Originally Posted by postmoderntease0
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On the one hand:
DoTs were very literally the *only* type of offensive damage that wasn't reported. It might seem absurd for Verant (and p1999) to not have DoT damage in the mix.
On the other hand:
There was a good reason for it. The DoT damage had a variable duration and total damage was based on whether the MoB was running or not, so it made sense not to list damage, as it was never going to even necessarily last the same number of ticks per casting, depending on how much (and what type of) running the enemy did, nor would it necessarily do the same damage per tick based on the same factor-- the type and amount of running the MoB was doing:
Yes, it makes it easier and more 'manageable' to have DoT damage listed per tick, but that's the whole freaking point. Those spells and their respective damage figures were supposed to be somewhat variable and unpredictable. It forced you to learn to play your class well, if you depended on debuffs and DoTs, because you had to really keep track of what you were doing. You didn't fzck around. You paid attention.
This is one of the reasons I love this server so much, and its players-- they want to do things the old way, because stuff wasn't handed to you then. They tend *not* to prefer WoWers, because before WoW, in EQ, the would-be-WoWers were the ones you added to your shitlist for *not* knowing their class and screwing the group over. Or else they were the ones who were such horrible powergamers that all they cared about was end-game raiding, rather than the experience that led to the end-game; those ones were almost worse, because they gave not two shits about other players *coughFOHcough*, they cared about parsing and maxing dps instead.
Contrastingly, the unknown element *forces* people to play the game more carefully, and that necessarily benefits the community and the entire game. This is especially important with matters like spells and combat, because these were facets of the game that affected everyone, not just one guy playing. If, for example, they made the 'combine' buttons destroy everything in the tradeskill bags, that's just annoying one person. No one in the group is going to die because Joey Leet wasn't careful about not hitting that combine button-- the combine button has nothing to do with Joey Leet failing to learn his goddamn class, casting fear in the middle of a dungeon, and train-wiping half the zone because he wasn't keeping track of snare.
I, at least, would request that you please remove damage over time messages until such time when they were implemented in Live. I still use the clock to keep track of DoTs and debuffs, especially when stacking them, because damage-per-tick spam gets completely lost in the 49 other things I'm trying to do in the middle of combat. I don't have time to sit there and count the number of damage ticks that get displayed, and if you do, then you're obviously not paying enough attention to everything else you should. Whereas, because I learned to play the game before the DoT info was added, all I have to do at any given point during a battle, is glance at the time to see if I need to recast anything, because I was keeping up with shit rather than letting the game do it for me. Because, when the game was new, if you didn't do that, you substantially decreased your odds of survival.
But, that's just my opinion. Parsing has other purposes than maxing dps on this server.
/rantsauce
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