Guild Wars 2

GW2 is realy like driving a car without a Tachometer. Imagine, you need to calculate everytime how fast you drive from A to B, because your car has no Tachometer.

If Raids are going to be that hard, that only the experienced and coordinated players can kill it, than give us please a DPS Tool, at least the ability to see our own DPS. With “Enrage Timers” I rly want to know how much DPS I`m doing, without knowing your DPS, you cant improve your gameplay. Players will start to test new builds, new rotations etc. I know from other MMORPGs that you are never going to use the same build/rotation for every raid boss, it will be different. In a 10min fight you are going to mess up a lot with your rotation, but with a DPS tool, you will start to improve yourself each week.

Raids are for Guilds, if you are in a Guild than the people will accept you, they are not going to kick you out of a raid because of your DPS. They will accept you and even teach you to get better at the game.

BTW there is already a META or KICK without any DPS tools, so it will not change anything for the pugs. Im only asking for a personal DPS Tool, that only shows your own DPS.

Brayzz.6524:

GW2 is realy like driving a car without a Tachometer. Imagine, you need to calculate everytime how fast you drive from A to B, because your car has no Tachometer.

If Raids are going to be that hard, that only the experienced and coordinated players can kill it than give us please a DPS Tool, atleast the ability to see our own DPS. With “Enrage Timers” I rly want to know how much DPS I`m doing, without knowing your DPS, you cant improve your gameplay. Players will start to test new builds, new rotations etc. I know from other MMORPGs that you are never going to use the same build/rotation for every raid boss, it will be different. In a 10min fight you are going to mess up a lot with your rotation, but with a DPS tool, you will start to improve yourself each week.

Raids are for Guilds, if you are in a Guild than the people will accept you, they are not going to kick you out of a raid because of your DPS. They will accept you and even teach you to get better at the game.

BTW there is already a META or KICK without any DPS tools, so it will not change anything for the pugs. Im only asking for a personal DPS Tool, that only shows your own DPS.

Just wanted to voice my support for this.

100% agree with OP’s post, there are some very good arguments in there. I don’t think a DPS meter would have a big an effect as people are afraid it would — the people who would use it to exclude people are already excluding them, often by using tools that are in a grey zone where we don’t know if we’d get banned for them or not.

If exclusion is really a big concern internally, at least letting us see some personal stats would be great.

For comparison, here’s a random statistical log that you can get from Wildstar:

http://www.wildstarlogs.com/reports/H2Wtq8YNCmLvbJaF

Something like this would really help players improve themselves for raids. It’s hard to convince people sometimes that their sb/lb/traps ranger really isn’t helping, but if they could compare their DPS to a reference, even without me seeing it, it would help show them the way.

I would love a DPS-Tool added to the UI.
Maybe display bossHP, fight-timers, and average boon/cond uptime and amount..
And maybe a general Interface rework? Inventory could have some slots that are “reserved” for some weapons and armor pieces. ALL windows could use a lot more “resize-options” like making Inventory smaller than 4×4, resizeable guild-panel, maybe even hero-panel.. Having an option to go directly to the trait-tab instead of having to click 2-3 times to get there, maybe Inventory could even stay open in between cutscenes OR EVEN AN OPTION TO DEACTIVATE CUTSCENES (like having a choice at the start: [ ]cinematic mode [X]I am just here to do this as fast as possible) There are so much possibilities to improve the average dungeon-runners game experience

Get ready to be literally eaten alive, in case phiws are reading the trashcan.

I’d be alright with a dps meter, but in all games I’ve played it felt very limiting and incomplete. I wanna see AT THE VERY LEAST:
- healing done;
- damage done per second and damage done total;
- condition damage/condis applied;
- boons applied;
- ccs applied;
- damage soaked;
- number of downs;
- number of rallies;
- number of resses.
Also, I’d like to see the meter split in boss phases. Yeah, hard to implement, but- if you do something, you have to do it right, not only because it’s easy. Dps by itself doesn’t mean much and it may encourage people to be selfish kittens just as I’ve seen in other games.
P.S. Your assertion that a guild isn’t gonna kick you because of your lacking dps is rather absurd, optimistic at best. Guilds kick for much less than that.

deSade.9437:

I’d be alright with a dps meter, but in all games I’ve played it felt very limiting and incomplete. I wanna see AT THE VERY LEAST:
- healing done;
- damage done per second and damage done total;
- condition damage/condis applied;
- boons applied;
- ccs applied;
- damage soaked;
- number of downs;
- number of rallies;
- number of resses.
Also, I’d like to see the meter split in boss phases. Yeah, hard to implement, but- if you do something, you have to do it right, not only because it’s easy. Dps by itself doesn’t mean much and it may encourage people to be selfish kittens just as I’ve seen in other games.

