Meters and Logs

                It seems that on the issue of combat meters everyone has an opinion.  Some people like them, and well some people don’t.  There are many reasons for this.

                Meters aside for a moment people like information.  In swtor, the information that the game provides to a player is very minimal to say the least with regards to combat.  When you get defeated you have no idea of whom hit you last, if you were hit by multiple foes or how hard they hit you for.  You are not given information on how much damage your armor reduced, or your passive damage reduction.  It also doesn’t tell you the damage your shield absorbed or the damage you dodged.  Nor for a PvPer does the game tell you the damage your expertise reduced.  That’s just on the defensive side of the game.  What about offensive moves.  There is no log on critical or how much surge is boosting them by; there is no telling damage boost from expertise.  Then the same goes for healing.  I will say that yes I do have all my fly text on but the fly text doesn’t break down the damage or defense or healing specifically like I am talking about.  Essentially the game does not even have a combat log.  You might be saying wait all this information you seek is in your character panel, and to some extent you are right but the character panel gives ranges and static values.  With a combat log you can see live data on all of these values not rather that just theorycrafting from the character panel.

                Combat logs are invaluable to players and would be a welcome addition.  There is no reason not to have combat logs, which can improve peoples’ personal games. Skipping over to meters, which tend to be lauded or seen with resentment. 

                The positives of meters are that on an individual basis you can see numerical data that shows how effective your healing, damage, or defense is.  From a healing stand point you can see your effective heals, overhealing, regeneration, downtime and criticals.  Some healing tends to be more situational than rotation based letting a healer see where they can use what heal to be more effective.  Granted as a healer you do not need to have meters.  Keeping people alive and in the fight is what gets the job done, however meters can help healers if they want to improve.  The same goes for dps (damage dealers) you do not need meters to do damage if the boss dies and you win all is fine.  On a personal level meters can help you improve your rotation to get more out of your character.  Or as a dps you could go look up a rotation that someone else has made.  They probably did this with meters and you won’t know if it’s working unless you see it on meters yourself.

                The negatives of meters result in each person being held to a standard.  If you are below this standard you are not good enough.  The problem with this is boss fights involve more than just straight damage; there are more times often than not, mechanics to overcome to defeat the boss.  If a player puts out amazing dps but dies 45 seconds into the fight then they aren’t really worth the spot compared to someone that puts out less dps but listens and survives until the boss is down.

From the guild summit they commented on meters and logs some.  From what I understood of what the Bioware team said there will be limited simply command so that you can see what defeated you and with what you defeated someone else with.  They also said that a detailed log showing everything your character does and everything affecting them will be out loaded so that it can be viewed but only out of game.  Also the detailed log is only on a personal level so you can only see your characters information not the entire groups.  Meaning some 3^rd party would have to make a program to collect and view this information for groups or in game.

So it sounds like swtor will be getting very accurate out of game logs.  They said they were going for the middle ground with this idea but I still don’t see why having very detailed logs out of game coupled with some less detailed logs in game would be bad.  Having them out of game could be nice for making charts and helping convey the data in a more meaningful way.  But in game I still would like a little analysis of my gameplay and not have to pop out of game to view my data. It will be a nice addition to see what defeated you but even this will probably be given with minimal data.

Meters and logs have their place and are useful.  Some people don’t like meters and aren’t looking to improve themselves and that’s okay.  But don’t go looking to set server firsts with an attitude like that.   So if you are a casual player that’s fine don’t get discouraged by meters just play the game you want to play.