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

[Penthea]

I was thinking about this thread earlier today and I came to the conclusion that an in-game parser should only be available to fully premade groups to minimise abusing it.

Friends and fc mates are less likely to be horrible about it with one another, and DF groups won't be able to use it as a platform to be needlessly nitpicky in content that doesn't require exceptional skill. It would also mean any savage/ex groups would have access to a parser, which is quite frankly the only content where being average is often not good enough so having a parser would actually be useful.

That being said I'm against it altogether for numerous reasons, but in my opinion the above would be the least unpleasant/damaging/annoying way of implementing it.

Anyone who wants to argue that it's necessary in DF content needs to calm the hell down. It really is not.

[Sylvina]

I feel FFXIV is reaching a tipping point where it's in danger of falling to the complete opposite side of the spectrum.

I don't think there's any danger of that given we still have Savage difficulty like O3s and O4s and theres a fight being planned which is supposedly going to be even more difficult.

[RichardButte]

I don't think there's any danger of that given we still have Savage difficulty like O3s and O4s and theres a fight being planned which is supposedly going to be even more difficult.

Even "Super Ultra Mega Savage Fighter 3 Turbo" isn't going to change anything about how the DF functions, though.

It's the mentality that it's okay for a DPS player to be hot garbage at their role that needs to DIAF, and no amount of endgame raiding will change that.

Anyone who wants to argue that it's necessary in DF content needs to calm the hell down. It really is not.

It's not technically necessary in DF content to not try to tank while black-out drunk, but people would SURE appreciate tanks NOT doing that.

A better solution would be to have a ranking that just shows who's doing the most damage from top to bottom without showing actual numbers. As long as you're ahead of the tank and healer, you're fine (and no, the threat meter doesn't do this).

[Shurrikhan]

I like how certain people are completely ignoring this point. I wonder why?

A question for you here. Why do you equate something as simple as just understanding the basics of your class to 'a sport they intend to master'? I don't think people in this thread are even arguing about a 200-300 DPS difference between DPS players. People just want the minimum standard for DPS players to be raised higher than doing the same damage as the freaking tank. Is using AoE skills during large pulls suddenly considered 'elitist'?

In my opinion, forcing 3+ other people to adapt to you because *selfish reasons* is far more inconsiderate than anything else.

This. Admittedly, even that 200 to 300 (some 8% to 5%) difference can be entertaining to try to bridge for players who are used to being engaged with the mechanics able to make those differences. That's not the majority of players, though, and I'm not saying that it should be. But knowing the basics of one's toolkit is the primary reason by which toolkits can be interesting, and by which fights can seem manipulable. Both the discipline and effort required to improve can be reduced; their presence is necessary, but there is no set minimum—it'll vary from person to person based on their awareness, analytical skills, memory, and perhaps most importantly the tools at their disposal.

No, the community has no obligation to improve, so long as they do not care how their own prospects are limited, and feel no invasive guilt at having consciously slowed others down.

Now, you can argue that guilt is unwarranted; as you said, anyone who signs up for a random run is signing up to play with whoever comes, whatever their skills and preferences. But the same applies to the player who would actively neglects any general rhyme or reason to his or her gameplay; s/he has signed up to play with anyone, the majority of which will to greater degree care about good play. Why are the three required to oblige the fourth's preferences, but the fourth free from any obligation to meet the other three mid-way?

That is hypocritical. The idea is inclusiveness, but that shouldn't be taken as a meeting only the lowest common denominator. The highest, even, would be starting point; the goal is the average, the largest possible body of people feeling well engaged (where dependent largely upon inclusion). Yes, there is a troll population. There is also a population for which placing mathematical optimization upon a toolkit makes it somehow feel less inherently interesting. But these parts do not make up the whole of unwilling learners. It is entirely worthwhile, for that very reason among others, for the game's design to try to mitigate that community gap by encouraging engagement at more than a surface/aesthetic level. And the best ways to approach this are through need and access, a more consistent and ever-demanding (within reason) difficulty curve and the tools to convenience and make something enjoyable out of self-improvement.