The issue there is that people like the OP seem only interested in pure DPS. They don’t care if you rez/heal/buff them or cc/degen/tank the mobs.

This is why we have no DPS meter, because people would solely focus on that and ignore all other stats. (Granted, they might eventually realize that buffs/heals are beneficial, but I think they’ll probably just blame the failure on everyone else.)

Well you can already see if someone is supporting you or not, you can see the buffs, ress etc but not the dmg done by a player. I sure want a complex DPS tool like in Wildstar too, but I think not gonna happen.

I liked how they did it in DCUO. You could pull up a menu in game that gave the total damage, total healing, amount of interactions, total damage taken, and a whole bunch of categories. You could pull this up at any point in the raid.

I like this for here as I think they could limit it just to raids, which I think is completely fair and in no way limiting.

Unlike the DCUO one though I’d want it reset at the start of each event, so it wasn’t a rolling thing throughout the raid instance.

Anyways, my 2 cents

Brayzz.6524:

Well you can already see if someone is supporting you or not, you can see the buffs, ress etc but not the dmg done by a player. I sure want a complex DPS tool like in Wildstar too, but I think not gonna happen.

Right, but DPS only matters if you’re struggling. (If you’re winning, you probably don’t care as much.)

At which point, someone’s going to just see that Joe’s DPS was the lowest. They’re not going to care that Joe had to keep rezzing the Zerkers and stacked might on them.

@Minos
Well, Joe can talk in teamspeak I suppose. But in all honesty: If one person goes down it shouldn’t only be one person to rezz him up… At least in raids. And also I’d check the person dying: There’s enough tells as to when to dodge atks

Minos.5168:

Brayzz.6524:

Well you can already see if someone is supporting you or not, you can see the buffs, ress etc but not the dmg done by a player. I sure want a complex DPS tool like in Wildstar too, but I think not gonna happen.

Right, but DPS only matters if you’re struggling. (If you’re winning, you probably don’t care as much.)

At which point, someone’s going to just see that Joe’s DPS was the lowest. They’re not going to care that Joe had to keep rezzing the Zerkers and stacked might on them.

If you provide all the information that should be, Joe would point out that he was busy picking up Bob and John the whole time and you’d see that they both had like 8 downs and Joe was involved in 20 pick ups. At that point you tell Bob and John to stop sucking so that Joe can DPS.

Raids aren’t supposed to be for PUG groups. Criticism shouldn’t be like what you see in Dungeons where it’s just “ehh kick him” no, it’ll be “hey pick it up if you need help on something say something and we’ll try to help” because you’re part of a team.

Minos.5168:

At which point, someone’s going to just see that Joe’s DPS was the lowest. They’re not going to care that Joe had to keep rezzing the Zerkers and stacked might on them.

If this is how my raid team acted, I’d find a new group.

Some people will be kittenhats no matter what tools they do or do not have access to. The solution is not to ban those tools, but to not play with those people.

DPS meters don’t kick people. People do.

I’m not so much concerned with the DPS number itself, but a tool that tracks ability usage, average damage of abilities, uptime on buffs / conditions, etc. Some way to parse out builds. Obviously raw damage is a useful stat, but knowing how much stealth uptime one PU build / playstyle is giving me against another for example would be really cool information.

We can all theory craft and crunch numbers to determine what it would look like if we were standing still, attacking a stationary target (like say the target bots :P), but I really would love to know how I’m performing on actual encounters.

If ANet would even just put in a command line option to write the combat log to disk (with some additional items, as I don’t think the combat log tracks everything that we need, I’d want to see ability activations and everything as well), the community would do the hard part, just give us the data.

in pvp there is endgame statistics of damage/healing done/taken maybe they are planing something like that for raids

Why would raids not be for PUGs? After the first month or half year of release everybody will know the easiest way to do the raid. Even 10 random Players.

Enrage timer isn’t necessarily a reason to get a dps meter either. And it should be pretty clear what the cause is of your lack of dps if you ever had that happen. Unless nobody ever went down and the entire raid went perfect.

Though I’m not against a personal dps meter, I think it isnt necessary

I know I’m going to get jumped on by the same people for saying this again, but these kind of meters have proven to be one of the biggest sources of drama and hate in other games and have absolutely no place in GW2.

