Damage Meter

[Flitwick]

With the Devs considering making changes in the future, I was wondering what the chances of having a damage meter/tracker implemented into the game. This idea comes from my days with World of Warcraft where you can download an add on that tracked your’s and the rest of your team’s damage, dps, heals, damage taken etc. and gives you the ability to share with your teammates. Forgive me if this is something that has been mentioned in the past. Implementing this could bring out a more competitive group of players in endgame play, encourage players to make adjustments to their enhancement set ups to increase their effectiveness.

 

Any ideas on this matter, whether or not it’s even possible?

[jubakumbi]

With the Devs considering making changes in the future, I was wondering what the chances of having a damage meter/tracker implemented into the game. This idea comes from my days with World of Warcraft where you can download an add on that tracked your’s and the rest of your team’s damage, dps, heals, damage taken etc. and gives you the ability to share with your teammates. Forgive me if this is something that has been mentioned in the past. Implementing this could bring out a more competitive group of players in endgame play, encourage players to make adjustments to their enhancement set ups to increase their effectiveness.

 

Any ideas on this matter, whether or not it’s even possible?

 

I get that a lot of poeple love these, I use one in STO.

However, the main fear in CoH has always been, rightly so IMO, that players will get taken to task over performance if these things are used.

 

So, it is a very sensitive subject to many people.

The MMO DPS crowd, IME, has a hard time 'living with' players that just like to play and not make the game a job.

 

DPS parsers and meters are a main tool used to suck the fun right out of many otherwise enjoyable games for a lot of players.

 

So, go carefully, IMO.

[subbacultchas]

I don't much care for this idea. Games like WoW with damage meters, or Neverwinter with Item Level often have people gatekeeping access to tougher content. Want to join a team for Tomb of the Nine Gods? It may say 12k item level, but you won't even get a team without 15k item level. Want to join a particular raid? Sorry, we only accept X DPS.

 

The thing is, this may work for some games and you may see minor bits of this in action on CoH. But overall, the philosophy of CoH is that anyone can team with anyone else and still feel useful. It may differ somewhat with 50+ content, but it's still true throughout the game. I would not like to see this changed.

[_NOPE_]

[glow=white,4,600]/JRanger[/glow]

[eiynp]

I would like to have access to more combat data, but it's impossible to have a proper in-game 'damage meter' without a public-facing API for it to hook into (and imo that's probably too much work to be on the table for development.)  Getting accurate data would also require the game to track a bunch of stuff that it may not at the moment (i.e. how do you decide when the 'combat' state begins and ends, what happens to overkill damage, etc.)

 

there used to be an app called herostats that could parse information from the ingame combat log, but iirc it didn't really function as a 'damage meter' per se (and also I dunno if anyone has gotten it working on homecoming.)

[jubakumbi]

Implementing this could bring out a more competitive group of players in endgame play, encourage players to make adjustments to their enhancement set ups to increase their effectiveness.

 

This is the part I should have quoted and addressed directly.

As you can see, others already have the outlook that the very thing you think of as a positive apsect to this idea is, to many CoH players, a very negative thing.

 

The whole idea behind these types of meters and logs is to encourage shame other players into playing the 'right' way the DPSers want.

 

As a personal tool to improve/test/experiemnt, I think these things are terrific.

The moment you can tell another player they are not doing enough damage, the tool becomes a weapon, IMO.

 

You want to be more effective in CoH?

Get more debuffers. :)

[PaxArcana]

With the Devs considering making changes in the future, I was wondering what the chances of having a damage meter/tracker implemented into the game.

 

Please no.

 

For one, it would completely fail to accurately measure the contribution of Defenders and Controllers; Damage Meters don't really account for crowd control nor buff/debuff.  It also wouldn't account for team-wide boosts like the Leadership pool.

 

Your Blaster may have done 10x my damage, and that Empathy defender might have healed tons and tons .... but my /ForceField Mastermind likely helped keep both of you on your feet at all, and his leadership toggles might account for as much as 5% to 10% of _everyone's_ damage output.

 

And speaking of Masterminds, my pets' damage is unlikely being counted as MINE, even though really it is.

 

...

 

In the end, those competitive players would likely want to exclude me from their teams.

