Is this truly wrong?

[HyoMinPark]

Kaiva, as you know (since I have mentioned it before), I am in the same boat as you where I tend to care about my parses a little too much, and that (combined with other factors such as a toxic static environment) served to cause me to quit raiding entirely for an entire month. Even now with semi-dipping my toes back into it, I experience a lot of hesitancy: not just about the environment itself, because I do not want another static to just implode or become a cesspool of hostility stemming from one person that snowballs onto others; but because I also over-analyze my own performance, and always have.

Something I think is very important to keep in mind, the tier is progressing. The fact that you have reached 50th percentile is great, especially since you are competing against SMNs that have their BiS, and you do not (I’m assuming you’re probably in a mixture of 350/360 gear, yes? Maybe a few pieces of 370 if you’ve gotten some drops?). Another thing you should consider are the party comps in which you’re in. Do you have an AST that is buffing the raid with cards? What about a NIN that provides TA every 60 seconds? Do you have a BRD buffing you with their passive critical hit up trait and Battle Voice? A DRG with Litany? If you are present in groups that are missing a lot of key rBuffs (“meta buffs”, we’ll call them), then your DPS is automatically going to be lower than SMNs who are present in groups that provide them with rBuffs.

Another thing to consider is that you are still fairly new to SMN, if I remember correctly, yes? You cannot expect 95th percentile play on a job that you are relatively new to, are still learning the ropes of, and have not dabbled much in Savage with.

Your willingness to push yourself and constantly strive for improvement are excellent mindsets to have. Just do not let the parse ruin the content for you. Do not let it get you so down that you absolutely feel like you’re the worst player in existence. This is coming from someone who went from a 90 in Demon Chadarnook to the next parse uploaded being a 52 on a job they consider their main, and who hung their head in shame about it until they considered (or, well, had it pointed out to them by someone with far more patience for analyzing an upset situation lol) the factors that lead to that 52:

—It was a couple weeks since my 90, so there are more parses there; just like there are more parses for SMN now
—I am competing against BRDs that have their BiS, where as I still have mostly 360 left side and a 350 body; just like there are more parses out there of SMNs with BiS that you are competing against
—I did not have a DRG, and that was easily -500 DPS there alone from not having Disembowel; this is somewhat similar to how, if your comps are light on jobs that offer optimization buffs, that your DPS would be behind SMNs that have those buffs present during their runs...though SMN does not suffer nearly as much from lack of a DRG as BRD/MCH does, but I won’t get on that soapbox in here

Not being hard on yourself, or not feeling like you’re regressing when you don’t see noticeable improvement, is extremely hard to do. But you have to keep trying, or else it will just ruin Savage for you. Take it from someone who has already let it almost ruin the content for them. Focus on clearing, focus on learning more ins and outs of SMN, and focus on trying to get your BiS before you start worrying about those little numbers. You have my Discord if you ever want to speak privately to me about things. I don’t think that you should give up on SMN and opt for something “less DPS intensive” such as a healer because you think you aren’t good enough, or because your parse isn’t purple/orange. That is also coming from someone who has considered switching to healer because they dislike their own main’s parses (for performance reasons, and because I hate how reliant BRD is on having a DRG to have their full potential), and from someone who has not received an orange on a job they have played in Savage content for SB’s tiers, and the latter end of Creator.

Let’s focus on not focusing on parses together!