Galaen_Frost wrote: »

Why does everyone practice their rotations on a dummy? You know there are real monsters out there to practice on, right? I've heard rumors about them giving you experience and gold. Just watch yourselves, I've also heard they move around and hit back.

NyxWrench wrote: »

From my own testing, weaving (animation cancelling light attacks into skills) cannot account for more than roughly a 50% increase in DPS. That is, if you can do 10k without weaving, weaving will get you to 15k. If you can do 20k without weaving, weaving can get you to 30k. And that's for perfect weaving. The average player probably wouldn't gain more than about 25%.

So at the high end, weaving clearly accounts for a huge amount of damage (30k to 45k, for example), but at the low end, telling people that weaving will fix all their DPS problems is close to an outright lie. Weaving won't take you from 5k to 50k. It won't even take you from 5k to 10k. This is the skill barrier.

The CP boost from max CP (including the hidden bonuses to resources for 300+ CP) accounts for another 50%-60% increase, just from a quick estimate. So someone with max CP weaving 45k DPS would be at 20k DPS without weaving or CP (20k * 1.5 * 1.5). This is the time barrier, from grinding CP.

Certain high-end gear sets also provide massive boosts to damage output compared to what 'normal' players can acquire (crafted and overland sets). I have nothing to judge this by, but I would not be surprised for it to be a 50% boost once you add in improving them to gold tier, plus transmutations. This is the accessibility barrier, between the ability to get into and complete the areas that drop the gear, and having the money needed for upgrading and transmuting.

Speaking of gear, you have the transition from survivability gear to damage gear. Early on in the game, without the damage reduction of the CP stars, going pure offense is very likely to get you killed. It was very hard for me to transition from heavy armor to light armor as a sorcerer, because every time I tried, I'd end up dying. My nightblade friend has always died super quick whenever a mob turns on him, so he's heavily reliant on working with our tank friend (whereas I do a lot of stuff solo). When I was finally able to switch to light armor, my DPS went up by perhaps 50%. (PUGs that are afraid of dying will probably be in more survival gear than offense gear, so that's probably a large chunk of the difference in DPS.)

And of course having the right combinations of skills in your action bar, plus rotations, is another improvement that isn't obvious until you dig into how the skills actually work and fit together. This is the knowledge barrier. From my own experience, this can be considered another 50% jump.

Speaking of skills, actually using skills, rather than just spamming light attacks, is an easy doubling of damage.

And then you have the slight advantages you can gain by choosing the 'right' class and race. This could be perhaps a 10% difference. Maybe more. (EG: vampire Altmer sorcerer vs non-vampire Bosmer sorcerer).


So stepping up the ladder looks like:

3500 - Very bottom baseline. Light attacks only, 'bad' race/class.
4000 - 'Good' race/class.
8000 - Using skills decently.
12000 - Switch from survivability gear to offensive gear.
18000 - Weaving
27000 - Max CP
40000 - Best-in-slot gear
higher - accumulated small-scale optimizations, group buffs/debuffs, etc

It's not a perfect representation, because it's not a perfect 50% step each time, and people are progressing on different aspects of it at the same time. But it seems reasonably close as a general overview.

The important point is that they are almost all percentage multipliers, so having them all line up perfectly ends up with truly ludicrous damage outputs, but damage drops precipitously if you lose even one of the components. An 'average' player (moderate CP, survivability gear, poor understanding of skill mechanics, unskilled at weaving) is likely to have difficulty even breaking 10k. This is your 'floor'.


People complain about the power creep of CP, just like they claim that weaving is the ultimate reason for huge amounts of damage. Without optimal use of the CP stars, you aren't going to get that high of an overall damage output. And even if you do, that +50% is pretty mild without combining with all the other +50%'s.

The real issue is not CP, or animation cancelling, or BiS gear. It's that they all amplify each other, compounding into something that skyrockets past what 'average' players can achieve. The boost to CP helps raise the floor a little, but not really enough to make a major difference. Animation cancelling isn't going to make you a DPS god unless you've already perfected all the other components contributing to your damage.

