Parsers and Problems

[Ryel]

Seems to me that, as we get further and further into the game's life-cycle, and more and more content - including the most extreme - is being cleared without need of an official parser to do so, that the idea of one being necessary becomes less and less convincing, while the idea of one - for anything other than purely personal training/tracking purposes - seems more and more redundant.

Even if this were true (it isn't) any player that looks up BiS guides for gear stats, optimal rotations for their job, or even battle strategy and encounter guides for tackling content is indirectly benefiting from the results of someone using a parser, in fact you can go as far as to say that the job forums on this very site probably wouldn't hold any worthwhile (debatable) information at all if it weren't for the testing and posts of players who are using parse programs, which has been the case in pretty much every MMO since the concept of beating on monsters with weapons.

To insist it's needed is really pretty silly at this point. It's like someone at a track saying "to clear these hurdles, we need to know exactly how high we have to jump", meanwhile, people are behind them, doing trial attempts, and ultimately clearing them... without knowing the exact height ahead of time.

Actually it's more like someone on a track team trying to improve for the hundred meter dash, asking their coach for their run time and getting shrugged shoulders as a response because they neglected to bring a stopwatch.

It's only needed when theres a benchmark of performance that needs to be met, coincidentally a large number of endgame encounters have strict DPS checks that expect you to meet that level of performance.