JusticeRetroHunter.7684

> @"razaelll.8324" said: > Well i surely do not have the experience yet to comment the state of balance in gw2 , but when i tryed it forfirst time back in 2016 i didnt liked it much, but now i am having a lot of fun. I mean, the balance feels pretty much the same as it has always been, except way less build variety because less builds are viable...and it makes theory-craft essentially worthless because most classes can only play one or two builds that will be able to accomplish *something* in a competitive environment. In many cases, it's not just one build on a class, but one build, on one class out of all 9 classes. The only reason this happened is because alot of runes, skill, and trait interactions have been neautered...interactions that were critical to how the build functions, without any sort of replacement or functioning mechanics that allow new builds to flourish. Good example, i us-to main PP daredevil, an off meta build that was excellent for destroying necromancers, for obvious reasons. Except after nerfs to pistol/pistol by absolutely decimating it's damage without doing any functionality changes to how the weaponset actually does damage, you can see why people start complaining about Necroes being OP...it's cause they don't have counters that exist anymore to defeat them...like PP thief. Whenever i see a nerf this, or buff that thread is like me being Eren Yaeger... looking at the future. None of it matters, it all is eventually leading to the same eventuality...so long as we stay on this path, nothing will change and it will spell the doom of the games inevitable balance death. The Stickwars 2.

> @"razaelll.8324" said: > Hello guys, > > I got back to play gw2 recently coming from WoW and i must say that in my opinion gw2 pvp is in a way much better place than WoW pvp. WoW pvp is a real clown fiesta and way more toxic. Imagine joining a team in a ranked 3v3 as a healer do 2 wins and after that you get kicked, because you didnt win fast enought, that what happened to me. So far i really enjoy gw2 pvp and the community and from all fantasy mmorpgs which i played recently i think that gw2 is the one in which skill matters most. I mean, this is why people still play gw2. Because most other games pvp are also as bad if not worse then gw2. That doesn't mean gw2 pvp is good...it's just better than every alternative. The combat itself is actually engaging and "hands-on" much like a fighter game, which is what separates right now from most other MMO RPG games. What's been happening to gw2 is basically a slow dismantling of that combat fluidity...by annihilating build diversity and gutting skill usefulness and functionality which just makes it less hands on...a slow killing of the game.

> @"Ragnar.4257" said: > Making the distinction between "the time of day" and "the number of people queuing (because of the time of day)" is beyond pedantic. It's a bit pedantic yea. but it's necessary because of what I just said. People truly believe that noobs que during the weekend, that pros que during prime time, etc...And that's a bias that comes from assuming generalizations about people, when on average, all that matters is the number of people that are currently online and currently queuing for matches. Frankly the only thing we know about population is that maybe between 5 - 8 o clock will have the highest volume of players, based on other sets of data available (like television prime time) So i was trying to make the distinction between those two...one is a myth, one is based on just average number of people, i think you'd be surprised how many people believe in the former rather than the latter.

Here's the thing about time of day. It's a myth. The only thing the time of day actually effects is the number of people that will probably be queing up for matches. This says nothing about whether you have more noobs que up during the day, or more noobs queing up during the night. If i suggest that you "que up in the night time cause that's when all the noobs go to sleep" is a myth. On the Other point about your comment. It's true that the MMR will search through the que for players with MMR that are close to one another, and if it can't find any it will expand it's search. I also like your suggestion, that an option for a longer que time in favor of tighter MMR spread. However i doubt it will ever be implemented and there are a few reasons why. The way the current MM works is by collectively splitting up that wait time through all the players in the que. Let's imagine that half these players use such an option for longer que times, then you are also elongating the que times of players that don't have the option selected. In other words you can't really have "an option" it's either one or the other. The ONLY solution for MMR is that it needs a high population where there are more players to sample from, it's that simple. How do you get high population...? Is the question to really be asking here.

> @"felix.2386" said: > 3 years of vanilla gw2, never had a single meta is close to this, or the meta HoT had on release. Back then we had more build diversity...different build systems...of course the balance was better back then.

> @"snoow.1694" said: Anet's design philosophy is to fight the natural progress of evolution, which is an exponentially complex problem. "Life finds a way," as it were. Trying to control every outlier is a lesson they should have learned from just watching Jurassic Park. I've been here, patch after patch after patch and it's always the same thing, but a different spec or build, and the hole only gets deeper as we slowly drown ourselves in these nerfs. It won't stop until people get a grasp on mathematical truths about the design philosophy...analyze what nerfs and buffs ACTUALLY do rather than what they THINK it does.

the fact that bots can be so effective with many builds in the game is also evidence of how poor skill design is. Think about it for a minute. Skills should have costs and synergies so that when one interacts with another there is a benefit to using both skills, and a determinant to using skills without considering the cost of using them alone, or without thought. GW2 has neither of those things. They just have...skills that do ABC and D unconditionally. A cooldown is NOT a true cost...bots show you exactly why that is.

i feel this is relevant here.