To elaborate, I agree that, in theory, these tools make a lot of sense.

In practice, however, they are more often used to put people down and emphasize bad gameplay practices- specifically, everyone prioritizing dps over EVERYTHING ELSE to avoid being called out or excluded.

Unfortunately, putting them into the game for the tiny percentage that would use them properly (as evidenced clearly in other games) isnt worth the hate, trollish behavior and plain out encouragement of bad gameplay they would create.

That said, I would have no problem with something that, at the end of the fight, shows you (and only you) which abilities you took the most damage from and/or died from during the fight – much like the death reports from PvP. That would be very useful information.

I’d really love to use one of those third party tools, but I care far too much about my account for it to be banned. If only Anet could at least let us know their stance on these particular tools, it’d put the issue to rest.

That said, any of this functionality natively supported in-game would be great, but I know it’d be on the bottom of their priority list if they’d even consider it in the first place.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I’d really love to use one of those third party tools, but I care far too much about my account for it to be banned. If only Anet could at least let us know their stance on these particular tools, it’d put the issue to rest.

That said, any of this functionality natively supported in-game would be great, but I know it’d be on the bottom of their priority list if they’d even consider it in the first place.

^ Pretty much this, even though I personally think it shouldn´t be super low on their priority list IF they are considering it at all (which I highly doubt tbh).

Considering Crystal has stated they know how much damage they were doing in raid testing, I’m pretty sure this tool already exists, it is just only usable by devs/non-live servers. Guessing the main issue is making it so thousands of people can use it without kittening everything else up, or the problems it would bring to the surface.

I guess these 2 issues would be the main ones to find solutions to if this is to be implemented.

I support the idea of an in-game tool that provides in-depth fight statistics, it will help a lot in the upcoming raid content. Being able to analyze each attempt is always a plus.

OMG i can’t support this enough.
The UI needs not only DPS/Healing/Buff monitoring tools but also things like MUCH better player and enemy health monitoring, a more robust target frame in general and (I know i’ll take a raft of abuse for this) CAST BARS!
I mean lets be honest, how often can you actually see an enemies “tell” animations through the constant cloud of particle effects?
IMHO These are ESSENTIAL tools for high level content designed around team dynamics.
At this point, if we are finally getting raids, i don’t even consider these tools as option as optional, but essential.

I’d rather they give me options to clear the smoke than to give me more UI boxes.

Done right, supporting this could be very little effort on ArenaNet’s part. They’ve already said they don’t want to whitelist individual add-ons, but as long as they don’t provide a gameplay advantage, they won’t ban you for them.

The only issue I have is that “gameplay advantage” isn’t very precise. If a GM was in a bad mood or wanted to get pedantic, that could mean just seeing an enemy’s exact HP, or more generally, displaying any bit of information that is not readily visible to everyone.

Perhaps with raids coming up, someone could spend a couple hours whitelisting, not individual addons, but a set of “approved” DPS-meter features. This way, as long as an addon only provides features from that set, you can know for sure that you won’t get banned for it.

It’s save them from having to implement one on their own, and provide piece-of-mind to those of us who would like to monitor and improve our performance in the new raids. This would take very little effort:

1) Start a thread asking for input on what sorts of features we’d like to have in a DPS meter.
2) They can stop following the thread — I’m sure our specialist wouldn’t mind compiling a list of the features that came up and submitting it with his report. If he doesn’t want to, I’d volunteer.
3) They have an internal meeting with 2-3 people (or hell, just one) and spend an hour going through the list marking them “Ok”, “Not ok”, or optionally “Ok, but under these conditions: […]”
4) Publish their conclusions in a sticky.

This would only take two forum posts and, if I make a crazy high estimate, 9 man hours (3 people for 3 hours is pretty overkill). That’s a pretty low cost for what would be a vast QoL improvement for many of their players.

BoogerSammich.7189:

OMG i can’t support this enough.
The UI needs not only DPS/Healing/Buff monitoring tools but also things like MUCH better player and enemy health monitoring, a more robust target frame in general and (I know i’ll take a raft of abuse for this) CAST BARS!
I mean lets be honest, how often can you actually see an enemies “tell” animations through the constant cloud of particle effects?
IMHO These are ESSENTIAL tools for high level content designed around team dynamics.
At this point, if we are finally getting raids, i don’t even consider these tools as option as optional, but essential.

