The only meter that matters.
Posted 07-08-2008 at 08:18 AM by Smaken
This post on Horacio's blog got me thinking about meters in general.
Horacio said three things in it that I think I want to expand upon and explore more fully.
I love this point. I've been working with a couple people on the side and they have really been able to elevate their games to a higher level. Another person I've been trying to bring along as a raid leader and they are starting to really get it.
Desire to improve > skill > gear. In that order, no matter what. I will spend a thousand gold in repairs to help someone who truly wants to improve.
Have truer words ever been spoken? I've long been a proponent of having Omen as the only dps meter allowed. I shudder to think of the implications should Blizz ever decide to put in an integrated dps meter on the default UI. This brings to mind a priest I know. Has to top the healing meters, even if it means he pulls aggro and wipes the raid. I have to have him as the MT healer, because if he is not, he will overheal the rest of the raid and get himself killed. Of course, he will blame the tanks, but really its his own fault for trying to be at the top of the meters. If he's doing 50% of the healing and the other two healers are each doing 25%, then he could easily back off a bit and probably still lead but by a smaller margin.
Cooperative efforts! What a great way to describe it. I think a lot of raids that I've been on have fallen more into the 'coordinated freelance operations' (CFO) category than the 'cooperative efforts' (CE) one. Its not just knowing what your supposed to do and when, but its thinking like a teammate, watching the rest of your group and reacting to what they are doing before it has to be assigned to you.
A good example of the differences between CFO & CE is Prince. Phase 1 damage is minimal, at that point he's pretty easy to tank. During Phase 2 his damage goes up a bit and you have to work harder to stay up and to get him down. Generally the CFO way to do it is to let the tank get 5-6k threat and then go to town. These are the people who run out of mana in the middle of phase 3. The CE way of doing it is to take it easy on dps during phase 1 and let the tank get a huge threat lead while conserving your cooldowns and mana, then as soon as phase 2 starts just go all out, pop everything and go to town. By doing it the second way you have a shorter phase 2 and your casters should have enough mana to finish out phase 3 as well.
These points translate all the way from Deadmines to Black Temple. Gurtogg is a terrific example of this. You must move, you must pay attention, you must watch your threat and above all, you must be ready to adapt to a changing situation right away. Archimonde is another one. If you're trying to do dps, but you're not watching the fires then you die and it most likely wipes the raid.
It all boils down to this:
Horacio said three things in it that I think I want to expand upon and explore more fully.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Horacio
The point is, do your best but if you do not equal the elite player you know or hear of, don't get down on yourself.
Desire to improve > skill > gear. In that order, no matter what. I will spend a thousand gold in repairs to help someone who truly wants to improve.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Horacio
The only meter that really counts is the "Boss Dead" meter.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Horacio
Group performance should always supercede individual performance and assesments of individual performance should always be rooted in "how can I help the group". Raids are not coordinated freelance operations, they are cooperative efforts.
A good example of the differences between CFO & CE is Prince. Phase 1 damage is minimal, at that point he's pretty easy to tank. During Phase 2 his damage goes up a bit and you have to work harder to stay up and to get him down. Generally the CFO way to do it is to let the tank get 5-6k threat and then go to town. These are the people who run out of mana in the middle of phase 3. The CE way of doing it is to take it easy on dps during phase 1 and let the tank get a huge threat lead while conserving your cooldowns and mana, then as soon as phase 2 starts just go all out, pop everything and go to town. By doing it the second way you have a shorter phase 2 and your casters should have enough mana to finish out phase 3 as well.
These points translate all the way from Deadmines to Black Temple. Gurtogg is a terrific example of this. You must move, you must pay attention, you must watch your threat and above all, you must be ready to adapt to a changing situation right away. Archimonde is another one. If you're trying to do dps, but you're not watching the fires then you die and it most likely wipes the raid.
It all boils down to this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Horacio
The only meter that really counts is the "Boss Dead" meter.
