Personally I cant wait until i can use damage meters. Right now I have no way to check my rotation, or what abilites are better than others and under what circumstances.
I am the type of players who really enjoys playing well and optimising his gameplay. Right now though. I feel like I am playing in the dark.
"Go back to WoW, no other game has meters." Hurp. I like how playing WoW is suddenly an insult. Is this because of weeaboos joining the communities?
Sudden? "go play wow" has been a insult since 2004, Where have you been? We used in in never winter nights, Planeside, Eve and many other games that were out around wow's launch.
Not just that, he's a hypocrite for using "weeaboos" when referring to disparagment by use of "go play WoW."
Personally I cant wait until i can use damage meters. Right now I have no way to check my rotation, or what abilites are better than others and under what circumstances.
I am the type of players who really enjoys playing well and optimising his gameplay. Right now though. I feel like I am playing in the dark.
Eh, throwing this up here from the other thread and points I made earlier for debate.
The reason that a damage parser should not exist is the same reason as to why DRM does exist.
It's not to stop the elitist people who know how to do all of it without the tools, it is to stop the people who don't. With a parser it's easy to call out those numbers and enforce elitism; without, not so much for the common man.
Furthermore, instead of looking at the problem as "who's fault was it" why not look at it as "what can I do to make sure that doesn't happen again."
The problem with damage meters is that it gives a very easy method to create elitist communities. Need x DPS to get into a guild? Even with a personal meter they could demand a screen shot. No screen shot, no guild. Have people done this before with DPS meters? Yes. Will they do it again if they're implimented? You bet your butt they will.
Lastly, the cross server LFD was implimented. It had been known to cause problems with looting. What do we see happen after it's put it? It causes problems with looting. This is not the fault of the devs, they created the system because the players asked. The players then took advantage of it because they can and will get away with it. Just like they would use a DPS meter to be elitist.
In short: why not act like the other character on screen is another player (read human being) instead of a number for you to use?
While I appreciate that someone was willing to re-open this kettle of fish, a few things remain.
1. You're right. People will misuse any tools they can get a benefit from. Be it elitism or simply finding excuses to remove members from group, anything that creates a benefit will also induce a stigma. This has been the case in every MMO where Damage Meters are considered acceptable tools.
Suggestion: Screw Damage Meters. Give me a rudimentary Parser. Why? because if the effective of a Damage Meter is to allow for personal growth, a basic parser meets and exceeds that need. If a player wishes to push themselves and see how certain effects are doing, something personal like a parser is the best route. Being able to chart hits/misses/average damage/average crit damage/crit rate, etc... these are the things that ultimately combine to form those one-note figures you get from a damage meter. More importantly, a parser tells you what YOU Contributed. You and only you. If you are an Archer and you're only doing 11% of the damage in a 5 man dungeon, clearly you are UP or your other DPS are OP. That's a pure and simple conclusion.
Reasoning: Damage Meters don't take into account differences in gear. They say "Assuming my current gear, I am currently pulling X% Damage, vs DPS #2 who is doing Y% and DPS #3 who is doing Z%." The core difference is that if you have the best gear you can get, you damn well better be doing better than anyone who doesn't have that same level of gear. Right now, people care more about iLvL than some dumb number a meter spits out because iLvL is somehow more reflective of skill.
2. In a game like TERA, there is am emphasis on gaining a 'Mastery' over your class. This goes beyond damage figures. This is a reflection of one's intimate knowledge of their classes strengths and weaknesses and how they've overcome their shortcomings. Take a good look at BAMs. You have some people who can solo them at level. You have other people, who are the same level and in the same gear, who can't even dent a BAM without running away crying. A damage meter never leads to class mastery.
Reasoning: When you attempt to boil everything in this game down to solid numbers, you are overlooking other important factors that make up the dynamic of this game's combat. Look back at the example in the suggestion from point #1. You're an archer who is only doing 11% of all the damage to the boss. There are 4 other points to consider: Does the boss have Adds? Is the boss highly mobile? What is the boss's AoE Range? How much damage did you (the player) take in the encounter? Now, let's assume you're doing an SM run. The boss summons spider minions. If you're going all out destroy the adds, you're not attacking the boss are you? More importantly, the adds are rather mobile and can deal a lot of damage very quickly. Careful steps were taken to avoid as much damage as possible. All the sudden, that 11% Damage on the boss isn't so bad anymore. The adds were murdered very quickly and you didn't take much damage, meaning the healer can stay focused on you tank.
