This is something I will need a little help with.  I can collect the general ability info from 1-50, but I won't be able to do all 3 styles.  I have a spreadsheet format that I can import with little effort into the MySQL database on the server.  Problem is, I can't see the ability info from all 3 styles (especially considering the amount of play-time I have these days - I'm far from 50...)

If I were to make the spreadsheet template available for download, do we have any level 50 volunteers that are willing to fill out the 15-50 mastery data?

Please be sure to report anything like this that you feel might be inappropriate.  Gold sellers and other spammers are not welcome here.  And thanks to those of you who reported this guy - I appreciate your brining this to my attention. 

~kaji

While this is true, I think things are still a bit off balance.  Caster DPS is more burst oriented than melee ability damage.  Once their energy bar is depleted, it regenerates much slower in-combat than our endurance bar does.  Since solo effectiveness is often used to benchmark a classes usefulness and survivability, it would appear that the offensive fighter gets the shaft.  While we struggle to take down a blue/green 3 dot, casters mow through even 3 dots with little difficulty.  But this comes at a price:  Toe to toe, that caster would not survive the encounter.

To me, it comes down to this:

Offensive Caster Pros:

+ Very high burst DPS
+ Damage can be done at any range
+ Very effective at range while energy pool lasts

Offensive Caster cons:

- DPS not sustainable due to energy regeneration rate.
- Low melee survivability.
- Easy to take agro if hate is not properly managed


Offensive Fighter Pros:

+ Moderate sustained DPS
+ Fast endurance regeneration
+ Moderate survivability
+ Very effective while health pool lasts

Offensive Fighter Cons:

- Damage must be done within melee range
- Low burst DPS

We obviously need a bump in the sustained DPS department.  If casters are doing all their damage in burst, then we need to do ours over time.  As it stands, offensive casters blow us away as long as they can stay out of melee range of their targets.  But as encounters become longer, we should beat them hands down.  We should not be seeing parses where burst DPS wins in all scenarios.

For me personally - I could care less if casters and healers can take out 2 or 3 dot solo fodder faster or more effectively than I can.  I just want to have a meaningful purpose in a group or raid encounter.

I managed to get a hold of leaked patch notes from build 1799, and found a few eye-opening items to say the least...

Vanguard Build 1799 Patch Notes 4/2/2007

GAMEPLAY NOTES

- There has been a significant experience reduction across the adventuring sphere. This will be more greatly noticeable on challenge level 2 and 3 mobs as challenge level 4, 5 and 6 mobs now have an experience bonus.
- Challenge level 4, 5 and 6 mobs have had their difficulty adjusted to reflect initial intent. Proceed with caution
- All in game dungeons now provide an experience bonus. This bonus will be amplified in a full group as long as all members are within range and eligible for adventuring experience.
- Ranged ammo tiers now have a noticeable impact on damage.
- Heroic and better items have been revamped to look… well, heroic and better. We apologize for the previous light saber models, it was an honest mistake.
- Found and fixed the issue that caused you to fall through the world on resurrection. You still may want to put levitate on just in case though.
- Faction wars have been fixed. No really. Honest to god this time.
- Call of Hero and similar spells will now only work when both parties are not in combat. Additionally, you may no longer move once you receive a Call of Hero box until you accept or decline it. We were feeling generous so dungeons are now tagged properly and these spells will work everywhere they should.
- If you have the item “Book of Morfare” in your inventory, it will no longer be there and you should notice you have lost 3 adventuring levels. Thank you for alpha testing this quest.
- Necromancers can now wear plate and start at level 40.
- Prepare for the upcoming Crafting & Diplomacy Double XP Weekend - Further information coming soon
- With ship portals now live and due to teleportation magic going awry the High Council of Telon ordered the temporary teleporters off towards other duties. Visit your local Harbourmaster for ferry departure schedules.
- To increase the quality of our customer support we implemented a feature to evaluate your last petition. Use /gm for further details.


ADVENTURING NOTES
- All Classes
  Invisibility cannot be cast during combat
  Fear does now break when the feared mob is hit so it is more in line with similar crowd control abilities
  New Mob learned abilities added for all classes at levels 25, 35, & 45.
- Disciple and Monk - Hand to Hand fighting now has new combat animations
- Dread Knight, Paladin and Warrior - Fixed issue where armor had faster durability loss than other classes
- Bard - Razor Parts Silk now requires a Dagger equipped and can only be used from behind your target.
- Bard - Run speed components in songs will now drop when fighting or harvesting to equal the restrictions of mounts.
- Bard - Multiple components of the same type will no longer stack in a song, but will stack with the same component when grouped with other bards.
- Blood Mage – Blood Feast does now stack with the same spell from another blood mage
- Cleric - Reduced the amount of melee damage to further the clerics role as a healer
- Disciple - The Astral Wind line now has additional Jin cost
- Disciple - A slight decrease in heal amounts have been made
- Disciple - A slight increase in power costs for heals has also been made
- Disciple - Ability to stack bonds with other disciples has been fixed
- Disciple - There are new endowments waiting to be discovered, disciples rejoice!
- Dread Knight - Torture has its damage slightly decreased
- Dread Knight - Word of Doom recast has been significantly decreased to match the Paladins Dictum of Valus
- Druid - Berries can now be cast directly in other players inventories
- Druid - Solar Flare should now open all finishers
- Druid - Deadly Swarm has its damage slightly decreased
- Druid - Reduced the amount of healing to further the druids role as an offensive spellcaster
- Monk - All melee skills have had their damage moderately decreased
- Monk - Jin will now decay at a faster rate
- Monk - Soaring Leap has its recast increased to 20 seconds
- Necromancer – Abdominations now have stances to further their offensive or defensive abilities
- Paladin – Dictum of Valus has its recast slightly increased
- Psionicist - Time Stop has its duration increased to 10 seconds
- Psionicist - Acumen is now group-only
- Psionicist - Due to high demand Illusions can now be cast on groupmembers
- Ranger - Trueshot has been added to trainers at level 25
- Ranger - Endless Quiver I, II ,III have been added to trainers at level 15, 30 and 45
- Rogue – Flash Powder is now on a 30 second reuse timer
- Shaman – All Tuurgin melee specials now require a spear equipped. Similar changes to Hayatet and Rakkur are in development
- Shaman - Your pets should stop wandering around on their own, especially during combat
- Sorcerer - The duration of Sleep has been decreased to 18 seconds
- Sorcerer - Sleep II and III have been removed
- Warrior - Trampling Charge I-IV have been added to the trainers at level 12, 24, 36 and 48. This skill replaces the formerly removed Leap Attack series.
- Warrior – Warriors mitigation has been slightly increased to reflect their role as the superior defensive fighter

