Why are low standards for dps acceptable?

[Odett]

Oooooh. Finally, a solid number!

500 DPS is bad, people. So all of you out there are expected to pull at least ... um, 700 is also bad? What is 'good' then? And in what context?

Inquiring minds think this is also a 'spurious statistic', but are willing to be proven wrong.

Context is contingent on item level, if there is AoE or not, collateral damage on ads that don't matter when single-targeting a boss (Faust), off-phases due to mechanics, your job and the type of fight you're dealing with (high SMN DPS in A2) and item level. In a fight like Thordan EX, for example, as an ilv 199 NIN, it's considered decent if you push past 1300 DPS after the first Heavenly Heel. At the end of the fight, your DPS will go down due to off phases, not attacking due to all the mechanics you have to handle, and stacking for certain parts of a fight and losing DPS due to not hitting positionals, so having more than 1000 DPS by the end of the fight is actually not bad, whereas having 1000DPS at the end of the first Heavenly Heel using an ilv199 NIN as an example would mean you have a lot of work to do on your rotation for that fight.

Go over to VA and a boss like Echidna, where the only times you're not hitting something is when it does the stack damage AoE, the mass circle AoE's, and charging up Gehenna, and 700dps is pretty crappy. I could pull around 620 DPS as a lv 50 NIN when Final Coil got Echo. Again, context matters so there is no "solid number", but using the person's example that I quoted, where they were spamming Chaos Thrust as a lv 60 Lancer and somehow being proud that they were SIXTH on the enmity list, I'm pretty sure we can all agree that that is laughable at best.