3. There isn't a physical need for a damage meter in TERA. The point of this game is to learn from your peers when you don't understand something. If you think an ability is terrible, reading about it or seeing pretty numbers on a meter isn't going to change your attitude. Until someone gives you an honest explanation of -WHY- a skill is good, or why you should do X, Y, or Z in combat, you're never going to gain the Class Mastery that I mentioned earlier.
I've learned something very important about MMOs over the years: No one is going to believe you until you completely destroy them. People are so comfortable in what they know that they can't consider what they don't know. WoW and FFXI are classic examples of this. When someone approaches a defined class in a new way, they are insulted, demeaned, and essentially exiled by the community until that person completely ruins their perception of that class. Damage Meters do not encourage this kind of exploration play. This is because, no matter what benefit they have, the community will always use it as a tool to judge players by.
Long story short: If you're going to tote the benefits of a damage meter as being a means of reflecting personal success, bear in mind that there is nothing personal about a damage meter. If archers and berserkers have a stigma of being weak classes, then damage meters have a stigma of being an elitist tool. A parser offers all the same benefits, on a personal level, exportable at the user's request, and is designed to allow people to try new approaches to gameplay and see if the result is worthwhile for them. Unlike a damage meter, a Parser is truly a test tool.
PS: If you don't know the difference between a Damage Meter and a Parser, don't foolishly say they are the same thing. They are fundamentally different and operate in completely different ways.
Not that I don't agree that archers are unappreciated and berserkers generally have a tougher time keeping up with BAMs, but I really don't think a dps meter is at all necessary. Although DPS meters CAN be used to measure the worth of a player, you'll have to agree that most of the populace that record their damage output are looking for a way to show off.
I played Ktera as a berserker with a Korean name (ëŒë¦¬ëŒì˜ which basically means RollingStone) and I had no problems at all getting into PUG groups and keeping up with the rest of my party. The ONLY time I've seen my PUG groups kick someone was if they had an english name and they'd usually kick ANY class with an english name, not just berserkers and archers.
I'm not quite sure why koreans seem to hate Americans so much and refer to them as (요안키) or yankee like it's some sort of insult and laugh at them when we're capable of doing just as much as them if not more. To stay on topic, dps meters are a method of showing off and although I do not mind if they are implemented, they are completely unnecessary.
So far I don't think DPS meters are needed in Tera.
As far as I can tell, being able to play your class and move so that you aren't dead seems to be more important. Normally I like DPS meters in MMOs, I worry that in Tera though people will start to blame healers if they die because they won't move because moving will hurt their DPS...
I think we have to wait for end-game to see how necessary DPS meters would be.
Okay before I say any more than this: Note that I AM a newcomer to all of this. I played FFXI (RDM/WHM) but it was more for the community experience. If you don't want my newbie input, feel free to skip this post.
Now that this is out the way: Personally, I wouldn't mind either a damage meter or a damage parser that OP and angelstar went into depth about. I do believe there will be more people than most using this information to swing their schlong, but for the sake of knowledge for those trying to improve their class it isn't TOO much of a bad idea (especially the parser). Fortunately for us not everyone is a jerk and maybe my excessive optimism is talking for me but i believe there will still be alot of players willing to take this information and teach us how to maximize our dps for future boss runs.
I'm still a casual player, but I don't mind this if it truely is a tool to help a a player improve rather than get him removed from parties more often. And if what you guys say is true, I may need it as a berserker.
The positive benefits of a damage meter are numerous. The negatives exist solely in the community, the people that use the tool. You cannot blame the tool if people misuse it. If you don't like the tool, don't use it. If you meet someone who misuses it, don't party with that person. Regardless, there are some people that would like this feature and don't want to use it for the negative aspects that people have stated (assumed or experienced).
Go back and read post #159 in this thread for an example of why this "just a tool" argument falls apart. This tool has negative impacts beyond the community--it has historically been capable of completely reshaping both how encounters are designed and placing absurd limits on the mechanics designers have available to provide challenge. Though the optimizer community would never deign to admit it, providing players too much information is a bad thing for a game system.
Edited by: LionRampant
about 1 year ago
- Reason: grammar/tense correction
Perhaps I didn't elaborate effectively because the two words cannot be used interchangeably anymore than "elephant" and "flea." Just like with Vietnam, while the US armed forces won every tactical engagement, they lost strategically.