> @"Vancho.8750" said: Yes, it's unfair. Truth is that even what i pointed out in my comment, isn't even the worst part about the matchmaker. The phase 2 part of the matchmaker is poorly designed yes, but the worst part about the matchmaker is the fact that it phase 1 really doesn't work, even if phase 2 didn't exist, because of statistics. Essentially Rating doesn't mean anything. It's really hard to explain why...but basically, Glicko was designed for chess...which is a 1 vs 1 environment, and for good reason. The best way to explain why Glicko doesn't work for multiplayer games is with a very simple example, which i wrote on another thread and ill just copy paste it here too.... >! Let's propose a hypothetical matchmaking scenario. >! >! Player Alice, Bob, Charlie and David exist and for this example lets say that... >! 1. Alice is a good player (As good as Charlie) >! 2. Bob is a bad player >! 3. Charlie is a good player (As good as Alice) >! 4. David is a bad player >! >! Now, they all end up in a match together. Alice is on Bob's team (A), and Charlie is on David's team (B). At the end of the game, Team A wins, and so Alice and Bob are rewarded. where as Charlie and David are punished. In this case, we can say that the Matchmaker treats Alice and Bob as being better players then Charlie and David. >! >! The 2nd match comes along, and this time, Alice and David are on team A, while Bob and Charlie are on team B. Team A wins, and so Alice and David are rewarded, while Bob and Charlie are punished and we can say that for this game, the matchmaker treats Alice and David as better players then Bob and Charlie. If we take a look at how these two matches add together we can deduce the following based on the matchmakers decision. >! >! Alice is the best player >! Bob is an average player >! David is an average player >! Charlie is the worst player >! >! So do you see the problem with the above deduction? Charlie is judged by the matchmaker as being the worst player, while Bob and David, who are supposed to be worse than Charlie, are labeled as better players than Charlie. >! >! So if you drag out this exercise on the order of many iterations, you will find that, the more games that are played, the more randomly distributed the allocation of good and bad players become, where players like David and Bob who are bad players, are lifted into this zone where they are considered average. Thus the most random assignment of rating happens to be the top of the population bell curve. In other words, The most common rating range, is statistically the most unknown and random place in the distribution of players rating. In essence, rating means nothing. Add the above side-effect with Phase 2's repercussions, and you get a very toxic and cyclical pattern where all players converge toward the most average rating among the entire population...Both bad AND good players.

> @"Vancho.8750" said: > > I seem to remember, looking at the matchmaker code on wiki, that total number of games played is considered as a factor, which was a bit of a 'yikes' moment. > I think I reached the games played range to get my account cursed, and it feels like it is getting worse the more games I play, like the system expects me to carry the game alone. I am the the point where playing side node build is no longer an option since my team will always fold teamfights and skirmishes without my help, even if they outnumber the enemy. The majority of my games are kitten show, where I keep thinking that I should have taken this build or that build , but then we will be missing the one im running and at that moment the enemy team has pinpointed me as a threat. > The whole thing is mentally exhausting at this point and feels like pissing against the wind most of the time. Yes, Total Number of games, as well as your rank number (rabbit - dragon rank in levels), dishonor, guild tag, and a few other parameters are in there, to not evaluate the players in your match (That's what MMR is for) it's to decide which TEAM you are gonna play on in that match. There is a lot of useful information on the matchmaking wiki that players should be informed about. Vancho, to understand why what's happening to you isn't you being crazy, but a statistical eventuality, just check out the example below. The Matchmaker works in two phases, Phase 1 and Phase 2. Phase 1 decides out of the hundred or so players currently in que, which 10 are going to be in a match. It decides this looking at MMR for all these players, and then creates hypothetical team configurations to create a potential match (this is called phase 2) In Phase 2, it uses a list of parameters to determine which team players belong on and when it searches all possibilities it can make, it settles on the best one, sets it aside, and when the server pings the matchmaker the matchmaker gets a green light to initiate a match. So in Phase 2, what's happening here, is that the matchmaker is giving you a score based on a set of parameters that try to additionally locate your skill level. So the scoring is basically like taking a test. Imagine that this test looks something like this... MMR = 40% of the test Profession = 20% of the test Rank = 20% of the test Games played = 10% of the test Dishonor = 10% of the test The above is an oversimplification of what the matchmaker is doing, but its essentially guessing what your skill level is based on the above parameters and comparing it to another player that it has selected in the matchmaker. The higher you score, the more the matchmaker believes you are a better player in comparison to a player with a lower score. Actual Code >!  Now Vancho, think about this for a moment. Let's just say you played 8000 games, and are level 400 dragon, and you are in gold 2. The Matchmaker will first attempt to find players in gold2 rating range. When it enters phase 2, where it has already chosen 9 players with a very close mmr, if you happen to have the most games played, and the highest level among the players it found a match for, it will thus score you the highest in phase 2. In the interest of self efficiency, the matchmaker will always TRY to find the AVERAGE in order to build a balanced game. Thus, you will ALWAYS be paired with the player with the lowest score, and you will always be against the players whos scores are more balanced than yours...because your score makes you an outlier among the players it has selected. If the average number of games played in gold 2 is 500, and average rank level is dragon (level 80), then in nearly every match you play while in gold 2, you will always be considered the outlier, and you will always have to work much harder just to get out of that range, in which these are the average numbers of games played across the matchmakers choice it made from phase 1.

> @"DoomNexus.5324" said: Just to abridge what you said, how the matchmaker works for a single player, is the same as how it works for duo players, by just making the duo be treated as a single player in the eyes of the matchmaker (By averaging their MMR) They have the code here on the wiki : https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm The code is written by the dev who designed it. Lots of interesting pieces of information for people who can read and understand the code. The MMR is only half of the process in terms of matchmaking, the other half, being which team the matchmaker decides to put you on. Using both it can evaluate what team a player should be on. If one were to ask me, mathematically it doesn't make sense to even have a system like this in place for a multiplayer game mode. The system it's based on (Glicko) was designed for 1 vs 1 player chess games, where it makes sense because no other person can statistically change your rating. However in a multiplayer setting, your rating is essentially as good as the average rating of your team, and where the win condition is simply to win or lose, means MMR which is supposed to be "defined" by player skill is not defined by your actual skill level, but rather your teams average chance to win or lose a game. That to me is the huge problem with the system as a whole, and also why we see such DRASTIC player skill level differences from player to play in g1-g3, where statistically is supposed to be the top of the populations bell curve for skill level, and yet brand new players and veterans are placed there. I could go on in depth about why the above is a terrible system with some hardcore math's but I've lost my enthusiasm for trying to show it to others. It's just a downhill battle and nothing ever seems to change so why bother u know what i mean.

