/Accuse @ the devs: have you set us up to fail...?

[Iscah]

I think the issue here is you do not know how to see what we are talking about in other players. For example, do you find it fair that someone can cheat the ilevel requirement to enter a place that requests ilevel 300 average, bringing a 285 weapon when you are given a 290 weapon from the job quest at 70?

That's a loaded question, I think - if the game lets you do it, it's not cheating, and it's up to the devs to set different minimum requirements if that player shouldn't be there. Otherwise you'll get new people coming in with that equipment by honest mistake, having no idea there is a higher standard expected of them by other players than what the game itself has set.

I honestly haven't even paid attention to how long dungeons take. And I only notice other people doing strange things if it's out of combat (tank casting Convalescence at the start of the encounter when I'm healing; DPS running ahead when I'm tanking) or it's affecting me directly (debuffs not getting Esuna'd; tank makes the boss move unnecessarily while I try to melee it). In combat I'm too busy concentrating on my own actions to notice others' - and generally if I do, that means I'm not paying attention and my own performance is suffering, or I forgot to pay attention to something more important like my own HP bar. I'm only just getting the hang of watching the enemy's cast bar and not just looking for floor AoE markers.

No idea where Elemental data center is, but shame I do not know anyone there. I def know people that can have a general idea how you are doing without a parser though.

Elemental data centre is in Japan. (I'm from Australia.) I guess I could see if some of my FC friends are using parsers.

Also I only thought of it after my previous post, but I'm leveling astrologian currently, and when I get low-level dungeons with that I'm probably playing 90% DPS outside of boss battles. So Scholar's faerie just fills in that little gap. (And I guess Tam-Tara in particular doesn't really have mid-dungeon boss battles? Just those imp mobs and then the Soulcounters which aren't that tough.) Ultimately those early dungeons are built for the difficulty level of someone who could have not even played a game before, or only started this one yesterday, and it's fair enough that a practiced player can do it with minimal effort by comparison.