Cast bars kind of go against the very core principle of the combat system. A better solution is to reduce the particle effects so that we can actually see boss tells. Overall it’ll be a better experience that cast bars as it’ll force people to actually look at the boss often.

Damage meters are another story and I’m in full support of them as I see them being 100% necessary for raiding. Will there be discrimination/toxicity based on them? Absolutely but any high competition game modes has toxicity because of it’s sheer nature. The same toxic scenarios happen without damage meters just in a lot less informed ways.

Minos.5168:

At which point, someone’s going to just see that Joe’s DPS was the lowest.

/snicker

Yeah, yeah… we all know that Joe gets carried and leeches all the time… kitten Joe.

This has my full support as well. I would love a way to track my dps/hps. I do see the problems that this could create as well. I don’t think we will ever see it ever released in game.

How about this:

You pull up your DPS meter. It shows your name, while EVERYONE ELSE is listed as colors to you. You wouldn’t know who was where in the dps charts, but you would know where YOU were. This lets you keep track of your dps wile protecting against elitism (I.E. terribads who can’t dps getting bullied), and so on. Could also have healing and boons in it as well etc etc.

Would look something like this:

1) Violet: x dps / y healing
2) Gold: x dps / y healing
3) Crimson: x dps / y healing
4) Rump Buffalo: 1, 000, 000 dps / 1, 000, 000 healing
5) Emerald: x dps / y healing
6) Azure: x dps / y healing
7) Silver: x dps / y healing
8) Black: x dps / y healing
9) White: x dps / y healing
10) Salmon: x dps / y healing

If someone new joins the raid, the colors get scrambled to protect their identity.

Also, I want cast bars please.

Could implement it as a feature only for enhanced squad UI, current lfg menu doesn’t support forming those groups as far as I know and it would require a person with a tag to activate it for a group.

You mean something like: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Scoreboard in PVE? The code should be already there.

Just want to give my support for a legal dps-meter of any kind. This is indeed a missing feature in the game.

And I thought that a DPS meter was only usefull to watch your DPS in order to not take agro on boss.
Well if anything the only number that really matter for me would be the agro queue on the boss. With this you know who would take the agro on boss if the tank fall. So I’d be against a DPS meter without a proper agro-meter

Minos.5168:

Brayzz.6524:

Well you can already see if someone is supporting you or not, you can see the buffs, ress etc but not the dmg done by a player. I sure want a complex DPS tool like in Wildstar too, but I think not gonna happen.

Right, but DPS only matters if you’re struggling. (If you’re winning, you probably don’t care as much.)

At which point, someone’s going to just see that Joe’s DPS was the lowest. They’re not going to care that Joe had to keep rezzing the Zerkers and stacked might on them.

I dunno if Joe did less damage than players who spent most of the fight down then I feel like Joe is still the problem…

But any good DPS meter would also show things like:

Boons applied
Boons removed
Healing down
Rezzes done
Downed
etc

They already have these statistics tracked in PvP, it would be almost no work at all to give us the tools to use them in PvE.

Sorry but I would hate having a DPS meter of any sort. It’s not about how people will kick others or not but in term of future design.
Basically if such a tool happens, there will be comparative post of “I did this rotation on ranger and I have XX DPS while Elementalist have YY so you should boost ranger or nerf Ele”. Nobody cares about amour, defensive tool, sustain, mobility, health… only DPS numbers count ! From that point there are 2 choices : either Devs pretend they don’t hear anything because they actually take everything else into account or they choose a WoW way where every single class do the same DPS more or less 5% (with similar rotation of course because “Profession Z is too hard”) and there are less and less class variety.
In the first case, people will keep on complaining in the second the class diversity will shrink, the game will become boring … and people will complain.

The DPS tool is a good tool for the dev to design and if they do a good job they will also factor the other things in order to design encounter . But giving the tool to everybody, especially people not able to fully understand what it means (read the majority) it has a good chance to hurt the health of the game more than anything.

Ranael.6423:

Sorry but I would hate having a DPS meter of any sort. It’s not about how people will kick others or not but in term of future design.
Basically if such a tool happens, there will be comparative post of “I did this rotation on ranger and I have XX DPS while Elementalist have YY so you should boost ranger or nerf Ele”. Nobody cares about amour, defensive tool, sustain, mobility, health… only DPS numbers count ! From that point there are 2 choices : either Devs pretend they don’t hear anything because they actually take everything else into account or they choose a WoW way where every single class do the same DPS more or less 5% (with similar rotation of course because “Profession Z is too hard”) and there are less and less class variety.
In the first case, people will keep on complaining in the second the class diversity will shrink, the game will become boring … and people will complain.