Wanna know why no one has provided a video yet? Cause i've been deleting every single thief i've come across this past week, so the only footage anyone can have so far is being insta-eliminated by hilarious 4-8k reaper autos.

> @"phokus.8934" said: > Simply put you don’t know how Glicko-2 scores nor how the GW2 matchmaker works. You want there to be something hidden behind it because you and countless others get terrible games. You’re trying to find something that isn’t there. And refer to the MMR wiki as that explains everything in detail. > You mean refer people to the source where it it explains that what Ryo said is essentially true and that you are wrong? lmao Did you even read or understand the code in the wiki? The code in the wiki literally explains how it uses a hidden scoring process to evaluate what team people end up on in the matchmaker.

> @"Filip.7463" said: > I wont read all of this but number of matches played and pvp level doesnt matter for matchmaking. Wow. The delusion is real. This is how the matchmaker works, ranking level and number of matches are involved when assorting the teams in the matchmaking process. Confirmed by the PVP Matchmaking Systems Dev himself. He was the one who also wrote the wiki page. Source - Justin O'Dell Dev Post https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/finding-the-perfect-match/ https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm

@"Ryo.5824" I did a lot of research on the matchmaker a while back. I will explain how it works, and then i will explain the consequences of how the matchmaker works leads to statistcal anomalies that describe behavior that you experience in matches. **How The Matchmaker Works** The first thing to understand is that there are a number of individual component parts that make up the matchmaking system. In the code they are described a bit differently, but the best way to think about it is imagining that each component is like a little machine that organizes information. These three machines are called the following : The Server The Matchmaker The Pool When a person hits the que button, a player enters the que. This que i will be referring to as "The pool" in which all players that are currently in the que are inside. The matchmaker is filing through the players in this pool, organizing potential sets of teams for matches. Every 30 seconds, the server pings the matchmaker, to initiate a match. If the matchmaker is not ready, by not having assorted a team of players it deems suitable to create a match, it will return an answer to the server (The answer in this case being that the matchmaker wasn't ready.) So the server will continue to wait every 30 seconds, reminding the matchmaker that it has a job to do. Meanwhile, the Matchmaker is searching in the pool for 10 players to create a match. This search is done by rating and is called "Phase 1." After the matchmaker finds 10 players within an acceptable range of rating for a match, it will enter "Phase 2" which organizes those 10 players into teams based on a number of parameters. These parameters include rating, *rank, *games played, party size, profession, and *dishonor. Once the Matchmaker has organized the teams in what it believes to be satisfactory (in which the matchmaker believes that each side has a fairly balanced distribution from the parameters above in both phase 1 and phase 2), The matchmaker will keep those players in a proverbial "basket", for when the server is ready to ping the matchmaker. The matchmaker can continue the above two phases for the players in this basket if it finds more suitable players in the pool. Anyway, the server pings the matchmaker, and the matchmaker gives the green light on all the players that are in the "basket," Anyone still in the pool and not in a "basket" will remain in que until those players find a suitable match by the matchmaker. **How Matchmaking Creates Statistical Anomalies** So perhaps you've already noticed how rank (rabbit-dragon), the number of games you've played in your account history, and dishonor can effect how the matchmaker places you on teams. This is enough to describe at least some of the statistical anomalies in the matchmaker, and it makes sense as to why we observe behavior where it would seem that player skill is drastically different from player to player in the same match. For now let's just ignore rating, and just focus on these parameters. Let's give an example that highlights one of these anomalies. Let's say you que into a pool of 9 other players. Out of the 9 players in que, you have the most rank (level 300 dragon) and the most games played in your account history (6000 games). Because the matchmaker first organizes players by RATING, you will automatically fall into this group of 9 players. So that means that if the matchmaker decides you belong on Team A because of those parameters in phase 2, then there will be almost no other configuration of players in which you are on a different team with different players, because the matchmaker will strive to make a balanced match. That means if you have the most, it WILL put you with a player that also has the least, because as someone that has the most, you are an outlier and outliers are balanced by this system by just giving you players with lowest value parameters. Notice how profession also plays into Phase 2. You could have THE LEAST rank and the LEAST games played on your account, and by simply chosing a certain profession before que, you might end up on the team in which you are grouped with players with the least value parameters, because the outlier that was supposed to balance out your team, is playing the same profession as you, and therefor they are placed on the other team. Now, this is just the anomolies that are caused on a micro-scopic level based on phase 2 of the matchmaker. This is a problem, but there is a more macroscopic anomoly that is much more sinister. It deals with how rating is essentially worthless in the context of the system, because of how anomolies end up shifting the real values of rating into more and more random values. To explain, let's propose a hypothetical matchmaking scenario. Player Alice, Bob, Charlie and David exist and for this example lets say that... 1. Alice is a good player (As good as Charlie) 2. Bob is a bad player 3. Charlie is a good player (As good as Alice) 4. David is a bad player Now, they all end up in a match together. Alice is on Bob's team (A), and Charlie is on David's team (B). At the end of the game, Team A wins, and so Alice and Bob are rewarded. where as Charlie and David are punished. In this case, we can say that the Matchmaker treats Alice and Bob as being better players then Charlie and David. The 2nd match comes along, and this time, Alice and David are on team A, while Bob and Charlie are on team B. Team A wins, and so Alice and David are rewarded, while Bob and Charlie are punished and we can say that for this game, the matchmaker treats Alice and David as better players then Bob and Charlie. If we take a look at how these two matches add together we can deduce the following based on the matchmakers decision. Alice is the best player Bob is an average player David is an average player Charlie is the worst player So do you see the problem with the above deduction? Charlie is judged by the matchmaker as being the worst player, while Bob and David, who are supposed to be worse than Charlie, are labeled as better players than Charlie. So if you drag out this exercise on the order of many iterations, you will find that, the more games that are played, the more randomly distributed the allocation of good and bad players become, where players like David and Bob who are bad players, are lifted into this zone where they are considered average. Thus the most random assignment of rating happens to be the top of a bell curve. In other words, The most common rating range, is statistically the most unknown and random place in the distribution of players rating. In essence, rating means nothing, because in a setting where the win condition is based on the performance of others, your rating is essentially as good as the average rating of the team that you are on. Remember, the matchmaker is BASED on rating. If rating is meaningless, then how can a match possibly be balanced, if the number it's based on can't accurately be indicative of player skill? In conclusion, Ryo, you are correct that there are hidden variables that determine your place in the matchmaker. Though they aren't exactly how you describe, they are indeed similar, but with no malicious intent. It's just the result of statistical anomalies that end up cascading into large scale, and long term issues with the matchmaker.