CRAFTING NOTES
- The recipes for Thestran dragonboat, Qualian trireme and Kojan juggernaut can now be aquired. Gossip with some locals for further information
- All crafted daggers now give a 8% greater chance of scoring a critical hit in main hand and 4% in off hand.
- Leatherworker - You can now build slingshots - these are only useable by offensive casters
- Added stone ammunition recipes to Artificer instructors.
- Added wooden wand recipes to Artificer instructors
- Added instrument recipes to Artificer instructors
- Recipes for rare crafting tools are now available from workorders

DIPLOMACY NOTES
- Tier 4 Clothing is now live on Informants
- New Targenors and Ahgrams nobility may be hostile when approached in clothings from opposing houses - be prepared

ITEMS
- All rods and scepters have had their appearances updated and re-tiered


~The Vanguard Team

These are all good suggestions.  I'll play around with the log files to see how much of this can be extracted for other entities.  I know the information is there for the first person, but I'm not sure about the others.  I could probably figure these values as a percentage of the whole, but as you mentioned, it really comes down to the order in which the checks are made in-game.

Well, they don't lie *too much*...  There are still some issues to work out, but with the exception of DoTs, they affect everyone equally.  I find it disturbing that a well-equipped, same-level DK could out-damage a NAKED monk - let alone one with similar level gear.

No 517428174281478 hits in that fight - notice the fight time (30 minutes?), total hits and highest hit.

[/quote]

Sorry, are those commas or periods?  It may be a localized windows thing - but it looked like the DPS was more than 400k.

There is nothing stopping you from comparing your own DPS against any other class in the game, player, pet, or NPC.  You don't even have to be grouped with them, or have their consent.  If you see something interesting in-game, simply get close enough and parse the log file to see where that character comes out - vs yourself, vs their target, vs other players, and so on.

This is actually quite easy to calculate:

Simply add the two "total damage" figures, then the Total Time in Combat ones and finally the Total Hits.

DPS = Total Time / Total Damage
DPH = Total Damage / Total Hits

This should work until I get either a fix from Sigil (unlikely - I'd rather them fix our class than monkey with log file code) or a solution in the parser code (maybe I can group the first names with the "most likely" first name / last name combination or something...)

This looks like the issue where the client logs some un-godly huge damage number.  I'll add a check to reject these entries - as they are clearly wrong.


The short answer is yes - that would be counted.  Since I was interested in comparing different players and NPC's, and you do not see their attack on/off messages, it was clear that a different approach was needed.

Each consecutive attack is logged with a timestamp of when it occurred.  The length of seconds that any given action "takes" is the delta (in seconds) between it and the previous attack.  The problem with this is the last attack in any sequence takes much longer than any other.  Say you finish a mob - the time between that and the next attack could be seconds... minutes....hours...who knows.  So, I use a "maximum attack delay" of 3 seconds to fudge any entry with a duration longer than that amount of time.

While this is not a perfect solution, it does allow me to track a number of things I could not account for given the content of the Vanguard log files - such as NPC DPS, other player DPS, caster DPS (since they do most of their damage out of combat,) etc.

I was thinking about it, but Brad was always against things "touching" the client in his stay at Verant / SoE.  It wouldn't be impossible to do either way - it's just a matter of someone documenting the hooks in the client a bit.  But if it's against the EULA, two-way communication with the game client may not be a good idea.

On the one hand, I understand their position - things like ShowEQ and MacroQuest really cheapened EQ.  But on the other hand, Blizzard took the other stance, and documented a very limited set of hooks to their game client - which makes things like Cosmos possible.  I'm keeping my eye on VGInterface - only time will tell what their actual stance on this will be.

It requires the Microsoft .NET framework to run - it should download itself easily from Windows Update.

Sure, you can copy directly from the output text.  Just select with the mouse and either hit edit -> copy or right-click the text and select copy with the mouse.  Before bugging the devs, I'd like to make sure we have a good idea of what's happening.  Maybe we can collect our findings in a thread before passing them along?


I can probably remove these entries if the damage is just impossibly large.  Any idea what they look like in the log file?  Also, could you send me a screenshot of the output?

For now, the communication is one-way (from the vanguard client to the parser by way of the log file.)  So the only way this could be done is if you were to periodically issue the /who command.  It may be possible to hook into the client and do something two-way - but knowing Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler, it may be against the EULA.  This would be a huge disappointment, since UI mods are so common in other games these days...

Not at all.  Some log parsers will not show other entities' DPS - this one will.  I was merely suggesting that if you were set up for another app that ignores NPC or other players' damage or misses - you might want to enable those for comparison against your own damage.


It shows you all DPS from any source in your vicinity - in other words, you can use it to compare their damage to yours (including NPC's.)  Where are you seeing "Player?"


Sure did - feel free.