An Alternative? to parsers..

[Nedkel]

And about the parser thing, I think none of you have really stopped to think in how many ways it can backfire, and my guess is that many of you would never be able to understand to what point it could unless you had a time machine which you could use to witness in first person how it backfired in other games.

It is not only the community issues. Right now the rotation of most jobs, if not all of them, are player based. What I mean is that there are several things you have to consider: you have to manage and refresh dots, align your abilities with self buffs and party buffs that you need to apply and refresh properly and with the proper timing. One of the effects of these rotations is that they are very fun, at least for me, but another effect is that the gap between a player who can do it properly and the one who can't is huge, and that is fine in my book.

However a parser would make these differences obvious to everyone and this would lead to tensions among the playerbase. The problem is that the devs don't want tensions among the playerbase, so they would fix it. How? Easy: dumbing down the rotations. Dots? They get applied automagically when you get a crit. Self buffs? They become a passive trait, so nobody has to apply them and refresh them. The combo thing? Reduce it's potency and make it proc based, so in the end, all the player has to do is smash one or two buttons all day long and smash a third one when it is highlighted. Tank/dps stances? Remove them, tanks are always tanks. Enmity? Increase the tank multipliers for enmity generation to ridiculous numbers to the point that enmity is pretty much automatic. Now the rotation and gameplay is not a player based one, but a rng based one. Sure there will still be a little difference between those who can do it perfectly and those who can't, but it will be minimal, and so the damage output will mostly be based on the gear.

Parser on the other end will result in complete balance reconstruction, due to the playerbase paying attention only on DPS (like in wow) and not the other stuff around the design of specific class.
It will hurt the game design on a much higher level than the simplification of the certain classes.
Why? Because without parser, its up to the game developer how he will design the class, he will make sure to not make it overcomplicated, but may do something cool that doesnt fit into the "performance need", developer could give it a lot of aoe or single target damage, several boosts for the party members, aoe CC tools and etc stuff which on the dps meter will not be counted into the score.
When the playerbase is weaponized with numbers, the things happen to changeover drastically, from the moment or two people will categorize the classes for not the fun these are giving (redmage is awesome) or how they support the party, or how long they will be alive or how much CC or skillshoot do they have, but how much damage do they deal. That will lead straight forward to balance issues, people will stop playing a class with lower possible dps (why they should? because they will not want to be called) for the sake of the other with the highest, giving game developer false and bad feedback on how they should balance "issues" made of air. SE will need to buff certain lower dps classes in order to cater the numberophiles needs, ending up with some classes you will not be able to balance out due to the utilities they bring. At this point if you have a class that does no damage but has a lot of utility and fun to play mechanics, buffing its damage will result in making this specific class overpowered, you cant nerf or buff it either because it will drop the class from each end to another, what you will do?

You will just flat out the gameplay of specific class, taking away fun mechanics, utility, CC or buffs so it will no longer be overpowered, since it has dps on pair with other classes, and you end up with balance purely gray and classes not different to each other. Thats what actually happen in League of legends few years ago, they were just giving damage to each champion and then they were forced to delete some of their mechanics away, because it turns out a mage (which got dmg buffed) with teleporting skill every few second is far stronger than a stationary mage that deals like 10% damage more, what they did? They increased the teleportation cooldown several times, and the character was no longer fun as it was before, killed it entirely.
Valuing dps is not hard task to do, but how do you value the part of the character designs that doesnt bring damage but instead is helping entire team or keeping you alive? Thats the biggest problem which comes with balance, and i bet SE would not want their playerbase to cry over certain classes, because they dont do as much dps as the others and asks for buffs. That will be annoying.
Basing balance around numbers will kill class diversity and fun, its not actually good at all.