Total Comments 16
Comments
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Honestly, if a healer draws agro from a mob, and its being tanked, there is most likely a tanking issue. Just based on the mechanics of healing, either the raid is taking an insane amount of damage, or the tanks threat generation is fairly weak.
There is a reason that most healers don't normally take threat reduction talents, because it is almost impossible to rip agro from a competent tank in TBC. About the only time I see healers die, its when a CCed mob breaks early, and it doesn't get picked up by a tank.Posted 07-08-2008 at 08:46 AM by Dethtank 
- I agree the healing meter is useless. For healers it's a mater of using the right heal at the right time. Plus for priests prayer of mending doesn't show as their own heals. As long as players don't die, the healer has done their job.
For dps, a damage meter is hugely valuable for checking to see how your damage output stacks up. My main is a rogue and it's important to me to be able to see if I'm contibuting as much as I should to the effort. As a class leader I need to be able to see who is pulling their weight and who I need to spend time with to help them improve.
When "winning the meter" becomes the most important thing your priorities are off to the detriment of the raid. When used correctly damage meters are a tremendously useful tool for analyzing your groups effectiveness. The best policy I've heard is "no posting meters until after the raid has ended". That way no one goes nuts in the course of the run.Posted 07-08-2008 at 08:47 AM by McBash -
Threat does matter in certain situations for healers in incidental ways. Tidewalker, where the conventional strategy has the paladin AOE tank healing a tapping warlock with RF up to gain aggro in the murlocs...Obviously not thier forte. Since there isn't anything else worth having, I roll with -threat on my healing cloak.
While I maintain there is far too much emphasis on meters in many places, they are not completely useless. They have thier place, hence, my love/hate relationship with them. I had specific issues with individual players while acting as the 'healing officer' in a previous guild. It's hard to look at someone with a third as much healing as the leaders and not know something is wrong. The point is, it doesn't end there. Why is it this way? What is this person doing?Posted 07-08-2008 at 09:23 AM by Horacio - Would it be wrong to say then that meters should only be available to the raid leader or class leader? That way instead of being the ego stick it is a tool used by the officers to see who is doing what, who is performing better, and who needs help? I will not deny enjoying seeing my name at the top of a meter, but I would be just as happy if at the end of a raid the class leader told me this was the kind of damage I was doing, this is what I should shoot for, and what to try and improve.
Posted 07-08-2008 at 09:32 AM by Tatt - I think that meters should not be spammed during raids, but posting a WWS afterwards for people to look at is constructive.
Posted 07-08-2008 at 10:19 AM by Thist - Boss Dead meter is a good metric - mainly if you fail.
If you routinely beat the boss then its useless, all of a sudden the important metrics becomem DPS/HPS/TPS, Time Alive, how smoothly you execute the encounter.
So if a rogue is doing 900 dps but the boss is dead, is he doing his job? Is there room for improvement? The "boss dead meter" points to "Everything ok". No meters are wonderful measures of performance the exception is when folks persue them to the detriment of the raid. Spec choices to favor personal dps over raid dps, risky moves to bump dps, favoring raid healing over tank healing, etc.
Lets agree that the #1 job is getting the boss down but in a close 2nd is everyone doing the absolute best they can to achieve job 1, and that means pushing your class as hard as you can. How can you measure that? Simple, the meters and the WWS reports.
It is essential to share meter data among the class, everyone wants to think they are the bomb, but when a guildie is beating your dps by 20% you start to wonder why. WWS is a great tool for research and starting conversations between members of the same class.Posted 07-08-2008 at 11:23 AM by loquatious - I don't disagree with much of what you said above, Loq but I would submit that using the dead boss or progression metric applies not when you fail but when you succeed. When you fail is when you look into the data and observation to find the cause and what needs to be improved and fixed. While it would be foolish to count bodies at the end of the raid and if where they are supposed to be, throw away the raw data, but reaching the goal of killing a boss is far more important than any one person reaching a DPS goal.
The original blog grew mainly out of a discussion over healing meters rather than DPS meters and they are two different animals.
