w/o anyone interrupting them.