Quote Originally Posted by KaivaC View Post
A good portion of us here on the forums look actively seek to improve ourselves, whether its be min-maxing, figuring out optimal rotations, etc. After my thread in which I found out that I was, at best, a 9th percentile raider, I took some time to work on SMN and 'git gud'. Managed to hit that 50th percentile bracket...only in sigmascape normal, and it looks like I've just gotten worse as a player trying to get better. I'm not satisfied with being a 50th percentile player, because that's actually worse numbers wise amongst Savage raiders than what I was doing back when I started that toxic elitist thread.

Keep in mind, I still generally don't ask for my information to get uploaded - they just end up online (I usually check a few hours after my weekly runs).

Anybody in this rut get in that position where they feel like they just continually get worse? That they feel embarrassed enough that they feel that they don't belong on the same level as their peers who, admittedly, don't judge them or really care? Or maybe the nagging feeling that you will never be good enough to be on their level?

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.
Quite often you're working on a new rotation you're just going to suck. The reason is that old habits and muscle memory tend to kick in during stressful situations, it's just a fact of human nature. Given that DPS rotations (for DPS, Tanks and Healers) are pretty strict, one panic moment where you miss aligning with raid buffs or completely bork your rotation will hurt your dps later in the fight and quite often very badly especially when you have to delay a burst window. The ONLY way to deal with this is getting your rotation in-grained as muscle memory. This doesn't mean practice your opener on a dummy, this means practice for 5-10 minutes straight on a dummy. Do that over and over again. Don't use the SSS dummies, use a level 1 dummy and keep going. Beyond that, going back into a savage fight you've already cleared is the only other way to get practice for your rotation AND timing for that specific fight. Instead of sitting on your clear for the week, join 0-1 chest groups, parse groups, fresh clear groups etc so you get the practice you need.

Ask for your parses to get uploaded. fflogs is a great tool to replay and analyze a fight. Don't pay attention to your percentile so much, pay attention to your CPM, number of casts and damage per cast. For example, here's a comparison between your o1s run on SMN vs a 99th percentile SMN on the same fight: https://www.fflogs.com/reports/compa...pe=damage-done

if you compare their uptime with yours you'll see they're active 91% of the time on this fight (this is one of the worst fights for uptime in the current savage tier) vs your uptime of 85%. When doing this comparison, don't beat yourself up - simply ask yourself what are they doing to get 6% more uptime than you? Is there something that you could do to increase your uptime? Since you're on caster, the movement required in this fight is going to cuck you; so think about pre-positioning. Practice slide-casting so that you can pre-position for upcoming mechanics. You know that you could get the prey marker, so pre-position at max cast range so that if you get prey you're already close to where you need to be and you only lose the cast time of running forward instead of backward. Try to position yourself away from others before the whirlwind markers come out so you don't have to move to avoid overlapping. When putrid passengers come out be prepared with AoE burst, this is a HUGE dps increase and one of the easiest ways to improve your overall DPS for the fight and trust me, 99th percentile players pad their numbers on those adds - just look at the comparison between yourself and any 99th percentile SMN and you'll see the HUGE difference that padding makes.

Back to the comparison above, forgetting the padding and CPM, what skills is this other SMN using; how often are they used? Tamamo hits 81 ruin 3s during the fight vs your 70. If you're interrupting your casts for movement that's going to destroy those numbers. The next biggest loss I see is Ahk Morn, Tamamo hits 8 Ahk Morns vs your 4 and 9 death flares vs your 5. So what is it about their rotation that allows them to get so many more bursts than you? If you creep their log and click on timelines, you can see their rotation for the entire fight; every cast at every point. Then compare that with your own log and see what differs there. Use fflogs as a tool to help you figure out what you're doing wrong, what you're doing right and ways to improve. Getting frustrated because you can't get above 50th percentile is going to happen.

Right now, I'm a 70th percentile avg WAR. Does that mean every fight was great? Hell no, I suck bad until I learn the timings of each fight by heart. I still miss opportunities to improve my dps and miss or delay a burst window. I'm 9th percentile on god kefka, and while that upsets me; it doesn't make me want to give up cause I know with more practice me and my team will improve on that fight. Just know that with practice and patience that you will improve as well. The KEY to getting above 50th percentile is PRACTICE. Get back in there and do the fight as often as you can and you will improve.