Parsers make you stupid

[Luciano_Bozzelli]

While I agree that ragging on ANYONE'S damage in faceroll content like A4 normal is idiotic, the best DPS are able to put out good numbers WHILE handling mechanics.

Food for thought.

Food for thought... The better your party handles mechanics raid wide, the better your dps can be... If you moving around saving others people ass, and then they have the nerve to talk about dps numbers that's just disrespectful.

I like to give this example to people... Two blm's in a party, (hell lets call one blm kate, and the other John) John is sacrificing his dps to make sure mechanics are handled losing his enochian and such because Kate's missing mechanics so he's running across the stage to assist and such, then there's the Kate, that doesn't handle mechanics good at all and stands still and just dps, then the whole raid group dies due to Kate missing some mechanics.

Then here goes the dps numbers man... "Kate great job you did 1300, hey John you need to step your dps up bro!!" It happens a lot lol. Dps is what it is, damage per second. You die, you help out, you do something unorthodox for the greater good of the group and your numbers suffer... What the numbers don't show is that you killed that add in 2-3 seconds. Matter fact you killed all your adds hella fast and did your job, but your numbers are low.

I know some instances there are hard dps checks, but what does it matter if a guy's dps is low, but he's stepping it up huge when it counts even helping other people with their adds, and situations. A person's greatness is more than just dps numbers, although like you said though, if he doing all that stuff, and keeping the numbers very high, then oh yeah, your right, he's good, but also if the people around him suck, those numbers will come down as well.

This is even more so with a blm. I had a whm a long time ago that would be in my area, and almost hit me with things like the heat lightning in turn 10. Constantly I was watching how close he was to me, making sure i move out his way, get my distance from him which required me to move a lot, and feel very uncomfortable around him. This affected my dps, when he got replace my dps went up cause i was just more comfortable around the new guy, and didn't worry about him much.

Just like the death syndrome. You know when you working hard to be the best you can be, then a tank dies, or a healer dies. It makes you look up at the hp pools, and try to figure out, are we loosing? Should I die, are we wiping, do we keep going? Another example of how the people around you can really make you great, or make you nervous and average. LOL

Hence, he's right, parsers do make some people stupid.

[Vmage]

I know some instances there are hard dps checks, but what does it matter if a guy's dps is low

as far as ffxiv high level content goes, it matters when you wipe to enrages due to low dps.

i.e. every piece of level 60 8-man content in the game.

a single person pulling 25-50% of their potential dps isn't a big deal outside of savage alex, sometimes even two if the healers and tanks are putting out decent numbers

but if there are enough people doing poor dps, you'll hit hard enrages.. I was tanking A1 normal last week, multiple dps < 500, we wiped to a self destruct a couple times before vote abandon went through.

I've also watched parties fail to meet dps checks in both of the extreme primal fights

...and I've heard about parties wiping to the soft enrages in A3 and A4 due to poor dps (both cascade in A3 and discoid in A4 ramp up over time)

so while you're right, there's probably some places where overall dps isn't a high priority... the current design of throwing enrage mechanics and dps checks at players in every scrap of end-game content doesn't give much wiggle room.

in any of the 'casual' end-game right now (everything but savage) a couple dps pulling 400-500 will cost your group the clear every single time, regardless of how well they handle mechanics... unless your other two dps pick up the slack and put out 1200+

again, not that I'm a fan of this type of encounter design... but every single bismark ex/ravana ex clear party in pf? they benefit from having at least one person running a parser just to identify and replace the weak links

[thunderbreak]

I think they were stupid before using parser...

[KaijinRhada]

The arguments against meters gets more interesting... If they're doing stupid things with a parser, then they probably have the same problem without concerning other mechanics.

[Evangela]

tanks, healers, and ranged DPS should take balls before melee DPS. so I'll let them deal with the balls first. I'll help only when 5-6 balls appear.

splash damage? if it's not a 4 melee DPS party, I don't really worry about it. premade party shouldn't make a 4 melee DPS party from the beginning.

[Hix]

tanks, healers, and ranged DPS should take balls before melee DPS. so I'll let them deal with the balls first. I'll help only when 5-6 balls appear.

splash damage? if it's not a 4 melee DPS party, I don't really worry about it. premade party shouldn't make a 4 melee DPS party from the beginning.

Even if a melee has to take balls, everyone should be able to position themselves so that they don't take splash while the soaker can still stay on the boss.

[Nadirah]

The arguments against meters gets more interesting... If they're doing stupid things with a parser, then they probably have the same problem without concerning other mechanics.

I just think we already have the damn things, no need to incorporate them into the base game.

It's an advanced tool. We don't *need* it. The same exact people that feel they need it will go get it. On a console? No problem. Get someone on pc to help with it.

[Sakuraluna]

Parsers don't make people stupid. They just don't suddenly magically make bad players good.

[Nadirah]

It's how the parser interacts with the log files. From what I hear, SE has no way of knowing if they are being used, because they are not interacting with the log files in such a way to be detectable from the server end. So in short, they can never stop it. Furthermore, they themselves have posted server first clears with high end raiding FC's which clearly show the usage of parsers. SE understands their use as a tool and have commented they wanted to officially sanction 3rd party add-ons starting with Heavensward.

The most commonly used parser isn't a real-time dps meter. It parses a text file after combat is over. It's not even an add-on.

Add-on "parser" that folks are talking about is updated in real-time and serves very little purpose to most people. 20 bucks says 98% of folks with Recount or Skada installed have no idea how to read the graphs.

[KaijinRhada]

My point was more basing mistakes on the fact they added a single element to look at on the screen where you already need to multitask with your eyes. A person shouldn't be spending an encounter with their eyes glued to the meter in the first place, but that isn't the fault of having one, that's the fault of them not paying attention.