Its Friday and Kaivax over on the US World of Warcraft forums has posted the tenth installment of Ask the Devs. This time the focus is on damage dealing and there are twelve answers for you to digest over the weekend.
A lot of the questions seem to focus on Shaman specs, mainly Enhancement, but theres also stuff for hunters, DKs and . However one of the most interesting answers revolves around that must-have add on, Recount. Before you all shoot off to go and check out the answers, heres what they have to say on the subject of Recount:
Kaivax
Wed dearly love to do this, and its been something weve been working on, off and on for some time. The problem is that increasingly players place a really high and occasionally unhealthy emphasis on meters, and once there is an official Blizzard-supported meter, then that situation is only going to get worse. Anything that isnt portrayed in our meters with a great degree of accuracy is going to be misinterpreted and cause forum drama. For example, its easy for DPS to inflate their meters on some fights by attacking targets that dont matter. How do we handle those situations -- trust players to know the difference? Thats tricky, especially when the community has a penchant for distilling lots of fights down into a single measurement of DPS. As another example, the Restoration druid Tranquility is intended to fill a role similar to Power Word: Barrier or Spirit Link Totem. Yet the druid cooldown is an actual heal, which greatly inflates their meters to the extent that we see a lot of players complaining about how Resto druids are overpowered. Do we not show Tranquility on healing meters?
On the other hand, one benefit of having easy-to-use Blizzard meters would be getting players to focus on their own personal DPS instead of what the best players in the world are capable of. It makes developers cry when we see a good Fury warrior go Arms and do lackluster DPS just because they read that Arms DPS is higher. (Now, if that player just likes Arms or wants to try something different, more power to them.
Also consider that damage and healing meters are valued by a pretty small set of the playing population as a whole. New UI features like the quest and equipment systems we added not so long ago, and even the upcoming Dungeon Journal, would be more widely used overall.
So the short answer is that it would be a very useful tool and we suspect well do it eventually, but we have an enormous responsibility to get it right, and even then it could do bad things to the community as a whole.
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