Meters themselves simply come down to usage and interpretation and comparing notes and good spirited competition, ie, players pushing one another to excel is healthy...in general but....can become counter productive if taken to extreme.
There is alot of nuance involved and people will have different takes on the effectiveness of data derived from meters and its usage in making changes. If I sound like someone who ignores meters and shuns thier usage, that's not true at all. I have recount running all the time and every break in the action, I'm going over things breaking down (healing) overheal, spell usage, target choices, etc as well as raw and effective healing.
I still maintain that is not enough to know how much DPS/healing people are doing but why and how it can be improved as well as what mitigating factors are involved.
It occurs to me I'm saying the same thing I said in the last 3 posts, lol. Sue me, I tend to get long winded. I'll STFU now, lol.Posted 07-08-2008 at 12:24 PM by Horacio -
The issue with this particular person comes to light particularly on the Moroes fight. Because several people are taking damage he's healing all over the place. If Moroes knocks out both tanks on him (totally possible between gouge & blind) he heads straight for that particular priest and 1-shots him. Normally you'd have enough aggro that Moroes would come right back, but you run into the fact that Moroes is not more than ten yards away from you and you don't have 130% of his aggro. I can output 800-1k tps, provided I'm not stunned (or blinded/gouged/whatever) but the simple fact is that he likes to see his name up there so he always gets himself killed.Quote:Originally Posted by DeathtankHonestly, if a healer draws agro from a mob, and its being tanked, there is most likely a tanking issue. Just based on the mechanics of healing, either the raid is taking an insane amount of damage, or the tanks threat generation is fairly weak.
There is a reason that most healers don't normally take threat reduction talents, because it is almost impossible to rip agro from a competent tank in TBC. About the only time I see healers die, its when a CCed mob breaks early, and it doesn't get picked up by a tank.
The whole point of my post was not to say that we need to not use meters, but rather to say that there is a priority involved:
Kill the boss.
Then worry about if you did 2k dps or 1,500 tps or did 45% of the healing or whatever. Progression is measured in dead bosses, not in dps meters.
Personally I have recount running all the time too. I use it to find out who's breaking sheep/shackle/trap/whatever and how (whether its aoe or something else). We had a problem with a hunter who liked multi-shot a bit to much and it was getting everyone but that hunter killed. There's a mage we run with who likes to firebolt the shackles before I can get anywhere near them.
I have a raiding mage as well as a tank and while I check my dps after a fight, I watch omen during the fight. If I pull aggro on any mob in a raid its almost a guaranteed repair bill (assuming I'm not fast enough on the Ice Block). I don't need that and I don't understand why some people do. Using dps meters is okay, as long as they are used as a benchmark, to measure how well you're doing - but not at the expense of the raid. If you are thinking in terms of your 'contribution' in anything other than Guild -> Raid -> Group -> your personal dps then you are wrong. Yes its fun to see those big numbers next to your name, but they do no good if the raid doesn't down the boss.... You can't point to your name at the top of the dps meter and say "Its everyone else's problem, I did the most damage" cause that's not how it works. You win as a team & you lose as a team. Honestly, look at a damage meter sometime, most of the time the separations are like 10-15dps. That's a couple more crits or your damage was riding in the top portion of your weapons spread, or maybe you're a bit lower cause you got a resist or a few extra glancing blows. That's where recount can actually tell you something, if someone is being resisted a lot more than they should or if their activity meter is extremely low.
Again the whole point is Kill the boss. First, second and third. Worry about doing it better once you can do it regularly.Posted 07-08-2008 at 01:15 PM by Smaken - And sorry Horacio, your post just inspired me, I didn't mean for you to have to defend yourself.
Posted 07-08-2008 at 01:16 PM by Smaken - This was what I was really talking about, not that meters are bad in general, but that people need to watch what's doing on with the raid, not what their personal dps is.Quote:Originally Posted by loqmeters are wonderful measures of performance the exception is when folks persue them to the detriment of the raid. Spec choices to favor personal dps over raid dps, risky moves to bump dps, favoring raid healing over tank healing, etc.
