Would a DPS meter be something we want in CoX?

No, it isn't.

Having played The Big Game and The Game That Recently Went F2P But Isn't Superheroes for several years, and having raided in both, with meters in the first and without in the second, no, it really isn't useful in any way.

And there's certainly nothing in CoX that would warrant it.

Also.... I don't care if I'm using OMGtheMOSTefficientattackchainEVAR when I'm playing this game. So what?

Amen. I'm sure that my "click the biggest hitter that is recharged" strategy against big bads could be improved, but things die fast enough already.

Yeah, that was what I was going to say. The tool already exists, you just need to go download it and install it. And it'll give you even more useful information besides.

Granted, I haven't used HeroStats in years, so my version isn't up to date. I haven't really felt any need for it since the buff icons started flashing to warn you before they expired. That's what I was really using HeroStats for.

And just to say it, the OP's suggestion is exactly how it works, it parses the log file.

I'm actually kinda surprised we got this far into the debate without that being mentioned. There is a DPS tracker for CoX. It didn't change a damn thing about how the game is played. Why? Well, 'cause, as said, the point where a player needs to monitor that kind of efficiency is far beyond the difficult of anything in-game.

It's also pretty easy to calculate DPS in this game. Whereas in That Other MMO, you've got your auto-attack, and abilities doing damage, and debuffing, and oh, dear Christ, look how much health he still has! So on, so forth. In CoX, you've probably got somewhere between four and nine attacks you're worried about. And the game gives you all the really relevant information, gratis. After that, DPS calculations are really just a matter of some basic math, no?

Oh, yes let's. I would LOVE the ensuing rush to get the most expensive UBAR IO sets to increase your gear score as high as possible, even when less "uber" and cheaper IOs would actually benefit your build more. And of course the inevitable complaining that all the "best" stuff costs too much.

You're not? /kick.

I often stand around waiting for Siphon Life to recharge so I can use it for the kill shot. I also do the Eagle's Claw > Cobra Strike combo just because it looks so freaking cool. The fact that I use Eagle's Claw at all might mean that AV fight is going to last a whole five seconds longer....that's five seconds of your life you'll never get back. Think about THAT next time you invite a Martial Arts Scrapper to your team.

Here's a really easy way to determine if you are "doing good damage". If the enemy is dead and you are still standing, then you are "doing good damage".

Yeah, uhm. I've done this with, and without, DPS meters. DPS meters help me figure out how to do better damage, with less time spent fighting over and over. Controlled experiments are better than uncontrolled experiments.

HeroStats would indeed help. I'm on Windows 7 64-bit, though, where apparently it doesn't work in full-screen mode, and on my machine, the game is unplayable windowed. (No idea why.)

No. Blaster defiance, resistance debuffs, and mysteries such as "if I start a power that takes 3 seconds to activate, do I get the buffs I had up when I started or the buffs I had up when I finished?"

On my blaster, one of my attacks gives me a 17% damage boost for a few seconds. It could be worse DPS than one of my other attacks, but still worth it to use if I followed it up with a particular other attack that had high damage... That kind of thing is sorta fussy to calculate, but could make a pretty significant difference in damage output.

amen bro

I might actually agree that on a purely academic level it might be useful to have as much "number data" as possible to min/max your builds in this game. But on a much more practical level does it really matter all that much whether you can kill something in this game in 6.893 seconds instead of 7.123? I can assure you that in 99.999% of the cases it doesn't, especially if you don't PvP (and frankly even that's questionable).

There's reasonable min/maxing and then there's OCD anal-retentiveness.
One might be acceptable but like anything the concept can be taken quite too far for your own or anyone else's good. *shrugs*

Right. Because my low-damage control that's keeping that sapper/other irritant from bothering anyone, or low-damage AOE immob that's keeping everyone nice and bunched up for AOEs, or FF/Sonic/Thermal bubbles, heals, buffs, etc... nope, no participation there. DPS is obviously the only thing that matters, ever.

**** no.

See my Guides and Tutorials

As noted above, I've yet to see clear evidence that it's actually useful in any MMORPG, even far simpler ones than CoH.

In general, while inaccurate measurements are problematic, *wrong* measurements are almost certainly worse than none at all; and in most CoH situations any practically realizable DPS meter would be deeply wrong.

(To illustrate what I mean by "inaccurate" vs. "wrong" in this context, if your nominal goal is to describe the nutritional value of a food, an "inaccurate" value might be where someone used a poorly calibrated instrument or inaccurate measurement while recording the amount of sodium, which resulted in a value that was off by an amount outside the acceptable error allowance, but not known to be off. A "wrong" value might be because someone thought that only meat could provide protein and never bothered to measure the contribution from the milk, egg, and soy ingredients... even if their math and lab technique were correct, the answer would be fundamentally flawed.)

