Parsers make you stupid

[KaijinRhada]

Snip.

True you can see those things, but if you really want to fine tune your playstyle, a meter is one of the best tools to help you do that. I understand that not everyone runs one or wants to, but not everyone that has one is out to get at people that don't. Keeping an eye on buffs and numbers may help, but a parser is more diagnostic and can help pinpoint what needs to be tightened up as far as DPS goes.

You can see people's gear and iLevel.

This is really the only part of your argument I would be careful about as being a false lead on how well people perform. Players can get high ilvl all they want, but that doesn't exclude geared out players from underperforming.

[Svalitz]

Oh I definitely agree, "you can't judge a book by it's cover".

I've seen some really poor performances from people who were full i180+ gear, but again, I didn't need to see numbers to show me that they were bad... I saw them wipe to simple mechanics repeatedly.

I'm more fed up with people going ape-sht over simple content like Roulettes, or members (some from my OWN FC / LSes even) making fun of other players for not hitting their parsing expectations on content where it doesn't matter.

Cause it doesn't matter. It's just a big self concious, self praising circle jerk 90% of the time I see people talking parses.

And to me, that takes all the fun out of the game feeling like I'm constantly being monitored (as DPS anyways) by other players without my consent. I can dodge every AoE and never get hit on DRG, but still be last on the parsing list and all of a sudden I'm a bad player. That's not ok with me

[Krylo]

I've seen some really poor performances from people who were full i180+ gear, but again, I didn't need to see numbers to show me that they were bad... I saw them wipe to simple mechanics repeatedly.

Sure, you can tell if they're dying. But tell me, how do you, without staring at him the whole time, tell if a monk is fucking up his rotation and losing GL3 more often than he should (looking at party list is only helpful if he's got very few other buffs on--otherwise GL3 can be hidden as party list only shows a few buffs/debuffs at a time)? Maybe he's low on accuracy in a coil fight and missing now and then and it's causing it to fall off. Maybe he's just messing up and hitting 1 when he means to hit 3. Maybe he doesn't understand how GL works. Maybe he's got some macros set up and the fact that you can't pre-load macros is causing him to hit abilities .2 seconds later which is causing GL to drop when he has to disengage the boss more often, and decreasing his DPS from having, effectively, less skill speed. How would you know?

All but the last one you could look in the battle log and see why it's happening, sure. But the parser is just a consolidated and timed battle log, and you're not going to see any of those things if you're paying the proper amount of attention to your own rotation and mechanics.

And yes, this has happened, and yes it has contributed, greatly, to missing enrage mechanics. I'm not going to go much into the story of it to protect the guilty, but someone was parsing, another monk was doing poorly, and it wasn't obvious. Maybe it would have been if I had stopped doing anything and just stared at his rotation--but then I'd have been doing terrible.

It's happened with other people, too, and the likable ones--the ones that get added to LSes and/or friendlists--someone in my group usually helps them improve their rotations so we can clear the content with them rather than dropping them, but I know that might not be the normal use of parser.