Is this truly wrong?

[KaivaC]

Took some time over the last couple of days to just focus on actually playing the game. Not just to figure out how to get my deeps up, but just playing the game through beast tribes and dungeons like I used to do. Funny how different it feels as opposed to how I started playing when Delta dropped in that I solely logged to raid and have big numbers. Riyah suggested something a page or two ago, so I'm going to give that a try - have to figure out how to record video with my PS4 and then track down some summoners willing to give it a good look. As for the current raid, I've sort of got stuck on SMN because of O7S. I despise the missiles because of their hit boxes. I'm not sure what it is, but I just cannot dodge the missiles in that instance if I'm a melee. I usually go DRG with that, but I don't get nearly as upset over damage numbers on that class because it's a different style than what I'm used to and I jump potioned that without a complete understanding of the job.

About playing for others' approval...I don't really play to get outright approval, but I do feel as if I should be skilled enough that others I happen to join in raids can count on me. And I feel a big part of that is having a high percentile. But that's just how I view my own playstyle in Eorzea. It's not something I push on others.

Given the variety of responses that I read through this morning, maybe it's time for me to admit that I need to back off from raiding for a little while. Not sure how many of the responders saw my other thread about a similar subject, but this is my first MMO (in the sense that I've played beyond two weeks). Seems like there's some real concern about my health - I can say that I'm fine, just getting overwhelmed at what I personally viewed as failure on my part. Thanks for the words and thoughts...I'm just going to try to break away from FFLOGs and raiding for a week, see if that helps at all.

[ChaoticCrimson]

<snip>

If you'd like to record something on the PS4, just press the Share button on the left of the touchpad and then push the Square button. That should generally record everything up to the last fifteen minutes of gameplay, or however much time went by since your last recording if you've recorded less than fifteen minutes ago. You can then find your video in the Capture Gallery app on the PS4 later, where you can trim down the video, copy it to a USB drive, etc. I've actually made a habit of recording my first clears on trials lately so I can go back and see how I've improved.

I'm glad you're taking time to cool off and try some other stuff though. The raids will always be there when you're ready. I could recommend maybe giving Eureka a whirl for now during your downtime. It's not the most thrilling content available, but once you're levelled up enough to start getting loot boxes from the fates there's actually some pretty decent stuff that can drop, like tier VI materias as well as cracked clusters (which can definitely be useful for raids later), and of course the mount and barding. Depending on your current gear, you may or may not benefit from the Relics on this tier but it'd probably be worth investing in, if not for them most likely going to be top raiding gear in the final relic tier then at least for the cool glamour. Personally, I feel like the SMN relic weapon and body gear probably has the best-balanced potential stats for SMN next to their respective Savage pieces, so I'd recommend at least considering those for your progression. There's, of course, plenty of other things you could try out too in the game if that's not your cup of tea. Whatever you choose to do, I hope it helps you relax and feel better about things.

[Aylis]

I'm kind of in that boat now, to the point that I've pretty much dropped DPS'ing entirely because I am incapable of keeping up with my peers. It's gotten to the point where I kinda shunned myself off because I feel like I don't belong with my peers anymore. This is more or less myself wondering if anybody is, or was, in that position. Or knew someone like this on the verge of...well, essentially calling it quits.

Self doubt, self loathing, self cannabalization and seeking to be a perfectionist and stressing over every second is one of the greatest downfalls of any player seeking to get better. I've seen and been in the situation before. Always staring at my numbers and getting mad at myself for doing less then I should be doing. Turns out a constant focus on my numbers was what the problem was.

What did I do? I learned to just let it all go. I learned to seek a sorta "zen" state in a fight. Where numbers don't exist at all, where hot bars and abilities and everything technical doesn't exist at all. Just natural instinct. When that side of me takes over, timers and everything technical is in the back of my mind. Muscle memory is enough to let me know whats ready and what isn't per cooldown systems. Numbers only exist at the end of the fight when the boss is down and the state of zen ends. Only then did I see improvement. Not to mention a healthier life and mental state too. No more stress or sleepless nights and when in this state. The rest of the party doesn't exist. They're only shadows so to speak.It's as if I'm the only one there. It helps me to not get annoyed at others performances and if a wipe happens it makes it easier to move past it and try again

Zen For the win!


Seek calm even as the world around you is collapsing and just do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjs2vPR19mQ

[KaivaC]

Hey Riyah are you still monitoring this thread? Do you use discord? Wanted to link up with you outside of the forums.

[Noshpan]

I don't raid (even though I would like to, I just have nobody that would want to take me) so I just assume that I'm mediocre at best: dependable but I can always improve, & don't make the healer's job more difficult by standing in poop.

[KaivaC]

I don't raid (even though I would like to, I just have nobody that would want to take me) so I just assume that I'm mediocre at best: dependable but at least I'm not making the healer's job more difficult by standing in poop.

