Just realized something: FFXIV is a terrible DPS player's DREAM come true...

[SaitoHikari]

There's Stone, Sky, Sea for that

Dummy fights are a terrible metric because it only tells you the minimum you need to do, and it doesn't fight back. You won't be weaving in utility skills in SSS for that reason. Plus, it's completely optional, and it's hidden enough that most players aren't even aware it exists.

It's also why using the aggro meter as an indicator of DPS is also a terrible metric due to how differently aggro works for most DPS. BRD and MCH now have two emnity dumps that halve their current emnity, not to mention MCH emnity is also split between themselves and their turret. Same concept for Summoners. And everyone that knows their rotation well enough knows that they MUST use their emnity reducing skills/dumps or else they WILL die.

I dunno, maybe I'm just miffed at the fact that I literally just went through two EX roulettes with co-DPS that was literally doing as much damage as the tank was (and I had literally 3!!! times the damage output because I was actually using multi-target skills in large pulls), and in one run, things were dying at a below average time which caused the healer and tank to assume that the both of us were bad at playing our jobs. Factoring in that our gear wasn't that far from each other, the other DPS really had no excuse besides sheer ignorance.

And that's really what this thread is about in the first place. Good DPS gets zero recognition outside of raids. Parsing was only brought up because it's the only readily accessible tool to measure this. And yet people are afraid to call out bad DPS, because such an act is counterproductive in every way possible - in that doing so basically ADMITS that you're using a parser, and/or that arguing about it ultimately slows down the run even more.

So yes, going back to the original topic, this game really is a bad DPS' dream come true. When something like this is even possible and even bringing it up results in conflict the vast majority of the time, it's an issue that's going to (or already has!) creep into development. What incentive do the developers have to create harder/more varied content when the vast majority of the community is content with the status quo regarding the average player's performance?

At the same time though, I still have to wonder if this is a purely English community problem. You take a quick glance at the Japanese community and notice they have WAY higher savage clear rates AND at the same time, the healer DPS debate isn't nearly as toxic over there as it is on our side of the ocean. Why is that? Because their DPS are expected to perform at a much higher level than ours. My philosophy is that if you're going to main a DPS and take on the burden of the fact that you're going to be sitting in long queue times, you'd better at least understand the basics of your job, because I'd hope you're not sitting in queues for half an hour just to get carried and make things even MORE stressful for the tanks and healers accompanying you.

So there's two topics that people are absolutely tired of hearing about: Healer DPS and bad DPS/parsing. How to kill both with one stone? Start holding the DPS accountable. It doesn't have to be parsing. It's just SOMETHING needs to be designed into the game that gives a clearer indicator on how DPS are performing. Maybe then, it opens a window towards halting the third most annoying topic that gets spammed on these forums - the lack of varied/challenging content. The devs aren't going to break out of this content cycle if the playerbase won't demonstrate that they're ready to move beyond it. The devs, after all, have been repeatedly quoted as saying that they design content while monitoring clear rates - highly implying that if the clear rate doesn't meet their expectations, then they failed somewhere in designing it.