Quote of the Day
“Mortals smell better charred.”
-Ash Titan, vCoA2
Daedra got them some mad trash-talk skillz, I’ll give ’em that.
CoA2 was a pledge last Sunday, so I PUG’d it all afternoon and evening through the dungeon finder. I killed Skoria a half-dozen times. And yet I’m still wearing a Skoria hat with Training on it, and I did not get a single useful piece of Burning Spellweave gear, because the entire daedric population of the city was mocking me.
The last run cost me over 25 repair kits and almost four hours of my life, and no, we never did finish. Did I mention two members of the group were in stage 4 vampirism? In a fire dungeon, yeah. Good times. But that actually wasn’t the problem.
Learned a very DPS valuable lesson I can share, so it wasn’t a total wash. I am currently doing ~20K, which is okay. Not great, okay. I keep driving that number up, but currently that’s where I am. In a harder dungeon like vCoA2, where DPS is the key, that’s the bottom end of the effective range.
The raw DPS number isn’t the whole story, however. Usually when you’re fighting a boss there’s some amount of evasion and messing with mechanics, so the number will go down, maybe waaaay down. Knowing that vCoA2 is a tough run, I was wondering if I was pulling my own weight given the lower numbers I was seeing, so I started watching the percent of the group’s damage that I was doing. And because I ran the same dungeon with a lot of different players, I got to see how that percentage plays out in real terms, comparatively.
In a balanced group, when the other 3 players are comparable to me in skill, I do 40-50% of the group’s overall damage. That works out logically – together, the other DPS and I are doing 80-90% of the damage, leaving, at most, 10% each for the healer and tank. That’s solid. When my damage was in that range, the group got through. Maybe not a cakewalk, but easy enough to still be fun, with minimal time wasted.
When grouped with players from my guild that I know are rock stars, my percent of the group damage fell to 25-30% – I just can’t (yet) pump out enough damage to keep up with them. At that point, someone else is carrying the group and I’m… helping. 🙂 But as long as the dungeon is no harder that vCoA2, that’s fine.
Here’s the red flag, though: at my current DPS ability, if my percentage goes up much beyond 50%, it doesn’t mean I got Suddenly Awesome, it means the other DPS is weaker than I am. If we’re in a dungeon where my DPS level is the bottom end of the acceptable range, that’s a recipe for disaster.
I’ve played ESO for almost two years, and I’ve never walked out on a group mid-dungeon before – I bring a hella lot of Stubborn to the table. (Also, I was doing easier dungeons.) But after we spent over an hour and a half on the Ash Titan, replacing two healers along the way, I finally told the group I could not pour any more time or repair kits into a mathematical improbability, wished them well, and ported out.
My friends have repeatedly told me that Stubborn does not solve all woes. I’ve questioned that logic in the past, but maybe they’re on to something. In the time I wasted beating my head against the wall with that group, I could have completed the dungeon 3-5 more times with other people. So the next time I see that I’m doing 60% or more of the group damage, I’m going to stop and ask myself if I’m good enough to get the group through the dungeon. I am not a quitter, but math is math.
In closing:
Damn you, Ash Titan! ::shakes fist at sky::
And to Valkyn Skoria: I am still coming for you, buddy. That light/divines hat will be mine, because that is a problem Stubborn can solve. :p
Letters From Tamriel 