There are many reasons for all this, but one of the most fundamental is that CoH characters are far more complex and interesting than in other games. Even when you look at a Blaster, they usually have a wide variety of tools that can significantly alter the outcome of a fight in ways other than their own direct damage output.

Some quick examples pulled out of my own recent experiences to illustrate the problems:

* My Archery/Devices/Munitions Blaster has frankensloted Surveillance to provide -22.5% Defense to all, for 20 sec. What's the contribution to DPS when I fire it against a tough foe?

The most optimistic view, with a high-Defense foe and a large group of Acc-debuffed allies, would chalk up something on the order of 20% additional damage from everyone in the fight for the next 20 seconds; it might be responsible for thousands of points of damage per click. The most pessimistic view, against low-Defense, high-Def Debuff Resist foes and with very high Acc allies, would be that it does basically nothing, being a complete waste of activation time and End.

Crucially, the calculations necessary to figure out what's actually happening would be absolutely prohibitive on the server side, given what we know of the limitations of what the server can reasonably calculate.

Then there's the aspects that transcend what can be measured by any rationally computerized means; if several pickup teams of people are fighting several tough enemies piecemeal (say, 6 Adamastors and 2 Akarists, like one point in last night's special event) and generally not exceeding their regen, having the giant red cross-hair animation point out one foe to concentrate more people on could easily change the course of the fight from "loosing gradually" (not really denting their HP bars past their regen, and an increasing number of people having to trek back from the hospital across the zone) to "winning steadily" (whittle down one with focused fire, then move to the next). How would you measure *that* in a DPS meter? And remember that this is one, fairly straightforward power, in perhaps the most straightforward damage-output-focused AT.

* Mid-teens semi-regular SG team with six Demon Summoning Masterminds and my Arachnos Widow (long story, and prior to Inherent Fitness); the contribution to overall team damage from my running Tactical Training: Assault and Leadership: Assault to buff the damage of the giant horde of 18 ugly demons stomping about greatly exceeded my entire attack chain, to the point that when I ran short of End it was far more effective for me to stop attacking for a bit than to risk dropping the toggles. (Plus TT:Maneuvers seemed at that level to make a significant difference in their survivability, reducing time and significant End that would have been lost re-summoing and re-buffing them.) Again, this from an AT that tends to be thought of as a "damage dealing class".

* My Storm / Sonic / Elec Defender has his sonic attacks frankenslotted with more focus on Recharge than Damage (not even counting the whole thing some people have about Defenders using their attacks in the first place). Layering the -Resistance debuffs more deeply on hard targets generates far more team damage than his own efforts could put out even with a more damage-focused build (and many of his mitigation abilities work on their own). The little orange numbers he sees floating up are almost a side effect of making everyone else's orange numbers bigger. Somewhat bizarrely, his highest "direct DPS" attack is actually his Ancillary Elec pool Immobilize, so when he wants to debuff foes he attacks them, and when he wants to damage them he controls them

* Twilight Grasp: Out of the box, -50% Regen, -10% Damage, -5% To-Hit, and can just about be double-stacked; it's an awesome debuff that gets better quickly with slotting. Oh, and it also has the useful side effect that it heals all your friends In a damage-control hybrid class, how do you figure its contribution?

* What's the real DPS of Howling Twilight? Sure, it does some direct damage in a radius, but if you've just saved three Blasters and their buffing Defender from a 60-second trip back from the hospital during a crucial point on an undermanned ship raid, the damage you personally log to U'Kon Gr'ai from firing the power is pretty much irrelevant.

* I fire a cone that catches a badly wounded minion, seriously overkilling it; a slightly damaged lieutenant, not quite killing it and therefore allowing it to fire an annoying power (such as a group heal or buff), and doing some damage to a boss. What's the DPS of that cone even in isolation, and how do you compare it to a single-target attack that would have assuredly taken just the lieutenant down with some overkill before they could trigger their PBAoE heal? What about the DPS value of spending an extra second to line up the cone to include another minion?

* What's the DPS of typing instructions?

* To take it in the other direction for a moment, suppose in a moment of sleepiness my finger slips and I fire Gale rather than Howl at a clump of enemies as the team approaches. What's the hit to DPS? The Rain of Arrows from behind me landing on empty floor rather than a debuffed clump of enemies taking 20% more damage almost certainly outweighs the difference in the orange numbers I see personally.

These are not rare, special, or unique examples; the majority of long-term CoH players could go on for ages listing examples like the above.

To bring up another point: simply turning on and reading your log already gives you the exact damage output (to the second decimal place) and time down to the second. IIRC firing off a demorecord gives time accurate to the millisecond, and based on the server's "real" clock to boot. The reason there aren't more tools taking advantage of this is while you could create very precise *looking* results, they would range from at best "basically meaningless" to more typically "actively misleading".

No Actual Value

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.