 

Even though, back in the NCSoft days, my Robotics/FF Mastermind was by himself the equivalent of another six entire heroes against ordinary enemies, and even most EBs.

 

...

 

Seriously, had one group claim I was just leeching, because my actual character didn't attack more than 3 or 4 times in a mission.  So I challenged them to a deal: they could pick the next fight, and I would sit out - no bubbles, no toggles, no pets.  Then, we'd swap - I'd put out my pets and bubbles and toggles, THEY would sit out while I fought alone.  I picked a bigger, nastier bunch of enemies than they had .... and was done putting the last of them down in about four-fifths the time the rest of the team took.  SO, which of us needs the other more, exactly? I asked, after explaining that while they didn't see any pretty beams and animations happening, I was still VERY active - looking around for situational awareness, prioritizint targets, moving my robots and directing their fire to as many as three different targets at once, etc. ... and, to their credit, the complaints stopped.  In that[/] group.

 

Literally, I could have carried that group through the entire mission.  Not as FAST as the whole team working together, but, I absolutely could have anyway.

 

And a damage meter would show me in last place, with (if I was very lucky) double-digit damage total across an entire STF ... because "Force Bolt" was his ONLY direct attack power.

[joyispunkrolex]

It's not the same thing, but the UI does have the ability to pull monitor some of your personal stats in real time. I think you just drag the relevant counter out of the Combat Abilities window? I recall doing that when I was really concerned about monitoring Def and Resist numbers for my WP Brute back in the day.

 

And yes, I don't care about anybody in particular's damage numbers so long as the team is functioning. Which is not really a high bar to clear most of the time. I ran a signature arc a couple weeks ago with somebody who was clearly drunk. The guy kept getting lost on maps and was pretty much never near any fighting but he was hilarious in chat. He contributed nothing to XP or mission progress but he was way too much fun to kick.

[hastened]

An accurate DPS meter for CoH would be amusing in a number of ways, since you would need to count the +Damage from the ludicrously strong buffs/debuffs the game has to the player who applied them.  I suspect you would get a lot of "Why is this Kin/Sonic defender out-dpsing the entire rest of the team?" type of questions.

 

Or maybe not, given how many people ask for Kins specifically I think they've got a pretty good idea of who brings what to the table.  I think people might be surprised by some combos like sonic/sonic defs though, I'm not sure people realize how strong -Res is in the same way they realize how strong Fulcrum Shift is.

 

Also, I would love to see a healing meter that included deflections/resisted damage/misses due to debuffs.

[wjrasmussen]

Hell no

[ChzBoi]

[glow=white,4,600]/JRanger[/glow]

 

I miss JRanger....as that would've been the appropriate 1st reply, oh so many years ago.... Thanks PK!

[GamerKate]

[glow=white,4,600]/JRanger[/glow]

 

BEST POST EVER LOL

 

MCM

[GamerKate]

I’m gonna (hopefully redundantly) Add ‘Hell no’ to this. WoW is a great game in some respects, mostly for the HUGE world they’ve created, but the endgame/Min-Maxing focus of the majority of the playerbsse makes it horrible for dirty casuals such as myself.

 

Also, as people have posted, in CoH buffs/debuffs are imo even more useful than flat DPS output. Don’t get me wrong, I love to see an 8-person all-Brute team all on full rage obliterate their way through a mission, but equally an all kin/rad Defender team can be an insanely exhilarating massacre-beast.

 

Besides, there’s a reason why the Avengers wasn’t 8 Iron Men. And if the next Captain Marvel movie is about 8 Captain Marvel clones just going Nova for 120 minutes, it would be an amusing but epic fail as a spectacle.

 

MCM

[Sailboat]

For years, playing COH, one of the best plugs I could make for the game was to describe with horror what I'd seen in other games where people's clicks were tracked by their peers.  The drama, the whining, the meanness, the pin-headed focus on "statistics uber alles" tore apart friendships, depopulated guilds and collapsed communities.  The absence of such tools in COH was wonderful and the playerbase as a whole was blessedly free of such things.

