How would an optional, official parser be toxic?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

The problem though is the last guy is going to be delayed enough that it might matter for progression. The weaker or newer they are, the harder it will be to find people. I mean, the people who beat it day one will be ahead of them and less likely to get newbies because finishing later my be a sign that you had issues with the dps check. It might be more of a discouragement than people think. It's add more teeth to the "two week problem," that it's harder to progress in stuff 2 weeks after a patch.

Except good raiders are far more accommodating than you believe. A good player knows the difference between gear discrepancy and skill. This is among the reasons we laugh at bloated ilvl requirements in PF because that isn't a skill check. One of the first things I do whenever I see someone doing awful DPS is check their gear to see if that's an issue. If it proves to be significantly lower, I'm more accepting because that isn't necessarily their fault. See, this is the benefit of FFlogs and analysis. You can easily check what people are doing and see why their damage is so low. Likewise, it's what good groups do to check if someone's numbers are legit or balance padded. Many hardcore groups won't even look at you if you have nothing but balance padded oranges. Those parsers may have been 80% otherwise, which is still a good number, but they don't trust you since you weren't upfront about it.

What you've described is precisely why people want parsers. They allow us to analyse. Now that doesn't mean some people won't be idiots and look at a i350 Samurai and mock them, but that isn't unique to FFXIV or gaming. There will always be idiots in everything. You don't blame or ban the tool because someone misuses it. If we did, well, shut down the Internet because heaven knows that gets abused on a daily basis.

Of course, this doesn't mean you ca waltz into any party you fancy or that ilvl requirements are inherently bad. There comes a point where a bigger enough ilvl gap will be a hindrance. In such a scenario, it falls on the player to remedy this. If that means waiting several weeks to get Genesis gear, c'est la vie.