Quote Originally Posted by Nektulos-Tuor View Post
Wrong, it tells you when things hit you. It tells you whats doing more damage to you, it tells you how much damage your rotation produces, it tells you overall healing output (in many games!)

Knowing how much damage is being done to you in fights isn't an advantage? Knowing when stuff hits you (because your pulling from a script! and reading packets!) isn't an advantage?

Sniffing the packets of other players isn't wrong to you?

It is a huge advantage, quit covering your eyes please.
Its not telling you anything your chat log can't tell you or is not already displayed on the screen. And you aren't sniffing other players packets. You aren't hacking other people's pcs. You are only seeing data sent to you. And the only data that you can get from parsers that you can't get from reading your own screen that I'm aware of is individual dot damage since it is lumped together into a single # on screen (same deal with regeneration effects).

How much a monster hits you for? Really? It pops up in bold letters on screen and in chat. When my coil group wipes and we are at all confused, we very, very frequently review chat log to see what damage was dealt to whom and the timestamps with it to figure out what killed us.

Why the tank die? "Oh check at 8:22 guys, bahamut scored a crit auto attack between flare breaths and the adlo effect was listed after so the adlo was just late and an unlucky crit nail in the coffin" Mystery solved! All from you handy dandy chat log. True story. We did this ALL the time during progression.

The only advantage is if it does something beyond just recording log data (using incoming data to trigger a sound to call out moves automagically or other capabilities). The numbers themselves give you zero information not already available except for th aforementioned separation if dots and regeneration effects. Bare bones parsers are just glorified chat log recorders that break the ToS by poking at SE'S property (their files).