DPS display could easily be solved with a system already in game.

[Vire]

That actually depends on the content at hand. The hardest raids do often gain the absolute most amount of benefit from parsers. Raiding requirements don't always involve parsing though. Source: over 10 years of raiding in games since FFXI and vanilla WoW, before parsers were even a thing. Our work-around was knowing where we could gear up to meet unknown requirements to complete (and this worked fine when you hit that point).

I can say for a fact that every Vanilla Wow guild competing for world first clears of AQ and Nax where using dps parsers. Specially so for every guild who was in the race on Korgath at the time. I don't know about FFXI because I never played the end game seriously. But that is disingenuous saying vanilla wow raiders were not using parsers/ dps meters. They where a thing since the second boss of BWL was a dps check enrage fight.

[Welsper59]

I can say for a fact that every Vanilla Wow guild competing for world first clears of AQ and Nax where using dps parsers. Specially so for every guild who was in the race on Korgath at the time. I don't know about FFXI because I never played the end game seriously. But that is disingenuous saying vanilla wow raiders were not using parsers/ dps meters. They where a thing since the second boss of BWL was a dps check enrage fight.

A couple things to note about what you said are regarding the world first clears and pointing out the stuff towards the end of the vanilla era (when addons were far more used and accepted as standard play). My point was that they weren't necessary to use just for the sake of completion. World First objectives/goals are very far and few, of which you gotta take the measures you need to to achieve. That doesn't change the fact that it's not something you need simply to clear (back then). DPS checks started popping up once the devs knew they had released enough gear of intended strength for players to use to clear them, which wasn't until far into the games (then current) progress.

FFXI didn't have any existing parsers (that I'm aware of) until years later, due to the fact you couldn't use addons due to how the game launch was structured. When the windower utility was released (not supported officially), that's when folks started to use parsers... but it was never really required for any content I'm aware of.

[Vire]

What im saying is dps checks where in the second raid released for the game and people were using them even back then world first clears or not. I was just talking about the last two raids because I have first hand experiences that showed without a shadow of a doubt everyone was using them. That doesn't mean people were not using them before. To talk about vanilla raiding and say things like world first clears are a tiny minority is weird because 40 man raiding intrinsically was hardcore. Anyone who was going through the effort to organize 40 people at the time where already the 1% of the game. It wasn't till TBC and Wrath really where raiding became accessible to most players so I really don't agree that DPS parsing wasn't a big deal in vanilla as only the most hard core elite players where doing raiding in the first place. I am not talking about pugging MC 2 months before TBC came out either.

edited for clarity