From personal experience, learning parties are common enough in the pf that you could pick up the fight. I have yet to be in a static myself. It wouldn't hurt to give it a try. I'm on mobile, so I dunno what server you're on, not if you're in the aether Datacentre, I can go in with you when I decide to raid again

[Melixy]

I think it's really easy to say "You need to take a break lolz because video gaem is just a gaem!!!111" when someone is upset that they're trying to seek improvement and aren't finding any improvement. It's obviously not good to get super wound up over a game, but there's no harm in trying to get better at a game either. Just know that everyone starts somewhere, so don't beat yourself up too much over it.

Anyways, I decided to take a look at your logs, Kaiva, and I just wanted to point something out. A lot of these logs are fairly old, dating back to February/early March. So I'm not really sure how well you're doing currently but I'd like to echo what Shihen suggested. Have a SMN main look over your logs. I recently stumbled upon a good guide for SMN. I can see if I can dig it up somewhere in my 3000 billion Discord servers. It was by Aymeric's Waifu, who is a pretty dang good SMN. I recommend giving it a look over. I don't know many SMN things, unfortunately, but I do know that checking the following will prob help:

1. Gear. Keep in mind that percentile is based on you vs other people and other people might have more gear or, most importantly, a better weapon.

2. BiS is a thing. You might not be getting gear that has optimal substats for your jobs.

3. Melds, pots, food. They make a huge difference in terms of your numbers. Don't have gil for it? Find a friend that can make you pots and food. Materia is pretty easy to get with hunts nowadays.

4. "Padds". That's what my group's PLD calls any group of adds. Like I said, fflogs is you vs other people and if other people are padding on adds with AoE... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

5. Keep in mind that FFlogs is kind of... well, just don't take it too seriously. It has great tools to look up people's performance, but seeing as we're past week 10 of the tier, it's gotten to the point where people are pulling silly parse runs and racking up really high numbers for "the lulz" or whatnot (there are people paying statics gil to give them parse runs...). If you're looking to have good numbers to get into a static, then keep in mind any good static worth joining won't just look at percentiles at face value. They will investigate what happened and why those numbers are like that.

Anyways, keep at it and don't get discouraged!

[Noshpan]

From personal experience, learning parties are common enough in the pf that you could pick up the fight. I have yet to be in a static myself. It wouldn't hurt to give it a try. I'm on mobile, so I dunno what server you're on, not if you're in the aether Datacentre, I can go in with you when I decide to raid again

I play on Primal data center & I must have great coincidental timing when I do check the PF I usually only see farm groups.

[AppleJinx]

When I got better my mistakes becomes a lot of noticeable and irritating so even though I am playing a lot better than before I end up feeling like I performed worse instead because of it

[KaldeaSahaline]

You really need to take fflogs with a grain of salt - those arent always totally "accurate" statistics. I actually just had a conversation with my boyfriend about this - he mains a BLM and explained to me that a lot of those higher BLM-numbers arent an accurate reflection of BLM-dps, because, for example, they come from runs in which the whole group optimised for that BLM (aka: ASTs feeding the BLM balance-cards and stuff like that - basically something that wouldnt happen in a real run.

How many parses would you say are "inaccurate" due to cheesing/padding? I.e. how many BLM parses total, and how many you suspect/confirmed are cheese and it's impact on percentiles. I'd be curious to see your analysis.

Unless you are in a static group that plays optimally I doubt you'll ever reach orange. I'm not even sure how likely high purple is. Don't beat yourself up about it.

While orange ever eludes me in this game, I've been comfortably sitting at high purples without BIS throughout Delta/Sigma (current ilvl ~356). My statics were not the best players, in fact, far from it. I mean hell, I still have 340 pants from Delta, and a 350 head piece from normal, and 360 boots from tomes. I did just finally get my O8S weapon though so should see an improvement next week.

Simply clearing OS8 period likely means I'm able to perform at a higher level then the majority of players, but people aren't satisfied with that and have demanded that I show them my logs before they queue for some reason.

Since your logs are hidden I cannot offer any insight. I can safely agree that on average, given the fact that you have cleared would likely mean you're better than most, but I wouldn't take that bet when I have 20 other people who have view-able logs and have cleared as well looking for a party/static.

For all we know you could have bought a clear and didn't want people to see you've only cleared it once, or that you were carried, etc.

As such, unless you wear BiS and are in one of these groups it's virtually impossible to get a 95%+ log.

Yo it's Wreck.

Copy paste from above:
While orange ever eludes me in this game, I've been comfortably sitting at high purples without BIS throughout Delta/Sigma (current ilvl ~356). My statics were not the best players, in fact, far from it. I mean hell, I still have 340 pants from Delta, and a 350 head piece from normal, and 360 boots from tomes. I did just finally get my O8S weapon though so should see an improvement next week.

