Damage Meters Please

Outstanding example of why dps meters are not needed, and actually are bad.

You need raid awareness, on the part of every player. What you do not need is severely dumbed down raid awareness, which is what dps meters generally are and do. Gerbils smashing keys and watching their damage meters is not in the best interests of a raid in my experience.

A raid leader needs more tools, to help fine tune raid performance runs, for sure but that is better done with a parser IMO.

Proper use of meters would have shown you all those things. You use the tool improperly, and then accuse the tool of being deficient. PEBKAC.

Bioware is a Big Boy ... they should be able to do both. As for the Raid Awareness comment I agree but meters are simply a tool in the over all evaluation of your group .... the "NO just NO" group clearly doesn't understand how to use the tool are is probably the type of player the rest of you are complaining about as abusers.

Come on its a tool guys and it should be easily available ... Bioware has admitted that they can track this when they did the balance several patches back .. it they can track it then they should be able to report it.

Don't understand the hate for Damage meters..if you dont like them..nobody will force you to use them ! If your running guild raids without them now fine...but you don't speak for me or others and we would like them..and macros..and addons. Nobody's gonna tell you you cant do what you do now...not gonna kick you for subpar dps in Fp's anymore than your getting kicked now. It's a tool for the hardcore/ raiders to use to make their raiding better for them. As a raisd leader with everyone using a dps meter..you can tell...dps #1 has a dps uptime of 95 %..dps 2 has a dps uptime of 55%..how many deaths..whos using which heals for certain fights..etc...its a tool not only for how much dps you can do.

They have both a positive and negative impact. But generally I think theyre overall helpful. Will they put an ingame one for the raidgroup? who knows, but for now the Realtime parsers out there like MoX do a great job. And unless your GM threatens to kick you, you dont have to use it - if you're afraid of others seeing your dps, or just are principally against it :P

There are third party DPS meters for TOR. I openly refuse to have it open during an operation. As helpful as recount was in wow, more often than not it was abused.

I can remember back when people would constantly post recount meters in party and raid chat. It used to annoy me to no end. I was usually one of the top dps, however it does get tiring when that's all you see.

People become too fixated on DPS meters and it takes the enjoyment out of the game.

Sorry mate, but you sound exactly like that anti-gs crowd back in WotLK.
"Skill > gear, a skilled player in poor gear will do better than the unskilled one in top gear! This means that gs is pure evil and must be banned from the game!"
While they have a point, skill is definitely important, this crowd refuses to consider a fact that, no matter how skilled you are, without a certain gear level you simply won't be able to do enough damage, or heal enough damage, or survive long enough under the boss abilities.
In your post you do the same mistake. You praise the skill and raid awareness, while lesssening the importance of dps/hps provided.
Yeah, a recount-like tool can't tell you if a player is skilled or awared of what's going on. That is not its purpose. The only "tools" which are able to recognize such traits are your own eyes and brain The purpose of a recount-like tool is to track and show the basic performance of a player. Data provided by the tool is by no means the only judging factor, but it's definitely the one which a good raid leader... every player actually should be aware of and take it into consideration, when judging someone's overall performance.
From my experience, the only environment where you can see people constantly posting recount meters in chat, is a PuG. Yeah, it may be annoying at times, but it also has a positive side. In PuGs many players usually don't feel any responsibility, so are used to slack alot and being carried by others. If they know that everyone can see and show their performance to others, they have to put at least some minimum effort into what they do in order to not being kicked for being useless.
In guilds, however, it's considered impolite to constanty show off with meters, so you can hardly see someone ever doing it. If you actually see a "meter person" in a serious guild, you can be sure that he won't last long there.

It's very simple: Damage Meter is a great tool to achieve the following:

- monitor the performance of your raid members (wow, a shocker)
- assess and solve the problems your raiders may have on the basis of data provided by the meter

also

- separate raiders / raid leaders who know how to use this tool correctly from idiots who don't. The latter then are divided into two groups: those who believe damage meter is evil and derives from Satan (aka "good raid leaders that don't need ****") and those who treat it as a prophecy that derives from God.

Knife is also a tool that can be abused. Does that mean you never slice your bread?

Now, it's a completely different thing if it's reasonable to ask Bioware for anything as "complicated" to code as damage meters and expect it to be implemented within 5 years time frame.

Damage meters are like healbot and stuff like that. Sure, it could be a useful perk, but they are hardly needed. People just rely too heavily on them because they either are too lazy to figure out the stuff themselves are not smart enough too.

Everyone is missing one of the biggest negatives of add-ons like recount though. It is not that it gets used wrong and occasionally someone really good suffers as a result or that it is annoying when it is spammed every 5 seconds. The downside is once dps charts come in, then there is no avoiding the concept of fotm builds, automatic go-to class build and rotations. Also, people stop being able to play their character the way they think might be fun cause now it is all about playing it whatever way is deemed the best on paper by complete strangers you will never meet. Take WoW mage class for example. Although there were three specs, in raids there might as well have only been one main one and one secondary one cause the third was not deemed raid worthy.

And once this mentality comes into play, the "give me a challenge or I quit" folks start yelling and the developers start designing encounters that can't be beaten unless the raid is putting out dps and hps that is equivalent to 98%* of the potential of a raid consisting entirely of FoTM classes, as opposed to 80-90%* of that value. Meaning that any and all freedom in playstyle goes completely out the window. Opening up parsers at all will most likely start bending design to this philosophy, but it hasn't become obvious yet, though certain classes and specs are already not welcome on [many] raids because they're "weak".

* - These numbers are for example purposes, not actual numbers.