Quote Originally Posted by BLaCKnBLu3B3RRY View Post
here's a thought... maybe they should try reading the tool tips for their actions? maybe they should play more to gain experience? maybe ask questions when there are doubts.
While I agree that those are good starts, they aren't the full story. Some classes have things that are rather unintuitive about their dps if you really break things down into the nitty gritty, and reading tooltips isn't going to be enough. To use a NIN example, if a player messes up their rotation and is about to drop Huton, but has Kassatsu up, at what point does it become worth using Kassatsu to reapply Huton instead of saving it for Raiton? That's something a tooltip isn't going to tell you. To be fair, a parser isn't going to tell you, either, but it's an example of something you can't find just from the tooltips. As for asking questions when there are doubts, that requires that people doubt themselves. Even ignoring the Dunning-Kruger effect, otherwise perfectly competent people can easily miss something that is blatantly obvious. I've had uncountable arguments with people about how dots function in this game even though everything I said about them should be obvious. And that's not even counting the one guy who swore up and down that you can only possibly get, like, 18 tics of Bio in a minute or some such.

Quote Originally Posted by Laraul View Post
The purpose of the battle log is NOT so it can be parsed by a third party tool! The purpose of a "battle log" is to give a player a chance to review what took place in battle to determine what took place in battle, ongoing or prior! Too bad the way the data is presented makes quickly skimming thru to find the information you find relevant impossible. And the battle log filters are contradictory and basically unusable.

Honestly the problem with the battle log is you NEED a third party parser to make sense of it. The battle log needs a complete overhaul. It should be easy for a human to comprehend first and foremost!
There are a good number of problems with the battle log. Let's see if I can count them:
  1. You can't display seconds in the time stamps
  2. Dot damage is not displayed at all
  3. Ground based effects like Flaming Arrow aren't shown at all
  4. Contagion isn't shown in the log
  5. Enemies with the same name aren't distinguished in the log

I'm sure there are more, but that's what I can think of at the moment.