 

These tools corrupt.  Even in my group of gaming friends, who prided themselves on being nice and patent with beginners to the point that our unofficial motto was "play nice and show some class," I saw people use these tools in WoW and Guild Wars to suggest kicking out "underperforming" friends.

 

So, uh, pleeeease don't.  Even when used with the best of intentions, such tools are bad for the game and worse for the people who play it.  And they are seldom used with the best of intentions.

[jubakumbi]

 

These tools corrupt. 

 

 

This.

 

In STO, the mere fact I ran a parser so I could see how my abilities combined for interesting stuff, I was often immediately a 'bad guy' because the assumption was the only reason I would run it was to shame others, when unless asked, I never posted results.

I had fllet members ask me to run the parser so they could shame others, I left the fleet.

These were the same 'relaxed, casual' players I had been playing with for a few months, turned into DPS dictators the moment the numbers arrived.

 

Data can be used as a weapon just as easily as it can be used as a tool...

[Sothoth]

One of the worst aspects of WoW are the damage meters.

 

How many times have you heard 'STFU till you start pulling numbers'?

Don't really want to see that attitude find it's way here.

[senseichen]

I'd like to see named pipes for chat channels, which could be used to write damage meters. But if really like to create a second monitor chat client with better organization and history.

[Kenwood]

With the Devs considering making changes in the future, I was wondering what the chances of having a damage meter/tracker implemented into the game. This idea comes from my days with World of Warcraft where you can download an add on that tracked your’s and the rest of your team’s damage, dps, heals, damage taken etc. and gives you the ability to share with your teammates. Forgive me if this is something that has been mentioned in the past. Implementing this could bring out a more competitive group of players in endgame play, encourage players to make adjustments to their enhancement set ups to increase their effectiveness.

 

Any ideas on this matter, whether or not it’s even possible?

 

 

For my first post on these forums, I am going to have to say no to this idea. I'm probably going to echo some of the no replies since I did not read every reply before posting, but the reason I say no is because I want people to have fun when they play and not treat this like a second job. The joy of CoH/V is teaming and playing concepts and powersets you enjoy and not ones that are OP or considered the best. Me personally, if I cannot thematically make powersets work, I will not play them.

[Rumors]

The only way I'd want a damage meter is if it could only be used to view personal information, not the numbers of anyone else in the team/league/super group/zone/whatever.  Only the user's.  It'd be great for figuring out which attack chain is the best for me to use without having to crunch all the numbers myself or beg the genius bruisers on the forum to do it for me.

 

 

But as the "see everyone's damage contribution", nah, no thanks.  I mean, they can be interesting for research and can lead to some funny moments, but the toxicity they bring isn't worth it.  When they became a big deal in Aion and people started gear checking before letting you go to any content was when that game became extremely unfun.

[PaxArcana]

Data can be used as a weapon just as easily as it can be used as a tool...

 

Generally, the only way to tell the difference between a tool, and a weapon, is the bloodstains.

[Karthunk]

Public damage meters cause sooo much toxic behavior.

[Omnicron]

I wouldn't mind an app that would show me my personal damage data, specifically, which powers are responsible for what % of the damage being done. I feel like it would be helpful in streamlining my build. How much damage is Rain of Fire really contributing? I feel like it's a lot, but it's one of those powers where its hard to tell. How much damage does my Justice Incarnate attack deal over the course of a mission compared to the Interface proc? When I have the threads, which should be upgraded first?

 

But yeah, no interest in seeing how much damage other people do.

[wjrasmussen]

See your own numbers turns into show us  your numbers.

 

If you have some  pedantic need for numbers. You can do it without a meter like people used to. Stop being lazy about it.

[Solvernia]

DPS meters turn ordinary people into unrepentant dipshits.

 

I get that you, personally, won't turn into an unrepentant dipshit, but add a DPS meter to CoH and everyone's going to start demanding you have a minimum 1k DPS before you're allowed to join their ITF. It does more harm than good.

[DR_Mechano]

Ok my old Illusion/Rad controller had not just its Phantom Army, it had the Tarantula from Black Scorpion patron power pool AND two Praetorian Clockwork from the Incarnate Trials stuff. Most DPS meters in WoW have trouble tracking just the hunter pet...thats ONE pet, now add in up to 7 at a time...