The DPS tool is a good tool for the dev to design and if they do a good job they will also factor the other things in order to design encounter . But giving the tool to everybody, especially people not able to fully understand what it means (read the majority) it has a good chance to hurt the health of the game more than anything.

That’s the point of giving it to people in raids, if you’re capable of beating the raids I’d hope you’re aware enough to understand that just because soandso did more damage than whatshisname, it was whatshisname that was able to provide that clutch defensive tool that saved soandso and other people.

This will sound like an ignorant question, but as someone that most would consider hardcore, in the sense of time played and skill level, I don’t understand the correlation between hardcore players and a damage meter. Why can’t a damage meter be for everyone? I personally don’t care for having one but if it’s implemented it also wouldn’t bother me, I’m just not getting the association with a meter to hardcore

Jerus.4350:

That’s the point of giving it to people in raids, if you’re capable of beating the raids I’d hope you’re aware enough to understand that just because soandso did more damage than whatshisname, it was whatshisname that was able to provide that clutch defensive tool that saved soandso and other people.

So what you say is that people are reasonable…. kitten when did I lose my faith in humanity?
I’d like to share your optimism about players’ awareness, and in a sense I’m sure it will be the case for the first 2 months. But as soon as the raid will be “on farm” then I’m sure the way to look at data with a cold mind and analyse a bit more than one column will be lost.

@warcry, as Ranael mentions, people who don’t understand the game will focus on certain stats (DPS) and ignore all other elements. This leads to dumb conclusions. Like say your Lightning field team is spot on with those, but then you see those 5 people lower on the damage score than the guy who simply stuck to the boss and unloaded. Then they start blaming the lowest damage person who was contributing and blasting water fields on the lightning fields protecting everyone instead of continuing to pump out damage while people died. It’s a dumb conclusion that dumb people will make though.

@ Ranael, no, you speak the truth, but it’s useful enough to the people actually pushing the content that I think it’s worth it. Having those stats will help a lot. But, you’re right in that many people simple can’t handle that kind of thing.

I wouldn’t be too concerned about that Ranael. That happens anyway, without the tool — people already make uninformed comparisons of balance all the time. Just look at Nemesis.

IMO, fear of unreasonable people being unreasonable isn’t a great reason to keep a useful tool off-limits.

The problem with DPS meters is the players. Players tend to only look at total damage done (or total healing done in other games) to see how performs the best without thought as to what the numbers mean and without the ability to interpret them.

HEY GUYS I HAVE HIGHEST DPS LOL! SWAP TO ADDS THAT NEED TO DIE QUICK? HELL NO I’LL LOSE DPS TIME ON THE BOSS AND I WON’T BE ON TOP OF THE DPS METER!!!!!ONEONE!!

That kind of behavior is all too common and cancerous and I’m certain this is the kind of behavior anet wants to avoid bringing into their game – which is about cooperation – because it would help create a toxic environment.

While a DPS tool would be useful for pugs groups to see who’s grossly underperforming, a good raid leader would be able to weed out the bad players before inviting them in the first place by having them link their gear, asking them questions about their skill priority and rotations and having them link drops off of the bosses to show that they’ve killed them multiple times before.

Zaroua.2714:

The problem with DPS meters is the players. Players tend to only look at total damage done (or total healing done in other games) to see how performs the best without thought as to what the numbers mean and without the ability to interpret them.

HEY GUYS I HAVE HIGHEST DPS LOL! SWAP TO ADDS THAT NEED TO DIE QUICK? HELL NO I’LL LOSE DPS TIME ON THE BOSS AND I WON’T BE ON TOP OF THE DPS METER!!!!!ONEONE!!

That kind of behavior is all too common and cancerous and I’m certain this is the kind of behavior anet wants to avoid bringing into their game – which is about cooperation – because it would help create a toxic environment.

People already did that for the last 3 years without any dps meters and will continue doing that in raids no matter what.

Zaroua.2714:

While a DPS tool would be useful for pugs groups to see who’s grossly underperforming, a good raid leader would be able to weed out the bad players before inviting them in the first place by having them link their gear, asking them questions about their skill priority and rotations and having them link drops off of the bosses to show that they’ve killed them multiple times before.