I could continue to argue this, but it really feels like we're moving away from what you were trying to say initially... which, at this point, I'm not really what you meant for it to be, since it was never clearly defined. Tera is more strategic than it is tactical? While you could form a strategy to deal with every encounter and then incorporate tactics therein, that's not really saying much, since we do this all the time, on the fly in most cases(unless we're dealing with raids).
Non-balanced roles in the DPS classes, different ways of dealing with the primary roles of tanking and healing. Warriors as evasive tanks, Lancers as damage sponges won't have equivalent "tanking" per second meters and Mystics being offensive healers while Priests are defensive healers would complete skew the healing rate in favor of the priest. Not to mention the difference in mobility, mana management systems, etc.
First, I take issue with saying that DPS classes are non-balanced. Supposedly(because I haven't seen any hard numbers), all the damage classes have fairly comparable output. How much DPS this differs though, I wouldn't know.
Sorcs and Zerkers hit the hardest, Slayers attack faster than the harder hitting ones to make up for reduced raw damage numbers, Archers do...whatever it is archers do(sorry, I've haven't really taken an interest in them), and for the most part, warriors are very rogue-esque in their dps form; putting debuffs on the mob to increase it's own damage, rapid fire attacks that don't do as much in raw damage numbers but the sheer number makes up for them, ect.
Looking at it like that, You have melee and caster nukers, typical 2h warrior in most other games, archer class, and rogue. In this sense it's no different from every other MMO out there, so how are the unbalanced?
Moving on, now we could assume the opposite, but that doesn't mean we couldn't get accurate measurements of class output if we had comprehensive combat meters that provide various data points for us to examine. Take tanking for example. You're correct in the fact that Lancers are damage sponges, but not in the traditional sense. When a Lancer blocks, if an attack doesn't do enough damage to overcome what the block rating on his weapon is, he takes zero damage. Therefore, if you looked at the data point for damage received, the closer to 0 it is, the better the tank.
Now, you can't exactly go about looking at that the same way for a warrior, since they tank differently. You just have to look at a different data point and use a little more math. The biggest portion of mitigation for warriors comes from dodges, but they also have skills that reduce damage receive while they use those skills. So we have to look at boss stats as well as 'blocked' damage. The boss stats is fairly straight forward, if he takes x number of swings, but only lands y number of hits, we could say that the warrior is using his dodges effectively. The more misses that the boss has, the better. Now, for the second portion of the mitigation, you have to look at 'blocked' damage. I say blocked because in the traditional sense, that's what it is. BossA does BigAttack for 9000 damage(1 damage blocked). We could modify this output for ease of use(cause not everyone is a math whiz). Instead it would be BossA does BigAttack for 9000 damage(1 damage reduced. With these data points we can accurately gauge a warriors tanking effectiveness in a fight. The more misses and more higher amount of damaged reduced(of damage taken) = better warrior tank. Can you really compare warrior tanks to lancer tanks....yes and no. Lancer are definitely the safer tanks, but by no means are warriors not viable tanks(at 60, I'm not sure, with the new boss fights n such, I know they're getting buffed in the tanking dept).
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. The perennial "tank/healer fault" is not something that is so easily explained away.
Since you basically cut this out of a bigger idea, I had meant it in the context of not when they're not in the middle of doing content. When they're on their downtime and discussing ideas about how to do things, that is mostly constructive. But let me retort since you changed the meaning: EVERYONE does this. From the most hardcore elitist [filtered]s to the most casual herp derps that every played an MMO. Let's not pretend otherwise, cause that simply ain't true.
Which, in your opinion, is or is not the vast majority of those who want a DPS meter?
The people which use the information that they provide to better themselves and their raids. Just like with anything else, the vocal(in this case [filtered]) minority is mucking it up for the relative silent majority. Look at how many people download combat meters, then look at how many of those same people are using those meters as justification to beat other players about the head. It's a fairly small percentage. It also gets blown way out of proportion because people take offense and freak out at even the slightest criticism someone levies against them. Both behaviors need to stop. We need to deal with the people who would abuse the tools to do this in the correct way, but at the same time we need to be open minded about other peoples opinions of us.
I have a hard time imagining TERA spending the money to police the players. Also, it seems to me the most successful games do not try to domineer players into playing one way or another through such overt enforcement. So that leaves it to the community to regulate itself and we both recognize that's a lofty ideal.
I agree, I doubt EME has the pockets to do such a thing, and even if they did I doubt they wouldn't. And again, we agree that it's a lofty ideal, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't make the effort to do such things. It only takes one person to say “hey, don't do that†to inspire another to do the same. If it's said by someone of relative prominence then it makes the whole thing easier as well.
