Absolute frustration at not being able to see my own DPS (ps4)

[Odett]

snip

can't quote you entirely due to post limit.

Ok, I was referencing mostly their hypothetical conversation with the 2 DRG's in A3S, and their exaggerated situation about how a parser worked, but with your point of skill potency and such, yes, you both have the right of it. That does not change. You can use math and the battle log to figure out how much damage you're doing, and if you and/or they can do that, that's great for both of you, but many players can't, and for those who can, it's an extremely cumbersome action. Yes, the process is the same, but a parser will do that quicker for you, so it expedites the process whenever you want to see what rotation works best, DPS wise. When I was in college and was taking Statistics, I could work out the problems by hand and spend 10 extra minutes, or I could input them in my calculator.

Here's an example, when NIN came out, I was really really excited for that job, since this game never had a "rogue"-like archetype, and that's what I went for in all my previous MMO's. I was lucky and had the next 2 days off work and school, and got NIN to 50 in those 2 days. Seeing as the job was very new, I had to come up with the ideal rotation myself, as there were no guides up yet that I could reference. Now, using what I knew about the previous jobs, I could reason that putting up my DoTs first would be best, so I could go for:

Mutilate (DoT)->Spinning Edge->Shadow Fang(DoT)->Spinning Edge-> Gust Slash->Dancing Edge

OR, I could prioritize applying my slashing debuff first, and even though the DoTs do not benefit from this, their initial potency would, as well as they skills I'd have to cycle through in order to get to them, so I also wanted to try

Spinning Edge->Gust Slash->Dancing Edge->Spinning Edge->Shadow Fang(DoT)->Mutilate(DoT)

I asked one of my friends who had a parser if they could help me out, and I tried both openers on a training dummy. The second rotation granted me the most DPS. Again, yes, this could have been fixed by math, but I am honestly not very good at it, and I do not see the reason to go through so much trouble when a program could make this easier for me. This is even more prevalent in long fights, where the combat log becomes a huge garbled mess.

Someone else a few pages back also made a great point that a parser would allow them to give The Balance to the highest DPS in the group, as that buff increases damage based on a percentage, and not by a fixed amount, so using The Balance on someone parsing 1.2k DPS would be more beneficial than using it on someone parsing 900 DPS.

Stupiduglytaru also mentioned an instance where someone wanted to kick them for being a MCH due to low percieved DPS, due to the stigma the job has, but someone with a parser pointed out that they actually had the highest DPS in the group, and I've myself encountered instances where the lowest-parsing player will either ragequit or blame someone else for a failed DPS check. A parser would add more transparency to this situation.

The previous two examples are only things that can be done with a group-wide parser.