> @"Dantheman.3589" said: > > @"UNOwen.7132" said: > > Support and healer are not the same thing. You can be a support without healing. Its about your role in the game. And thieves role is that of a support. > > No, no thief cannot support with out healing, mind you rezzing is also healing. Supports that support without healing do it via damage mitigation which thief does not do. UNO is correct here. Support literally just means to support someone else to amplify their performance. Typical +1 thief falls into that category, but it's given a special name, which is a +1 roamer. A Firebrand can +1 someone, but it's a different kind of support. When we talk Linguistics, people will automatically assume that when you say "+1 me", they mean "send in a DPS to kill this guy" and not "i need a healer." +1 also isn't exclusive to just thief, it implies for someone to literally come to add another person to a fight. You can ask for a +1, during a 2v1, to make it a 2v2. Doesn't have to be a thief either.

@"Obtena.7952" Here let me explain the calculation like this. There are two versions of Obtena. There is You, the "real Obtena", and then there is the 100% efficacy version of you, "the Perfect Obtena". Both Obtena's play the same build, but the perfect Obtena version of you plays the build absolutely perfectly in the most ideal conditions imaginable. The real Obtena plays the build at some fraction of Perfect Obtena's performance. This fraction is expressed as a percentage, and is called The Efficacy to which you are playing the build in comparison to Perfect Obtena.  The point in the exercise is to understand how to play as well as the perfect version of you. If perfect version of you can do X Y Z you want to try to figure out how to better and better meet those conditions of X Y and Z. The caveat is that you will NEVER play as perfect as perfect Obtena. It's is impossible to do because Perfect Obtena is perfect in every way imaginable. The understanding here, is that we can calculate and figure out how to play like perfect Obtena by adding up values that are the absolute limits of abilities on her build, and we try to evaluate those values by assuming they are used perfectly...which means used on cooldown, and are never under-utilized etc. When we go into the field, we evaluate our efficacy (as best as we can), and try to get closer and closer to 100%, even though we can't actually reach 100%.

