To people who complain about "elites".

[CookieMonsta]

parsing leaves a trace on their servers and SE has basically stated "they wont go in and look for it if they don't have to, but if they have to, they have to do something about it".

Thats a load of crap, do you even know how parsing works? Hint you can parse without ACT using just a pen, paper and pocket calculator. Trust me, the only way SE can know that kind of information is if ACT literally tells them "I am here!!!" which it doesnt, or if SE installed spywear on my PC (which will be swiftly dealt with by BitDefender)

A few question to help me understand:

What do you consider a below average dps? If we consider 100% being the best DPS, did you really mean it mathematically as a dps doing less than 50% ?

And can an average skilled party complete Zorvan Ex regardless of the time and phases it may take?

The rotations in FFXIV are usually designed that if a person utilizes most of their offensive cooldowns, stack their DoTs and applies their appropriate debuffs on the boss, they should achieve roughly 60-75% of their job's potential at a particular gear level. Typically, the damage improvement from gear is only 20-30% every raid tier. Like going from ilevel 240-270 is iirc 30%.

To go below 50% means you typically are either using gear that is two progression patches old and/or don't perform your rotation properly.

Like is said earlier, the issue with zurvan is people are trying to burst him to 75% in the opening phase of the fight to skip soar. They "guarantee" this by bringing 6 DPS jobs. However, if all the DPS are performing at 50% or lower, the skip will still not happen thus negating the effectiveness of the strat.