The reason why I think a meter won’t fix the problem is because of the way human nature works. I’m pretty sure Anet has all these numbers. It’s not Anet’s fault that people get obsessed with pure efficiency. But as already pointed out in my PvP story, pure efficient can’t always be measured by numbers. The very existence of the tool will teach peiople to focus on it, even people who don’t focus on it now.
It’s a matter of, not so much of metrics, but of awareness. In Guild Wars 1, you had two possible ways to upgrade a weapon for your character. You could use +5 armor or +30 health. I tried testing it a million ways, and could never be sure, even after five years, which of those was the better of the two options. So I didn’t pick one over the other. There was no real proof.
Here, the actual proof of “more damage” will have people convinced they should build for more damage. But that might mean a ranger taking a skill that isn’t search and recuse into a dungeon. That skill doesn’t do pretty much any damage, it just gets people up faster.
Evasion skills or blinding skills, won’t show up on a DSP meter, nor will they really show up on any kind of meter.
I have skills that help the entire party but they’re not always increasing my damage.
A metric that is misleading is one that is not well done. The numbers themselves and access to them is enough to mislead a whole lot of people. It won’t make damage less important, it will make damage more important, because in people’s heads it will become even more important.
And even changing the name, note you started calling it a damage meter. It’s how people will use it, whatever you call it.
I should mention I used a parser (which is what you’re asking for) in Rift when I played it, and it pretty much destroyed any enjoyment of that game for me.