> @"Obtena.7952" said: > I'm not asking you the accuracy of the individual bits of healing you are doing. I'm asking you the accuracy of the total healing potential ... those things you presented in the posts earlier on. For instance you have a post showing a calculated total healing potential for Druid ... 12,148,097 - 13,948,097. What's the actual ingame result with that build? Maybe your intent had nothing to do with showing heals over time for a specific build and just individual skills? The in game result is called the efficacy. The efficacy is a percentage to which you are utilizing the builds potential. This is outlined in the original post as to why it exists, and why its essential to use because otherwise you are just playing with numbers in a void. If the druid build has a potential to heal for 12 million to 13 million, (4 million of which comes from actual healing with green numbers, while the remaining 8 million comes from upkeeping protection permanently) Then after an encounter you count up all the healing you did using the information that you have available to you and you see what percentage of that healing you did in the fight. There are a number of ways to assess finding out protections mitigation potential, but the most accurate way, is to count up all the applications of the boon by using the duration. If the duration of the fight was 3 minutes, that means if it was perma'd180 seconds of the boon was applied to each player, For 10 characters that's 1800 concurrent seconds of protection. So the number in ARCDPS will show some number from 0 seconds to 1800 seconds of protection (per player it would be some number between 0s - 180s,) and if protections value is evaluated at mitigating 5000 (where if the typical health is 15,000, then an attack that strikes you at or above 15,000 would have killed you, thus making the range of damage range from 0 - 15,000. we take 33% of that maximum to get 5000), then that is 9 million maximum healing in the form of mitigation. The above potential means that in order to get close to this number the player needs to A ) Mitigate attacks of 15,000 per second damage always with protection. B ) Maintain Protection at all times. So the efficacy for protection in this build here, is the ability to meet the above 2 conditions, which in practice is impossible to do. You can get close...but you can never get 100% efficacy, because you will never always mitigate 15,000 damage per second (It will always range from 0 to 15,000 meaning that on average, it will be some value sitting around 7500, and lower and higher depending on the fight). An argument here could be that the mitigation should be taken AFTER the attack rather than before, which pushes the potential higher ( again if evaluating, player health at 15,000, 21,000 damage would be the highest attack you could take before protection comes in to reduce that damage down to 15,000 which is a number between the range of 0 and typical player health.) That's up for debate, but it only means that the potential for protection would be even higher then the number I had originally given it. We could debate this that's no issue and really would be a more interesting question to discuss rather than me explaining how to do the method 100 times. Now back to the concept, In most cases, the efficacy is always going to be a significant fraction less then the potential. The purpose of the calculation is to try and better meet the above conditions by pushing your efficacy up...and that can be done in a variety of ways based on the information you gleam from the calculation. That's all it's meant to do...give you a value to compare your performance to so you can make better and better decisions about things. Rather then the typical way players compare values (which is comparing HPS numbers to other players using different builds) you are just comparing your build to the same build used at 100% efficacy. > The relevant question for any calculation is how accurate it is to the ACTUAL value. If it's not close, it has no predictive value. So ... if you calculate heal "x" is 1500 HPS ... and in game it's ... not ... then the question is how close is it. I'm just looking for the value being presented in the thread because I do refer people to info threads and bookmark them. Calculations are great if they are accurate ... because then you don't NEED to make the build and see what the heals are yourself. You can calculate and have confidence you know what will happen. So your asking essentially how accurate did I research to find out the numbers... well that's what independent confirmation is for. If for example I'm wrong about Druid's protections theoretical maximum value, someone may come along, show the value of protection is some other number, and then we either agree or disagree, usually the outcome is a better method to determine that value. Now I go and I show the math in the spoiler tags, usually along with cliff notes to describe how the calculation was made, so that one can independently verify that number by going in and doing the calculation themselves to confirm that number is an accurate number. Aside from that, the method is designed to never be able to reach the theoretical maximum anyway. If you can reach and go above the maximum (100% efficacy) it means the math is wrong. So if you can heal in practice for 14 million healing on druid using that meta build, when the theoretical limit is 13.9 million, then either the claim is wrong or the calculation is wrong. That's really the entire point of having a theoretical limit and comparing it to the efficacy to which one reaches that limit. Lastly, i never came here to actually do the calculations myself. I just wanted to provide others with THE METHOD to do the calculation, so that THEY can do the calculation themselves. I was basically just forced to do the calculation because others here demanded I do so...which I'm fine with doing, but that's not why I'm here in the first place. I'm also not infallible, I make mistakes on calculations and I correct those mistakes if I find them.

> @"Obtena.7952" said: > OK ... but none of that addresses my question to you. If you can't show your calculation is accurate based on what's really happening in the game ... you haven't actually shown the thing you claim. I must be failing to understand your question at all. I keep repeating the accuracy of everything. look let's go back to the above example for Wrath. Wrath hits me for 1153, 772, 748, 748 and 748 damage in the above example. In theory, the next hit from wrath (or any skill for that matter) can range from 0 to infinity. Course, why should you believe that the next wrath hit should hit you for infinity rather than some value that actually occurs...in order to understand why you are less likely to be hit with a wrath that crits your for infinity damage, you need to do a little math, which I've already explained a hundred times now. So what you do is you normalize to firstly get rid of infinity since it's invalidated anyway by player health- So now in theory the next hit from wrath can range from 0 to (YourTypicalHealth) which we will say is 11645. That above is the range for the damage that wrath could ever possibly do to me. I can assume that whatever damage I mitigate from this skill could in theory fall between this number and that's where the accuracy stops for the calculation...BUT we can go further. You can determine a tighter accuracy by looking at what the enemy can do. If you do the math and find out how much damage Wrath can do on the enemies build, then you can further squash that range between the range of that number. Let's just say for now that Wrath can do some number between 200 and 1500 damage...don't ask me to go look that up because I don't have the time right now...but the point is that you can go and LOOK and do the math to determine the amount of damage that Wrath could ever possibly do and use that range to further compress the accuracy. So now when you block an attack, if that attack is Wrath, then you can identify that it will block some number between 200 and 1500 (or whatever it is) The method I use mostly here just abridges the above step, where instead of narrowing down enemy skills to components (which you can in fact do), it just takes the damage you could take from any hit from the encounter as an average of all hits that you took. So if I'm hit for X Y and Z from the fight, and i block A B and C, then you just take the damage that you took from all sources, normalize any hits that are above your level of health, and divide by the number of times you were hit. You already know that number will fall between some number that ranges between zero and your health because of normalization, so the number will always give you back some value between that range. The average of that number is what you can expect a block or dodge to mitigate on average based on the encounter. >You're claiming you calculated healing potential to debunk a myth you can't calculate it ... but to debunk that myth, you have show that calculation has SOME level of accuracy ... seems to me the reasonable thing to do here is to actually MEASURE the healing potential of whatever scenario you chose to make your assignments to non-measurable mitigation effects. Okay instead of asking me this question that i keep answering over and over again, let me ask YOU a question, then i can at least correct your responses. Look at this picture  You are hit 6 times in this picture by a legendary Defender. 4 of the hits are absorbed and 2 of the 6 hits so far has done 63,752 damage. What do you think, using the magical powers of deduction do you believe is going to be the damage that you absorbed is?