What you’re saying there is all speculatory tho. If we had some form of statistics to PROVE that XYZ spec was 10% / 20% / XX% better than ZYX build (especially on a per encounter basis), then it would be better. However all we can do is speculate that this build is better. From a raid leader point of view, I’m going to want my raiders in the most optimal (theory-crafted) builds and specs, however there is no way to know that my rangers custom build is any amount better or worse for this encounter than the cookie cutter build at the moment (aside from game experience, which im not saying either partys are lacking of course). If we had some form of logging or statistics we could look at after the fight and say “Wow that build isn’t that bad afterall” that would be immensely valuable. Instead we’re in a situation where everyone will be expected to run the cookie cutter build in fear of being called out for it on a wipe.

Lets use this beta weekend as an example. We KNOW for a fact engineers were the BEST for the condition damage and what they were doing in that raid, but by how much? We can make guesses and crunch some numbers, but there is literally no way to know how crucial it was that they were engineers. Would a raid have lost 2% damage running something else? 10%? 30%? There is no way to tell, hell we can’t even count how many conditions we’re put out, let alone the damage.

Again, as I’ve said previously in this thread, I don’t really care about a DPS meter. I just want post fight statistics. I would much rather see percentage of skill usage, uptime on buffs and conditions, their sources, the stacks, etc etc. Raw DPS is a useful statistic sure, but I could care less if I had the other information. And I also don’t need it in real time, because I would rather not have my raiders staring at the DPS meters during fights making poor decisions because that hundred blades would net them some extra DPS, but instead they get caught in a seeker and we have to scramble to pick them up.

Players will find out how to optimally do encounters, just look at the stack mentality in dungeons and fractals. Hell look at the BWE3, in 5 hours people had already figured out how to exploit the fight. Giving us logging and statistics simply gives players the ability to better understand their class and the fights so that they can tweak their builds better to bring what they need to the table. It doesn’t take alot of thought to bring 4 condi engineers to a fight that needs conditions. But if I had the tools I would definitely look for a more exciting alternative.

Zaroua.2714:

The problem with DPS meters is the players. Players tend to only look at total damage done (or total healing done in other games) to see how performs the best without thought as to what the numbers mean and without the ability to interpret them.

HEY GUYS I HAVE HIGHEST DPS LOL! SWAP TO ADDS THAT NEED TO DIE QUICK? HELL NO I’LL LOSE DPS TIME ON THE BOSS AND I WON’T BE ON TOP OF THE DPS METER!!!!!ONEONE!!

That kind of behavior is all too common and cancerous and I’m certain this is the kind of behavior anet wants to avoid bringing into their game – which is about cooperation – because it would help create a toxic environment.

While a DPS tool would be useful for pugs groups to see who’s grossly underperforming, a good raid leader would be able to weed out the bad players before inviting them in the first place by having them link their gear, asking them questions about their skill priority and rotations and having them link drops off of the bosses to show that they’ve killed them multiple times before.

Jump off boss and get 3-5 target cleaves for more damage? hmm doesn’t sound bad

Really though, you’re right, but that’s when the raid as a whole goes “hey dumbkitten, do your job or gtfo no one cares about your kitten.” At least that’s how raids went in my last game with the Stat window.

As many are noting, we have years of anecdotal evidence from other games showing that, while some would use them to improve the game, the vocal majority would just use them as a tool to incite drama, encourage exclusionary behavior, and put people down. I realize some of that happens already, but it isnt something Anet should support in any way.

As useful as the information might be, the positives simply do not outweigh the negatives.

Blaeys.3102:

As many are noting, we have years of anecdotal evidence from other games showing that, while some would use them to improve the game, the vocal majority would just use them as a tool to incite drama, encourage exclusionary behavior, and put people down. I realize some of that happens already, but it isnt something Anet should support in any way.

As useful as the information might be, the positives simply do not outweigh the negatives.

My experience is the opposite, in that the majority use it as a tool for improvement and friendly competition, while the minority use it to be kittens.

Jerus.4350:

Blaeys.3102:

As many are noting, we have years of anecdotal evidence from other games showing that, while some would use them to improve the game, the vocal majority would just use them as a tool to incite drama, encourage exclusionary behavior, and put people down. I realize some of that happens already, but it isnt something Anet should support in any way.

As useful as the information might be, the positives simply do not outweigh the negatives.

My experience is the opposite, in that the majority use it as a tool for improvement and friendly competition, while the minority use it to be kittens.

I started high end progression level raiding in 2006 – and leading those 10 and 25 man raids around 2008. In most cases, when I was raiding as a DPS, I topped the dps charts or came very close (but never linked those charts in chat).