Posted 07-08-2008 at 01:20 PM by Smaken - Defend myself? Meh, this is a good discussion and people have honest, heartfelt opinions worth comparing and debating. Its a touchy subject. For as many times as you have people dying and raids wiping while people are not doing thier job efficiently in pursuit of the top spot on the meter, you have raids wiping and flaming out because you can't put enough heat on the mob and people shrug thier shoulders and mumble about nonsensical crap(like this entire sentence, lol).
There has to be a middle ground inbetween being devoted to making the high score like an old school arcade game and burying your head in the sand and not trying to improve. Irnoically, both ends are toward selfishness which is a raid killer. You either don't care or care too much about the wrong thing.....but those are both the extremes.
I've known people scared to death of meters because it exposes thier inadequacies. They throw up the ignorance defense and when pressed, recoil into kicking their can across the yard.
I've known people who refuse to pull off a target and lose combo points or stop a spell cast because thier trinket is up.Seriously, I was talking to a friend whose Kara raid has a priest that refuses to use PoM because he doesn't get credit for the damage it heals I can't make this shit up.Quote:Stop DPS, aggro dump incoming--pewpew! CRAP. Of course you fricken ripped Hyross off of me, you twit...my 650 SS vs. your 3K shadow bolt, what do you think is going to happen on a fresh aggro table? But hey, you led the meter, props to you I guess. No, we don't have wipe recovery, run back you turd.Posted 07-08-2008 at 01:54 PM by Horacio -
Damage meters are a wonderful tool. Does it feed into their desire to be better? Does it make them want to push the envelope harder to be just a bit ahead of that other guy? Yep. Those are good things for a raid.
Far worse than someone who tries to push the envelope and top out on personal DPS is someone who, not knowing their potential, is producing just a bit more DPS than their tanks. That's not hyperbole, it's a reality a lot of guilds discover when they first start putting public meters up.Posted 07-08-2008 at 02:23 PM by Ciderhelm 
- I doubt we disagree much, everyone hates the kid that posts the damage meter in party after every fight.
I wish there were decent healing meters. For example how much time the tank spent under 100% health, how often his health dropped under 50% and how quickly it was restored.
After all the mark of a good healer is keeping his folks alive and as fully healed as possible, minimizing overheal (hardly a concern in TBC), and in general pumping out as much healing as possible (ok meters are handy for this).
On my shaman I pwn the healing meters, on fights like VR I can easly do 1300 hps, but how does that make me better than the priest with 600 hps who is keeping a tank alive? apples and oranges.Posted 07-08-2008 at 02:24 PM by loquatious - As great as the boss dead meter is for keeping the raid happy and a guild together, I think individual performance matters a great deal as well. It will never become more apparent than that one raid where you go into farmed content and every class leader tries to swap in everyone they have waiting that needs gear from it. After all, the raid didn't show up and the boss just die and hand out the purples all on it's own.
Posted 07-08-2008 at 06:06 PM by Treenaa -
DPS and healer meters are two VERY different animals. Both have their uses, but while I cannot see any detriment to DPS meters (aside from the obvious problem with someone who doesn't understand control), healer meters are much more complicated.Posted 07-08-2008 at 07:17 PM by Norrath - Something occured to me a few months back when as a resto druid, I would lead the meters about 75% of the time and finish top 3 unless I got my dumbass killed. I thought to myself, am I really pretty good or am I just the best of the worst?
Keep that in mind, the big fish/small pond mentality can be very detrimental. If you have a DPS leader for a class that your people emulate, you might not be getting the best bang for your buck. Use a wider sample size, compare notes with other raids, other guilds. I would expect this is obvious and players serious about raiding are looking at a variety of outlets for thier information, tips, etc.
And just like properly analyzing meters, compare apples to apples, reasonably similar gear. Look at how they gem and enchant, mostly, look at the skills they use.Posted 07-09-2008 at 07:39 AM by Horacio