> @"Obtena.7952" said: > The accuracy of your calculation is the amount your calculated values relates to the actual values. Yes. Because all hits that occur only MATTER when they do damage within the range of your health how much more accurate can you get really? Fact, when you are hit for more then the health of your HP, you will go to downstate because you become invulnerable upon death, thus blocking all additional damage that comes to values above your HP. In the combat log, if you took a million damage in a single hit, it registers in the combat log as taking 1,000,000 damage but you only take the amount of damage equal to your health anyway. So the calculated MAXIMUM potential value is going to range between 0 and the typical player health. The combat log is going to show you exactly what happened to you...but it doesn't ACTUALLY matter that you took a million or only took 20,000. This is why you normalize. And also, you can measure damage mitigation because the combat log does give you enough information to tell you what you mitigated. You literately can backtrack everything you blocked, evaded or mitigated. So long as the mechanic has a name, you can find it, evaluate how much damage it does or can do and then add that up using Nemesis's method. Your literally being irrational to think you can't backtrack to find realistic in field values for mitigation. But if you want to continue thinking dodges have infinite value go head...i won't stop you. Example:  Guardian's Wrath hits me 9 times. i evaded the attack once ,blocked it 3 times, and was hit by it 5 times. In total, Wrath hits me for 4,169. (1153+772+748+748+748 = 4169) The average damage that my block and evade has in value is this number divided by 5. which means the healing value of my block and evade in this encounter is on average 833.8 healing. You understand? Throw in an attack that hits me for 150,000 damage that I also happen to block. the average unnormalized damage that i took would be 1153+772+748+748+748+150,000 = 154,169 and divide by 6 attacks to get an average. Therefore according to YOU, on average I mitigated/healed 25,694 , even though my health is only 11,645.  so what happens to the remaining 14 thousand damage per attack? Does it just go POOF and fly away into my inflated value for the damage I just mitigated? Or do we actually evaluate it where it matters, which is at the boundary of player health? who cares if i blocked an attack for one billion damage or 12,000 damage...it literally does not matter how much i took if everything after 11,645 puts me into downstate. Notice below after attacking a legendary defender. I'm hit for over 120,000ish damage even though i only have 19,000 health (and 3x downstate health for total of 72,000 Health)  So tell me... i took 120,000ish damage when I only had 72,000 Health (which includes downstate health). Do you really think I should include an extra 50,000 damage that literally does not matter and exists only to inflate the numbers beyond any meaningfully accurate measurement. Again you are being irrational if you don't think you can measure mitigation in a meaningful way, and believe that the value of blocks and dodges should be evaluated at infinity rather than being normalized, which any mathematician will tell you is how you would evaluate this kind of data. The above point i'm trying to make here also supports how using inflated numbers can give you values that are actually UNREALISTIC through measurement of something by biasing the measurement. That is again the whole point of what Nemesis set out to disprove. Edit: made a small mistake just fixed.

> @"Obtena.7952" said: > As for quantum limitations on measurement accuracy ... the changes in times and energies involved with the measurement of DPS videos and Golem Kills will result in NOTHING near that limit ... so you can file that in the "_I read something on Google about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle one time_" bin. lol. oh of course you would say something like that. GUESS i have to explain this one too since you clearly don't understand why measurement is always described as an average within a range. It's an axiom in mathematics about measurement called "The measurement problem," and it has 3 axioms, only 1 of which are relevant to non-physics 1) In order to measure anything to 100% precision, the experiment must be done an infinite number of times, infinitely often. This rule here isn't a physics thing...this is an axiom in statistics about experiment and receiving results from doing a measurement. Not something you can just "google and throw in the trash bin." This is extremely important when talking about making ANY measurement of any kind. When we talk about DPS video's and Golem kills, no matter how insignificant the margin of error, there will always be a margin of error. Nemesis clearly talks about this in a video which you clearly did not watch and if you actually knew what he was really about, you wouldn't be discounting what he said because what he said applies to more than just weapon damage ranges...It's boss armor, it's boss mechanics, its player behaviour...those things are not insignificant at all...and frankly neither is the range in DPS weapons...the entire point is that no matter what you do in any and all measurement, the value you get will ALWAYS be some AVERAGE within an ACCEPTABLE Range... > Except I'm not questioning the accuracy of a measurement here ... we are talking about a _calculation_ and the question at hand is how accurate that calculation is based on the collective experience and history of the game. I'm proposing it can't be accurate be because of numerous factors, one of them being the variable nature of the non-measurable damage mitigations that you have simply assigned some value to. > I mean, even if you want to assign a value to increase your accuracy, what scenario have you LIMITED your calculation to for that value to be at all relevant? Again you don't seem to understand what is being said cause i keep having to repeat it. You want to know how accurate the calculation is...the accuracy is literally that range of 0 to 20,000. Hopefully you haven't forgotten why I'm saying 20,000? (Please don't make me repeat myself a hundred times.) 20,000 is just the typical health of the player, where any hit above 20,000 would have otherwise killed that player. the number you will mitigate an attack for will be between 0 and 20,000 because anything above 20,000 is the same as just being hit by something that does 20,000...because in both scenarios you would die. [Therefor you NORMALIZE numbers above 20,000 to a range of 0 to 20,000. This is a very basic and essential mathematical exercise in order to remove infinities. Talk trash about google all you want, but you need to look this up if you don't understand how to do this.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_(statistics)) Again...the amount of damage you will mitigate will fall as some number between 0 and 20,000. The average of that range is just the MEDIAN number. If you have a data set for measurement, you would use those numbers in the dataset and use the mean. All it tells you is ON AVERAGE how much you can EXPECT the maximum damage to be, when you mitigate an attack for...it doesn't say that dodge is "always worth 10k healing" it says it's worth some healing value between 0 - 20,000, and on average, that value is 10,000. You need to set your thinking cap forward and learn how to evaluate information so that you can ask better questions, cause now I'm just getting tired of repeating myself over and over the same things. > The people calculating DPS to push meta were wrong 8 years ago. That was a result of TOO many unconsidered factors that had a significant impact on the practical DPS values from real ingame play vs. the theoretical ones they calculated. Why do you think this calculation for healing potential is any different? My suspicion relating non-measurable mitigation values to player skill is just ONE of those factors. The additional factors are the same ones that made the DPS calculations not just inaccurate ... but plain wrong. > I'm not gonna talk bout this. Do you really think i'm some meta pusher when all i talk about on the forum is build diversity? Come on now...