[Sylvina]

It's not technically necessary in DF content to not try to tank while black-out drunk, but people would SURE appreciate tanks NOT doing that.

Actually while filling in as tank for a raid static today they suggested I get drunk to deal with being nervous lol. I didn't because my doctor said no drinking.

[Kazrah]

Actually while filling in as tank for a raid static today they suggested I get drunk to deal with being nervous lol. I didn't because my doctor said no drinking.

I helped with a study over a decade ago in WoW to understand how drinking affects tanking ability, testing both veteran and noobie tanks in dungeon and raid circumstances and made a point-based system based on various elements of tanking style. The main thing we learned from that study was that the increased levels of apathy caused from drinking (we called them "the f**k-its" at the time) improved tanking ability based on the parameters that were set by up to 30%, with the greatest effect on people who had just picked up tanking and the least effect on seasoned tank players who already had a naturally-developed dose of "the f**k-its".

Of course for all tank players involved, performance went downhill once they got plastered enough to the point of not being able to see their screen.

[SaitoHikari]

I helped with a study over a decade ago in WoW to understand how drinking affects tanking ability, testing both veteran and noobie tanks in dungeon and raid circumstances and made a point-based system based on various elements of tanking style. The main thing we learned from that study was that the increased levels of apathy caused from drinking (we called them "the f**k-its" at the time) improved tanking ability based on the parameters that were set by up to 30%, with the greatest effect on people who had just picked up tanking and the least effect on seasoned tank players who already had a naturally-developed dose of "the f**k-its".

Of course for all tank players involved, performance went downhill once they got plastered enough to the point of not being able to see their screen.

Do you have a link to this study? Because this sounds like it would be a hilarious read.

[Gallus]

OP did it really take you 2 expansions to notice that? xD

[Penthea]

A better solution would be to have a ranking that just shows who's doing the most damage from top to bottom without showing actual numbers. As long as you're ahead of the tank and healer, you're fine (and no, the threat meter doesn't do this).

In my opinion this is not good. It would falsely inflate or deflate egos. Someone could be like "wow I'm first in dps!" but little do they know they're only 1% ahead of both the tank and other dps. Or on the flip side someone being upset that they're always second and they have no clue how close their dps is to whoever is first. Or even someone always being second thinking it's okay for them to be second because they're a dps and they have no idea that their dps is barely over the tank, which is actually bad at high lvl.

Either have a proper parser or have none. Rankings with zero information attached are basically useless because they can too easily give a very false impression of performance.

[Kazrah]

Do you have a link to this study? Because this sounds like it would be a hilarious read.

Sadly it's been so long that I forgot who kept the notes for it. It wasn't that much of an official study either in that it started with making fun of one guy in a raid who brought it up when he kept saying "tanked tanking" and then it just kinda snowballed from there into a "hey, let's see what happens" kind of moment.

I do remember having a dozen people tested though: the three tanks we had in our raid group (it was a BC thing), three people that tanked up to heroic dungeon level on either an alt or offspec, three people that were in the process of leveling their first tank, and three people that had never played a tank before. The guild leader bought and sent every test player their own bottle of tequila for the experiment, and after we did the tests for the three raid tanks, the other testers were given a choice of what tank they wanted to use for the experiment, and the raid tanks agreed to let the other testers borrow their accounts for the experiment (we knew it was ToS violation, but we felt our experiment was more important). Each tank did up to five runs of The Mechanaar, with first run being sober and then taking a shot of tequila at the start of the next run (hence why I said "up to five runs"). With each run, we'd add and subtract points based on things like how they pulled mobs, how much they pulled, how often they asked for CC and so on, tallying final scores at the end of each run.

Since I was too young to drink at that time and I played a DPS spec whose damage output was nearly irrelevant, I was one of the scorekeepers, meaning I basically spent hours following people through the same dungeon as they became progressively more hammered throughout the night, which was nearly as entertaining as it sounds. There were two major takeaways from it: 1) the less experienced you were, the more alcohol improved tanking ability, and 2) one of our raid tanks might've been consistently drunk for every single raid night.