I can say with 100% confidence that, in that time, almost nothing – not even shared loot tables – provided the level of drama and hate in a group as dps meters. Even when groups downed bosses easily, someone always felt the need to call out the lower numbers in the group. It is just the nature of many MMO players to hunt down and belittle those they feel aren’t pulling their weight (even when they are).

Would DPS meters be useful? Sure. Are they worth the drama and hate? Definitely not.

Minos.5168:

Brayzz.6524:

Well you can already see if someone is supporting you or not, you can see the buffs, ress etc but not the dmg done by a player. I sure want a complex DPS tool like in Wildstar too, but I think not gonna happen.

Right, but DPS only matters if you’re struggling. (If you’re winning, you probably don’t care as much.)

At which point, someone’s going to just see that Joe’s DPS was the lowest. They’re not going to care that Joe had to keep rezzing the Zerkers and stacked might on them.

pretty much

Gaaroth.2567:

Minos.5168:

Brayzz.6524:

Well you can already see if someone is supporting you or not, you can see the buffs, ress etc but not the dmg done by a player. I sure want a complex DPS tool like in Wildstar too, but I think not gonna happen.

Right, but DPS only matters if you’re struggling. (If you’re winning, you probably don’t care as much.)

At which point, someone’s going to just see that Joe’s DPS was the lowest. They’re not going to care that Joe had to keep rezzing the Zerkers and stacked might on them.

pretty much

Find a group that isn’t full of incompetent tools that don’t understand how support works.

Problem solved.

Blaeys.3102:

I started high end progression level raiding in 2006 – and leading those 10 and 25 man raids around 2008. In most cases, when I was raiding as a DPS, I topped the dps charts or came very close (but never linked those charts in chat).

I can say with 100% confidence that, in that time, almost nothing – not even shared loot tables – provided the level of drama and hate in a group as dps meters. Even when groups downed bosses easily, someone always felt the need to call out the lower numbers in the group. It is just the nature of many MMO players to hunt down and belittle those they feel aren’t pulling their weight (even when they are).

Would DPS meters be useful? Sure. Are they worth the drama and hate? Definitely not.

So how do you see it going when a guild cannot get a boss down because of an enrage?

In my opinion the drama and hate will be no less, it’ll just be less informed. Wiping is frustrating enough as it is and blame will come down on someone, it way less likely that the person(s) causing the wipes will get blamed if we don’t have tools too gauge performance. It’ll come down on those who play a “sub optimal” build or those playing “inferior” classes, even though we’ll have no idea if those people are actually doing their job or not. It’ll be entirely speculation.

The lack of damage meters won’t cure toxicity in a highly competitive environment where you have multiple people working towards a goal. It WILL let good raid leaders make informed decisions about how to address issues though.

Pandabro.8743:

Blaeys.3102:

I started high end progression level raiding in 2006 – and leading those 10 and 25 man raids around 2008. In most cases, when I was raiding as a DPS, I topped the dps charts or came very close (but never linked those charts in chat).

I can say with 100% confidence that, in that time, almost nothing – not even shared loot tables – provided the level of drama and hate in a group as dps meters. Even when groups downed bosses easily, someone always felt the need to call out the lower numbers in the group. It is just the nature of many MMO players to hunt down and belittle those they feel aren’t pulling their weight (even when they are).

Would DPS meters be useful? Sure. Are they worth the drama and hate? Definitely not.

So how do you see it going when a guild cannot get a boss down because of an enrage?

In my opinion the drama and hate will be no less, it’ll just be less informed. Wiping is frustrating enough as it is and blame will come down on someone, it way less likely that the person(s) causing the wipes will get blamed if we don’t have tools too gauge performance. It’ll come down on those who play a “sub optimal” build or those playing “inferior” classes, even though we’ll have no idea if those people are actually doing their job or not. It’ll be entirely speculation.

The lack of damage meters won’t cure toxicity in a highly competitive environment where you have multiple people working towards a goal. It WILL let good raid leaders make informed decisions about how to address issues though.

This. Only change I’d make is its not 100% about a “damage meter” its about statistics and reporting on the encounter (abilities used, buffs, conditions, etc).

If I have one mesmer putting out twice the alacrity, while running the same build as the other mesmer, while only losing a marginal amount of DPS personally (for a gain to the 5 people gaining alacrity). I can start looking into what the second mesmer is doing wrong (first place to look would be what abilities are they both using, and how often). That would help me make an informed decision and give constructive feedback to my raider. Instead I’m just going to assume they’re both playing correctly because they’re playing the correct spec, and blame the damage loss (due to less alacrity in this example) on the thief running the home brew build.