> @"Obtena.7952" said: > Again ... 'giving' something a value isn't NOT a measurement, so no matter how you justify it, no calculation is going to account for the damage mitigation differences account from player behaviour. That's important because that consideration is related to the suspicion I have that higher skilled players are much less reliant on heals than lower skilled ones. You can't just gloss over that... Your suspicion is not relevant here either. Nor is your conclusion that dodging will always be the most optimal mechanic for all situations because it's not true... About measurement, you need to understand something very basic here which is common scientific knowledge. NOTHING not even in physics can ever be accurately measured courtesy of quantum mechanics (not even just QM, its a mathematical Axiom). You will never have exact values in the real world, nor would you have exact values in the game...because the game has by virtue of it's design has variables built into it's very fabric that you simply can not get around. This is another thing Nemesis points out btw...Ever notice the Damage range on a weapon being 1099-1199? That is CEMENTED as a range for all DPS calculations and you can NEVER get an exact DPS value for every encounter, even if all conditions are ideally met and all things are in a perfectly controlled environment. The game will ALWAYS give you a RANGE at which your DPS will fluctuate by virtue of the above, and therefor all DPS calculations are just AVERAGES between RANGES. The range for evaluating damage mitigation is no different than the range that a DPS weapon can give you...It's just that Damage is shown to you in a combat log where as mitigation is not...therefor you can not give yourself anything more than an educated guess about how much it is mitigating. Ill say it like this... a non educated guess would be assuming, that protection gives you a near infinite amount of damage reduction because in theory if you took for example, 33 billion damage in one second, protection would mitigate 10 billion damage. This statement is TRUE...but it is NOT PRACTICAL because you would have died 22.99998 billion damage ago. It would be ridiculous to assume that protection or any other damage mitigation for that matter, is the best thing in the game due to having theoretically no upper limit on its mitigation in theory and, that saying otherwise is tantamount to denial of any educated guess on how much it could be ACTUALLY mitigating. Sound familiar...It's Nemesis signature slogan "ACTUAL DPS VALUES." The purpose of the average's is to give you a more practical value in the form of an average (derived from a range) that helps you access a MORE ACCURATE value in practice. If you asked me you should go back and watch Nemesis's video's cause A ) you either haven't or... B ) You don't understand what he really did or how important it was.

> @"Obtena.7952" said: > "Giving it an average" is now a measurement? The average is the AVERAGE POTENTIAL, which is a theoretical potential for which dodging will mitigate over the course of some arbitrary amount of time, and this potential is and can only be expressed as an average. This means that if one WERE to be playing at 100% efficacy over any period of time, they would mitigate on average the median number of the hits you would take during an engagement. The average potential (10,000 from the previous example) is what CAN be measured, where as the efficacy can only be estimated, but will always be some number lower than the theoretical maximum potential (0 - 20,000 from the previous example). The efficacy CAN actually be practically measured (using the same technique laid out by Nemesis) but it requires knowing what the enemy does, and how much damage it would have done if you otherwise wouldn't have dodged. For example, Let's say you were to dodge every time off cooldown, meaning every 10 seconds you dodge. Let's say now that you were to fight a boss that does some arbitrary number of attacks during an 180 second long engagement. In this fight you've dodged 18 times. If the boss did 100,000 damage by the end when you never dodge, then on average, you took approx~ 550 damage per second. Dodging 18 times means you will ON AVERAGE dodge approx 10,000 damage over the course of 180 seconds (550 x 18 dodges). If the average theoretical maximum of mitigation from dodging is the median number mentioned before (10,000 damage per second) then your efficacy to which you are utilizing your dodges in this fight is 5.5% of the average potential. Gaining higher efficacy in the above scenario, means dodging attacks that do the most damage. But that number will always range between 0 and 20,000. make sense? > This is the SAME approach that people were using to push optimal play with DPS before it was being measured ... and it was proven inaccurate by people like Nemesis when they ACTUALLY measured it. No it's definitely not the same. The entire point of the exercise follows the philosophy laid out by Nemesis. You extrapolate a theoretical maximum number (The potential), and you go and you see how well you meet that number in the field (The efficacy). The potential because it is the theoretical maximum is the upper limit to how much you could do in perfectly ideal conditions, and the efficacy at which you play your build will ALWAYS be a fraction of that number. This is how Nemesis makes his builds...by creating builds that can attain high efficacy during engagements where you aren't in the most ideal situations...

