[dev1058] Say no to the hate meter.

[Preypacer]

@Preypacer

Whatever you might have thought about my examples, you got the purpose of them. Yes it's a game, but hate meters have to do with the life or death of the party. There has probably been thousands of skills, far better examples than the ones off the top of my head I'm sure, that has been lost over time due to modern technology. If you are going to call it a crutch, you will have to call those advances crutches as well. In the meantime, someone who might have otherwise been very good at a job except needing that one tool, might be less successful at his job, and be overlooked due to poor performance.

Actually, no.

The point of my responses was that your analogies were flawed in the case of using an axe versus using a power saw. And in the case of having a tumor checked, was completely and abysmally off in the weeds.

With the axe/chainsaw comparison, your reasoning is flawed because as I explained, in either case, the user has to gain skill in each tool by using it and finding for themselves what angles or approaches yield the best result. There is no guide or gauge showing them if they're getting more or less effective. Not really sure how you could read my responses and twist them into somehow validating your statements.

As for the tumor one... You are trying to equate life or death in reality to life or death in a game. There is no comparison. Period.

In real life, the doctor making a mistake and mis-diagnosing a tumor as benign is life threatening, especially if it's ignored early enough to have been properly treated with the correct diagnosis. There is no "resurrecting". There are no home points to return to. There is no "gear damage" to repair. If a tumor is wrongly diagnosed and it leads into an advanced stage of cancer that can't be dealt with... That's it. Game Over.

It's okay to make mistakes in a game because if you fail, and your party wipes, you get to come back, try again and hopefully get it right. Real life doesn't offer that option.

Really not that difficult a concept to grasp.

It's appalling, frankly, that you would make such a comparison to begin with, and then continue to argue it as "it's the life or death of the party".

FFS, get some perspective before you start whimsically throwing out comparisons like that. And find a better analogy while you're at it.

There is more to each job than just watching aggro. A good tank keeps an eye on the entire party’s needs, making sure everyone is ready before beginning the fight. A good healer watches the party’s back, and compensates for the party until they can respond to whatever threat came from left field. A good dps knows to help keep aggro off the healer. These are things no tools will compensate for.

The meters remove the need for players to learn where that balance is by hands-on-experience, and replaces it with a meter that spells it out for them.

It's not the end result I'm arguing against... It's the means of getting that result.

As for telling someone how to play, that comes from both sides. I’m sorry you were refused by so many, but that just suggests that the majority like and want addons. I personally never used any, other than a dmg meter to measure my performance, and whatever was built in the game. But by saying no one should use a meter, you are effectively telling people they should play like you. That is why the toggles have been made available. Anyone who wants to be that skilled, or have the mystery in the fight, can if they choose.

No... I'm not telling people to play like me. I'm expressing my point of view that it's far more interesting and challenging to learn a mob's behavior by paying attention to the flow of battle to learn the most effective tactics to maintain or mitigate aggro with them, than to look instead at a meter that spells it out for you.

You disagree, that's fine. But do not twist my words around into some kind of strawman to do so.

[Arcell]

The meters remove the need for players to learn where that balance is by hands-on-experience, and replaces it with a meter that spells it out for them.

By learning through hands-on-experience do you mean accidentally pulling hate, dying and getting your party killed because now the monster's AoE attack is facing the squishy characters?

The hate meter takes out the guess work and just shows you, this does this. You still have to use your own better judgement on when to use certain things, especially if they generate a lot of hate. You still have to know how to mitigate hate generated as well as lower it if need be. If you don't know how to do these things on your class you're an unskilled player and will pull hate.

As for skilled players, enmity control will be pretty much the same. Though as I said before you can try to push the line of how much you can get away with while you're riding the line of pulling hate or not. You can more effectively use your actions without having to worry about pulling hate accidentally because of a miscalculation due to the amount of speculation involved.

That being said I don't really care how they do it. Numbers are fine, % is fine, even a more ambiguous system is fine. It doesn't have to be spelled out exactly but however they do it I'm still going to be playing the game and enjoying my time.