DISCLAIMER: The above paragraph was just a stitched together example, please no one come at me about it being two mesmers and a thief, or the specifics of the example (pitting two people against each other for example), was just used to make a point, lol.

Pandabro.8743:

Blaeys.3102:

I started high end progression level raiding in 2006 – and leading those 10 and 25 man raids around 2008. In most cases, when I was raiding as a DPS, I topped the dps charts or came very close (but never linked those charts in chat).

I can say with 100% confidence that, in that time, almost nothing – not even shared loot tables – provided the level of drama and hate in a group as dps meters. Even when groups downed bosses easily, someone always felt the need to call out the lower numbers in the group. It is just the nature of many MMO players to hunt down and belittle those they feel aren’t pulling their weight (even when they are).

Would DPS meters be useful? Sure. Are they worth the drama and hate? Definitely not.

So how do you see it going when a guild cannot get a boss down because of an enrage?

In my opinion the drama and hate will be no less, it’ll just be less informed. Wiping is frustrating enough as it is and blame will come down on someone, it way less likely that the person(s) causing the wipes will get blamed if we don’t have tools too gauge performance. It’ll come down on those who play a “sub optimal” build or those playing “inferior” classes, even though we’ll have no idea if those people are actually doing their job or not. It’ll be entirely speculation.

The lack of damage meters won’t cure toxicity in a highly competitive environment where you have multiple people working towards a goal. It WILL let good raid leaders make informed decisions about how to address issues though.

Toxicity issues aside, pure DPS meters wouldntt, in most cases, solve any issue – and, in fact, would probably create them.

DPS in this game is as much about group support as it is about individual contributions. Might/vuln stacking, blast finishers, fury uptime on the party – these are all crucial to success. When you stress the importance of dps meters, you encourage selfish builds that center around personal damage output, rather than group performance. You also encourage players to care less about strategically switching targets so they dont have to ramp up vuln or their condi stacks again.

To your hypothetical about what happens when you wipe, instead of looking at individuals and trying to pick out lower dps, your energy will be better spent looking at why you wiped and which group support functions will keep that from happening again.

DPS meters, more often than not, cause groups to focus on unimportant issues – and, as I’ve said before, cause drama where drama isn’t needed. They simply aren’t useful and act counterproductive to team play.

Blaeys.3102:

Pandabro.8743:

So how do you see it going when a guild cannot get a boss down because of an enrage?

In my opinion the drama and hate will be no less, it’ll just be less informed. Wiping is frustrating enough as it is and blame will come down on someone, it way less likely that the person(s) causing the wipes will get blamed if we don’t have tools too gauge performance. It’ll come down on those who play a “sub optimal” build or those playing “inferior” classes, even though we’ll have no idea if those people are actually doing their job or not. It’ll be entirely speculation.

The lack of damage meters won’t cure toxicity in a highly competitive environment where you have multiple people working towards a goal. It WILL let good raid leaders make informed decisions about how to address issues though.

Toxicity issues aside, pure DPS meters wouldntt, in most cases, solve any issue – and, in fact, would probably create them.

DPS in this game is as much about group support as it is about individual contributions. Might/vuln stacking, blast finishers, fury uptime on the party – these are all crucial to success. When you stress the importance of dps meters, you encourage selfish builds that center around personal damage output, rather than group performance. You also encourage players to care less about strategically switching targets so they dont have to ramp up vuln or their condi stacks again.

To your hypothetical about what happens when you wipe, instead of looking at individuals and trying to pick out lower dps, your energy will be better spent looking at why you wiped and which group support functions will keep that from happening again.

DPS meters, more often than not, cause groups to focus on unimportant issues – and, as I’ve said before, cause drama where drama isn’t needed. They simply aren’t useful and act counterproductive to team play.

I think it’s safe to say that when anyone here talks about a “DPS meter”, we mean, ideally, a tool that would provide information on support, healing, etc., not just raw DPS.

But even so, let me take Mr. Pandabro’s example a bit further:

Your DPS team includes a necro and an engi. The necro is playing skillfully, putting out his fair share of damage, and all around performing to the best of his class’s ability. The engi, on the other hand, is using terrible rotations, missing damage modifiers, and spending too much time semi-afk, drinking bourbon, and eating spaghetti during the encounter. He stays near the boss, looks busy, but isn’t putting out nearly as much damage as he should.

Without the DPS meter, who is more likely to get blamed for the wipe?