> @"Obtena.7952" said: > No correction needed ... I'm talking when NO one was measuring it all. Again no. People measured it this way back then. The measurement itself was BIASED. He identified those biases because those people were missing how to analyze essential information about DPS which is damage PER second. You can manipulate the DAMAGE side of the equation by manipulating the TIME it takes to do that damage. > What I said isn't invalidated by any of this though ... no agreeable calculation can be made for damage mitigation because there are damage mitigating elements that are dependent on the person playing, Is this not exactly what I've said and the opposite of what you were saying earlier? You said dodging is "the best" without needing to measure it, and I said that you can by giving it an average that brings it out of the realm of the unrealistic (dodging infinite amounts of damage) to realistic dodging as an average of the amount you will face in an encounter. Someone already commented that dodging is sometimes omitted in favor of just healing through it...that's information based on practical behavior. You don't know if what you will dodge will always kill you, nor can you dodge every single ability to maximum efficiency. If a boss does an attack that does 7k, then according to you, one would dodge this 7k damage, when it is perfectly plausible to just heal through this damage. In other instances, where an attack does 25k damage, healing through it becomes implausible and dodging becomes the most optimal strategy. Your assumption is that dodging in either case is the most optimal strategy, which is not true, just because it can mitigate a potentially infinite number does not mean it always will.

> @"Obtena.7952" said: > Nemesis' real contribution was that he actually MEASURED dps output, not calculated it uhh no...let me correct you. Back then, all DPS was measured that way because DPS meters didn't exist. The difference with what he did, was HOW he analyzed the information, and expose how the mathematics can be skewed... which was the following: 1) The shorter the engagement, the more burst builds gain an advantage in DPS meters. If you do a burst sequence that does 100,000 in 3 seconds, and then nothing else for 30 seconds, then if the fight lasts for 9 seconds, the Damage would read 11,111 Damage However if the engagement lasted 30 seconds, then the Damage would read 3,333 Damage. This was the problem with people who were just using pure damage per second....purposefully skewing the time portion of the equation by using engagements smaller then the time it took for those burst sequences to even refresh, to artificially boost the DPS number. This is why he makes a distinction between SUSTAINED DPS and BURST DPS. Shorter engagements favor burst builds, longer engagements favor sustained damage builds. 2) He made a distinction that, there is the THEORETICAL maximum number, and then there is the PRACTICAL application of a theoretical number. This is akin to again, the potential and finding out the efficacy of that potential. Back then people were basing their judgments on the theoretical maximum damage ALONE, and not taking into account that in practice things are never 100% ideal. This is actually what you are saying weren't you...that players will always use dodge to its maximal effectiveness all the time?...See this is not the case and, and Nemesis identified that one needs to make theoretical and practical comparisons in order to make the "ACTUAL REAL DPS NUMBERS." Because otherwise if everything was taken at it's maximal effectiveness, you will get math in a void calculations and unrealistic DPS benchmarks, which is when people see that a class does 40k dps but in 99.99% of the time you will only reach a fraction of that number because those benchmarks were done on golems in prebuff conditions using incredibly short time scales that skews numbers like mentioned in #1. 3) That the calculations you make should be time-scalable (and also reversible). Yes DPS you do in a 3 minute fight should roughly scale with damage you do in a 15 minute fight. The lower the duration of the engagement the less accurate the number will be. The reason for this is that a rotation has specific time slots in order to be used the most often within the period in which all skills come off their cooldowns. So a if the full rotation is 30 seconds, then the DPS should scale to all engagements in segments of 30 seconds. Example - A 30 second fight yields 15k dps. Thus a 3 minute fight should also yield 15k dps. If you were to use an engagement that was 2 minutes and 15 seconds, then you are purposefully omitting 15 seconds of a fight in order to shorten the engagement to artificially boost the number by giving the calculation a 15 second window that would be considered a burst sequence rather than a full rotation. This is why when you select an arbitrary amount of time for an engagement, you need to use the maximum rather than the minimum number of times you could use the skill in that time frame. This is why when you divide for example, 180 seconds by the number of times you can use overload water, you get a fraction. You round DOWN no matter what fraction that number is...otherwise you skew the number to be theoretically higher than what's actually possible. so in 180 seconds, you can at most use Overload Water 8.57 times, which is automatically lowered to 8 times...if you rounded UP to 9, that means you are including a burst sequence to your calculation, which will inflate your HPS. 4) He made a distinction about buffs and how using Alacrity and Quickness boosted numbers by shortening the engagement time, again in favor of burst builds. He made a note to mention that because these buffs could not be perma'd and weren't exactly readily available back then they shouldn't be used to calculate values for fights as if they could be perma'd...in other words if you don't have quickness, alacrity or any other buff anywhere in the fight you should not include it in a calculation otherwise it skews the numbers and gives you unrealistically higher numbers. Everything that is available and there should be calculated...its that simple. 5)About non-measurable things, yes damage mitigation is not measurable. You can only give a range of it's effectivness...but that doesn't mean you can't make an educated guess about how much damage you are mitigating, and Nemesis supports that line of thinking. (Using educated estimates to judge effectiveness of things that can't be measured or reported in the combat log...yes he has a video on this too btw) and that when you do give a theoretical estimate, you should always know that there is a practical application of that theoretical number which you can either meet or not meet based on your performance. Assuming you always perform 100% optimally is what Nemesis would consider to be fake meta because its unrealistic to assume you are ever playing at 100% optimality. Edit: If you read through all of my posts here, you will notice and see that all of my calculations and even the language with which i describe stuff, follow closely these philosophies he outlined many years ago.