I have an answer to the obligatory damage meters where everyone wants to be #1 and anyone below them should "Lrn2Play, Nubcakes!"Personally I'm not a big fan of damage meters, and especially not of healing meters. And while Cap'n John's idea would be an improvement, I don't think that its solving the problem.
Damage Meters (D) and Healing Meters (H) already exist. What we need is a Mod that compares both figures and gives us a new variable, say X, where X = D/H. The more Damage you do and the less Healing you require, the higher X will be. Dish out a ton of Damage but need a lot of TLC from the Priest and your X-factor will be lower. Now we're talking low maintenance DPS.
Naturally a Tank will have a low X-factor because his (or her) job is not to inflict a lot of damage but to absorb a lot of damage, meaning he will need a lot of Heals compared to his Damage output, but that's acceptable for the Tank.
X = D/H will reveal that the Rogue who topped the Damage charts needed more healing than the Tank, which could explain why the Priest was OOM and unable to heal the Tank, which is when Wipes occur.
High DPS good, low maintenance DPS better (shades of Animal Farm?).
Of course the other side to this argument is that if the DPS is high enough the Mobs will go down so fast that a few extra Heals thrown the Rogue's way are no big deal. But that's usually only going to happen when the group is overpowered versus the Instance's difficulty level, as you, Tobold, found out on your recent MC Run.
I'd be interested to know if the Damage and Healing Meters could be configured to throw up this X-Factor, as an answer to the guy who loves to toss up the Dmg Meters after every Boss fight.
"Yeah, pal, you're #1 on the Damage Meters, but look at the Healing you needed. No wonder our Priest is always OOM and needs to drink after every single fight."
The underlying problem is that measuring damage and healing output only gives you a total score. It does not tell you anything about the timing of that damage or healing. And I would argue that the timing of damage and healing is what makes a good player, not the total output.
That is easiest to see with healing. Imagine two groups running the same dungeon in parallel, each of the group having just one healer. Obviously the success criteria to compare the two groups and the two healers would be which of the groups has the least deaths, and not which of them has the higher amount of points healed. In fact, if both groups come out without deaths, the group which used *less* healing to achieve that is probably the better one. If one of the groups used a lot more healing, they probably ended up with the healer being out of mana a lot more often after the fight, thus everybody waiting for him to drink and recover his mana between fights. Equally obvious when comparing the two groups healing scores is that the healer isn't uniquely responsible for the score. If one group manages aggro much better, so that the mobs always hit the tank, with his better damage reduction, the healer will need to heal less points. Now combine the two groups into one raid group, and the same thing still applies. Assuming the healers work with some sort of healing assignment, it is a lot more important that their healing target doesn't die than how many points they heal. And the behavior of the healing target influences the score. So you can't pull out a healing meter at the end of the raid and determine who was the best healer. There is a brilliant post on Yet Another Nightelf's blog on how to top the healing meters by doing all the things that are bad for a raid.
Similar considerations apply for damage. More damage isn't always better. One important aspect is timing. A mage starts a combat with a full mana bar, a tank with an empty rage bar. If the mage pulls out his biggest guns right away, without waiting for the tank to gain some aggro and rage, he is likely to pull the mob away from the tank if he lands a crit. That leads at the very least to the tank losing time by having to run after the mob, and the healer wasting mana on having to heal the mage. In the worst cases it leads to people dying and the group wiping. Timing the damage to do less damage at the start and using the biggest spell to for the death blow is a lot better gameplay, but a damage meter can't show that. Another aspect is mana efficiency. Killing a mob faster with more damage only helps if the time you gain that way is longer than the time you lose for having to recover that mana. If your mage is out of mana after every trash mob, and is reduced to using his wand after half the boss fight, he isn't a very good mage, whatever huge damage numbers he produced.
If you are in a good group with good players, you will know it. If somebody screws up, you will often also know what went wrong. But you won't be able to describe that difference between good and bad with some simple to measure numbers. How do you measure how good your pulls are, how little time you lost standing around, how well the aggro management was? Damage meters, whatever you do to modify the numbers, won't tell you that. And people looking after their damage meter and healing meter scores are more likely to play bad than good, because playing after the meter just encourages bad behavior.
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