I had that feeling 3 days ago, I went for my weekly o6s in PF and we wiped over & over again on 1% .

I was Ast and a Mch who parsed complained I did 400dps when the sch did 2000dps, he said he could do 2500dps "easy" as a whm.

I told him I did most of the heals, buff everyone with cards + did pink mechanic that I wasn't use to (but didn't failed). That I am ok to try to dps more but that every time 5 dps died on instant death mech to max their dps, and it should give us the 1% missing.

I left sad, I am a healer I want to first heal, do mech, then buff, then dps...
A friend went to FFlogs and saw that I did 91% of the heals with less overheals than the sch.

How many times did I see ppl not buffing up pt's, not helping raising, not using CD's, not avoiding aoe's...Just for their parses. Is that being good at their job?

I went to fflogs to look for the parse in question (the one your friend claimed he reviewed), but I can't find any indication it is there. I only saw one log with a MCH, and you didn't have a SCH in that party and it was O5S.

The few parties where you had a SCH, you were consistently outhealed by them and they overhealed less. Also - you actually have a log recorded where a WHM did almost 3k DPS (whether it was easy or not, is an entirely other topic). He did ~5x your raw damage, whereas you only did ~2x his raw healing. Accounting for cards lessens this by some factor though.

Now - assuming the run you mentioned exists somewhere and I'm just an idiot and blind, your DPS wasn't the issue you wiped. If you had 5 DPS dead, that's the issue, clean and clear.

snip

Kaiva - rule # 1 don't compare results from one content form to another. That's stupid.

Rule #2 getting a different percentile isn't a good/bad thing inherently. You need to analyze the actual changes week to week. Make sure you only ever compare fight length to fight length. Look at your CPM, your debuff/buff uptimes, and your raw damage done. Look for variances and analyze why they're different. Then apply the knowledge gained into understanding your percentiles.

What also doesn't help with that is reading forum posts.

I usually play healers. A while a go I tried the O5S dummy with my ilvl 348 RDM and beat it with 0-2 seconds. I even failed it once because I accidentally pressed the wrong buttons. In the past I did the same with the O1S dummy and no matter how often I tried, I didn't get better than maybe 3 seconds faster or so.

And then there are posts by players who say (just an example) 5000 dps is very, very low and only bad players do so little dps. And there are posts by players who say they almost never play RDM and still can beat the O5S dummy with ilvl 330 with 20 seconds left on the timer.

I don't know at all if that's wrong or if it's normal, but it makes me feel so extremely bad that I only very rarely play a DPS anywhere.

In my experience - people with your issue simply aren't pushing buttons enough. Letting oGCDs sit off cooldown for extended periods of time, not pushing buttons quickly enough (2.5s GCD, but only pushing buttons every 3.3s or so), stuff like that.

And now for a somewhat minor variable you might not be aware of - padded runs. A ridiculous amount of people will end up with better parses than you, simply because the AST is giving them all the Balance cards, and stuff like that.

copy paste from above:
How many parses make up a "ridiculous number of people" due to cheesing/padding? I.e. how many parses total, and how many you suspect/confirmed are cheese and it's impact on percentiles. I'd be curious to see your analysis and how you arrived at the data point.

I joined a group in the PF on Tuesday that wanted to do o5-7. Joined in with them on Discord. After we cleared o5, I asked if anyone was logging. I felt like I totally crushed it, never did a misclick and managed to nail my elusive jump/other jumps/sprint to keep uptime up time... yet when they read me my #s, I was only at 5k. I was heartbroken, because the week prior I got 4 new pieces of gear.

I saw 4.7k lol, not 5k

That said, that's like what our DRG does, and he's a fairly average player. That said, if you're upset about ~50th percentile don't be. It's a great spot to start improving from. You're right smack in the middle of the upper echelon of the playerbase. Not a bad spot to be.

Of course player ability factors into it but given 2 players of equal skill, the one with a significantly lower item level won't stand a chance. It is simple mathematics.
Yes, the gap isn't as ridonculous in XIV as it is in WoW but gear is still of paramount importance.

If you parse yourself as a 350 alt you won't stand any chance against a 370+ that knows what he is doing. Pretending otherwise is ignoring the truth.

As a percentage the numbers aren't that different between games. I've tested 2 different fully melded sets and saw about a 25% difference in throughput between them. At the time I had compared the #1 log of my spec in WoW against my clear (he had roughly 15 ilvl on me), and it was a bout a 22% differential.

While FF14 may have "smaller base numbers", the percentage differential is pretty similar between savage and mythic and those without.

I rather have someone with lower damage whom rarely fails mechanics than someone whom is top damage but failing repeatedly.
In the end it's more important to get the job done and have fun while doing so.

This is a common misconception. It is impossible to consistently fail mechanics and be the top DPS. Failing mechanics gets you killed, or wiped, thus lower DPS. Top players will do both mechanics and DPS.