If you had an average player getting +25% from all the above categories, compared to a top-end player getting +50% from all of them, rather than being slightly ahead, the top-end player would be doing 2.5x as much damage as the average player. Limiting things by raising the floor or lowering the ceiling is really difficult when you have compounding effects.

When you can multiply all these things together, average to moderately difficult content suddenly becomes easy. And if the devs balance content around making things a challenge to these top-end players, that's basically impossible for the vast majority of the playerbase.

The changes in Murkmire look like they're trying to cut into some of the above potential. With weaker defenses and lower sustain, you have to take away some of those multipliers in order to stay alive and keep generating damage. You can't keep letting things multiply together forever. Force players to make choices for survivability, and you put an effective cap on the limits of where you can go with damage output without trying to impose explicit caps.

zaria wrote: »

Galaen_Frost wrote: »

Why does everyone practice their rotations on a dummy? You know there are real monsters out there to practice on, right? I've heard rumors about them giving you experience and gold. Just watch yourselves, I've also heard they move around and hit back.

Real enemies will either die fast or kill you fast unless countered. Soloing an world boss is more unlike an dungeon / trial boss than an dummy parse as you have healer and tank and only have to handle mechanic.

Now for learning the key mapping for healers pulling some trolls works, just replace damage abilities with far less damaging ones. Note that this is just about knowing the keys for abilities and keeping buffs up.

Cage_Lizardman wrote: »

I'm still pretty much in the same spot I've always been, good at most things but not good enough for most vet trial groups. DPS has gone up, but so has the requirements. It doesn't really seem as if much has changed to me.

ResTandRespeC wrote: »

o_0 wrote: »

Developers will always cater to the majority. Majority is casuals. More casuals = More money, and this is a business.

If I am wrong, please name a MMO that has not catered to casuals and has focused their business model on the small % of hardcore players. Note this MMO would have to still be active, a dead MMO would only prove my point further.

WoW comes to mind lol. Keeping hardcore players interested is important to any mmo business model simply because they help provide longevity. They are the content creators for things like twitch and youtube, they help spread the word and bring new people in as well as provide invaluable assistance with testing the game.

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Honestly they provided a better way to progress. WoW does a very good job at catering to everyone. They provide content for all players and a way to progress and run the treadmill. A company should never cater to one specific group and leave out the others because that's how you end up with games like wildstar. I guess we just have a different definition of what it means to cater to "hardcore" or "casuals". Of course there needs to be low and medium levels of content and of course there needs to be very challenging levels of content. I consider catering to hardcore to mean putting out content on the end spectrum. The other content is more of a lead up. Which is exactly how wow is designed.

o_0 wrote: »

ResTandRespeC wrote: »

o_0 wrote: »

Developers will always cater to the majority. Majority is casuals. More casuals = More money, and this is a business.

If I am wrong, please name a MMO that has not catered to casuals and has focused their business model on the small % of hardcore players. Note this MMO would have to still be active, a dead MMO would only prove my point further.

WoW comes to mind lol. Keeping hardcore players interested is important to any mmo business model simply because they help provide longevity. They are the content creators for things like twitch and youtube, they help spread the word and bring new people in as well as provide invaluable assistance with testing the game.

WoW is the perfect example of a game catering to casuals over hardcore players. Casuals complained that they should be able to experience all end game content too because they are paying customers. Blizzard made that happen. Hardcore players nearly rioted saying casuals don't deserve to experience all end game content if they don't earn it. Sound familiar.... This is just one example, which could be easily expanded to how vanilla WoW was compared to WoW now. Changes like this happen in all MMO's and in the end, the majority wins, whether it be casuals or hardcore players who practice daily. Majority = cashflow and ZOS is a business. If the majority ends up being casuals who don't want certain things in the game and cashflow declines due to that, what do you think the first thing ZOS will change is.