Unchained. Seriously, why are we not abusing this skill?

[Sarcatica]

Gonna be honest, not 100% sure what you said has to do w/ what I said, but:

DPS comes from learning mechanics. The absolute maximum you can do going into an encounter for the first time is your opener (even this can be sketch, Hummelfaust alone has you save your offensive CDs for when he actually drops rather than unnecessarily burning them on the 2 Fausts) and then your standard rotation. There are many, many, many changes that have to be made to your rotation throughout the encounter based on what mechanic is happening. An easy example is that if a boss jumps at a certain time as DRG, you want to make sure you can keep up BotD by planning out your GCD usage before and after the jump. This applies to basically everyone, to one degree or another.

So I'm not really sure what you mean. Being not good at mechanics defacto means that your DPS isn't going to be very good. Improving on said mechanics will improve said DPS. JP groups get better DPS because they take their time and consider how to best handle every mechanic, rather than rush headlong into it. Lucrezia was largely successful DPS-wise because a lot of their strategies involved just healing through things and ignoring certain mechanics entirely, thus allowing them more up time than groups that played safer. Generally speaking, though, if you see someone doing good DPS it's highly likely they're also handling their mechanics well. If you see someone doing bad DPS, they're highly likely to be messing up mechanics or not handling them properly.

I do, however, agree that SE is largely to blame for the current state of the players' skill level. Let's be honest, every encounter in this game is really simple and easy to execute as long as you can memorize the script that the boss follows. This hasn't changed since the start of the game, every boss is like this, the only difference is realistically the length of the script. Sometimes you have to have quicker reactions but if you know that the thing is coming, you aren't really even "reacting". But despite this, people fail at end game raiding. Surely it's just that every player is bad and they just need to git gud, yeah? Nah. Game design problem. You can't make the whole game not punish you at all for being a complete troglodyte and then suddenly you either execute correctly or you either instantly die or you instantly kill everyone in your party.

What we really need, and I know it's been said 50,000 times, is more mid-core content. More stuff like the EX Primals to teach players that their actions have consequences and they need to learn the boss' script instead of just hoping and praying. This isn't a hard game by any stretch of the imagination, but because there's this one big wall that suddenly appears for the one piece of relevant content at end game when you've been skipping through the meadows this whole time... it's just... I dunno, it baffles me.

Anyway. I might've completely misinterpreted your point and made this lengthy post that kinda turned into a tangent for nothing. So if that's the case I apologize, but I stand by experience equating to better players - even if raiding is an unnecessarily steep wall, its one that can be climbed and with perseverance you'll inevitably get there.

More or less, I am comparing the <700dps vs 1.1k++dps. The sentiment and normally is right is that JP players (majority) can pull their own weights even if their DPS isn't stellar. So, in that sense, they just have to focus less on smaller DPS adjustments and focus more on the whole mechanics. Currently, this is what's lacking between the NA/EU vs JP players. The average player in NA/EU is definitely more likely to be less skilled by a considerable margin, compared to the JP players. This is also something that is bugging me to farm stuff in PF/DF, something on the line of 3 DPS doing 800dps each in Sephirot EX farm parties. Quite horrible if I must say.

EDIT: maybe it's clearer to ask the question if a DPS is doing 1k and below in Hummelfaust alone, what would you think? This is exactly what is happening, no one is there to take these people inside hard raids because of the DPS requirement to just pass the "mini-boss" and the fight is as simple as a dummy fight even. Changes need to be made if SE wants to design better dungeons/raids/trials. At this point, the content is getting stale with all the facerolly stuff and the sudden jump in difficulty (Sephirot EX is still very hard for an average joe).