How to Dragoon per Second: A DPS Paradigm

[JackFross]

As far as the whole crit thing goes, I agree with Hak, honestly. Whenever my white mage freaks out and talks about a BIG CRIT stone III, I laugh a bit. It makes things more fun, for me, to hear people excited about things like that, and honestly, those big crits are the only side of the numbers you can see in the fight (without having a parse overlay running) that have any sort of real, immediate meaning.

That said, a LOT of less-good players have a huge disconnect between being good and making big numbers happen. It comes down to something I said before (maybe in this thread?) about how ANYONE can do the opener, but very few can maintain the sustained DPS required of those upper echelon DPS. I ran with a Bard once who was saying how he thinks he's pretty good because he sees such and such from Empyreal Arrow on his opener and such and such with Sidewinder as if that means he was great. And then he ended up being one part of a group who couldn't kill Faust on a day my parser stopped working.

So yeah. People who use their high single hits to say they're good piss me off, but I wouldn't go off and qualify anyone who loves to see big numbers as being fundamentally flawed in their thought process. When you've done content enough times, you get to stop paying attention and auto-pilot. When running on auto-pilot, you can take your time to stop and enjoy the string of crits you shit out in your opener.

I dunno. This is likely incoherent since I'm really tired, but that's my general thoughts on the matter. DPS is certainly about all those things you mentioned, but I feel any good DPS needs to have that lust for big numbers that makes them SUPER GIDDY when they see a record-breaking hit that they've never done before.