Parsing in Shards

iBluNT

Dalayan Elder
It'd be awesome to hear from staff on an explanation on why we haven't implemented a valid parse/test mob in the game yet. With such a top heavy game, players are limited to very small dps upgrades, gear optimization, swaps, etc. and it's really shitty basing your gear on assumptions and what fomelo tells us.
If this is the first time staff is hearing of the idea, then that's fine too I suppose. Please help.

Even from a development standpoint, players are often asked to provide parses or back their theories up with actual numbers and we have no place to actually do this.
I could understand years ago when population was heavier and you could theoretically reverse engineer class mechanics through this if you were REALLLLY determined enough, but that's probably the only negative I'd ever see to adding this to the game.

Zmal sparring dummies are a start, but no where near the customization that we'd need to provide actual numbers.
These exist on live in the Arena already with scalability on many different metrics. Photo below from my test server.

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Some customization options that'd be amazing to have, but not limited to:
- Bane/Race type
- Level, AC, Spell AC, etc.
- Damage done, damage taken
- Resists
 
all numbers are falsified and big alchemy doesn't want you finding out the logs aren't real and that tier 2 rangers out dps tier 13 monks.

i can't imagine a single valid reason to not have one other than some horrible issue with server stability or something nonsensical like "my immersion".
 
I remember staff (Wiz) having/using one in Shadow Haven back in 2004. It didn’t have the functions you mentioned directly, but you could summon mobs to test that already had those stats. So, if nothing else, those tools for DPS parsing are something that were once a thing for staff.
 
Taryth definitely built one in PoWar for the bst revamp. Does all that you requested. Summon any mob (or groups of mobs), they all have like a billion hp and crazy hp regen and hit for 1 dmg (and don't do the crazy mechanics that can one-shot you) but stat wise (ac/resists/etc) are identical. The ability to summon any mob was restricted eventually (cause I was getting frisky with the feature) to dev only, but for instance we would spawn rujik and IM and other T12-13's for when Swiftur and I were testing, and stuff from ToT or lower when other folks were around. Brought in a bunch of folks from sub lvl 65 up through the tiers to try and balance various things as best as we could, obv new gear and a whole new 1-2 tiers came out afterwards though. can be used to test single target and AE dmg output.

for the players it would just provide in chat what your dps stats were every... 10 sec I believe, not sure if it logged to an exportable file for him (i would assume so). If this was the case, opening this open to a larger audience would eliminate needing parse data from the community. Just provide a few options (like you said every 10lvl or so) and a few examples at major tier jumps, and the data would be stored in a log file they could make a report for.
 
It'd be awesome to hear from staff on an explanation on why we haven't implemented a valid parse/test mob in the game yet.

A parse mob is going to be a hard no. Both Taryth and Jumbers are against parse mobs and I am going to agree with them.

We have a staff member who delivers accurate parses using core knowledge. We can hopefully deliver better and more accurate DPS for fixes. We are also recently able to push core changes to the test server now; allowing us to parse, compare, and tweak changes before we go live.

These controlled parses won’t always equate to a players experience though. So feedback will be important.

Thanks for your understanding in this matter.
 
These controlled parses won’t always equate to a players experience though. So feedback will be important.

Kinda threw this one right back in your court without my help. I appreciate the responses and everything, but sometimes it seems like a lot of jargon and blanket statements.

I'm already over the fact that one won't be in the game; it's been obvious, but my question was why can't we have one, and not, can we have one? We've known the staff hates it otherwise it'd be in the game already, and I obviously know the staff can parse things. Why can't we?

I get that you like to keep things locked up in anticipation of what's to come, or item balancing, etc. but why isn't anyone allowed to know how their class works or what weapons are best for their build?

How do we give feedback other than "this feels bad," and a loose parse on a raid mob over 1-5 minutes with dozens of variables with mechanics that are now being modified in the game and have no way of going back to compare?
 
i gave feedback about current entropy spine feeling unbelievably bad b/c of the low proc rate / its weird damage execute / intensify mechanic being over-factored into balance and mentioned how its nearly twice as worse as spire of deathly cold in almost every single actual use case scenario, with math. the response was more or less "yeah but spine proc still does more on paper though in some incredibly niche and unrealistic scenario" so im not really sure really sure how important feedback based on player experience is.
 
im not really sure really sure how important feedback based on player experience is.
This is the first I’ve heard this or I forgot. This is a good example of real experience being better than numbers. I also don’t like the spine proc formula because it is very obfuscated. Even knowing how it works is confusing.
 
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