My Catharsis in FFXIV

[Mhiro]

It's kind of a forward and back here--

Though I do mostly agree with OP more than anyone else here due to the situation mentioned. But that's probably because I don't understand the need to maximize when you're geared and have the fight on farm to the point where if you accidentally fart you'll skip a phase. Nor do I see any problem with playing it safe while you're still in the early stages. If you see that you're successful in remaining alive to continue a stream of damage, but you haven't 100% gotten that scripted fight rotation down to a second nature level of memory, it would be best to continue that and minimize the amount of times you die. At least until you actually get to the rotation down which for most of you gifted individuals doesn't take more than a clear or two, right?

But what do I know. I quit raiding a while ago despite being told I was well over good enough for doing it. I just don't find raiding fun.

[Nora_of_Mira]

Nor do I see any problem with playing it safe while you're still in the early stages. If you see that you're successful in remaining alive to continue a stream of damage, but you haven't 100% gotten that scripted fight rotation down to a second nature level of memory, it would be best to continue that and minimize the amount of times you die.

it took me halfway into this raid tier to make up my mind on this exact situation.

I started out thinking exactly how you do on this, but I later learned it was actually crippling my DPS. Because I was playing it safe during the learning stages (running away from aoe's before i had to, prepositioning for w/e thing was happening, etc), I found I was clearing the fights just fine w/o having to optimize my DPS bc "I was alive the whole time, so who cares." but when it came to optimizing DPS, I realized playing it safe made me ignore all the opportunities I could've been greedy, dragging my DPS down. The result was having to learn to be greedy in our clear parties and THAT resulted in more deaths, completely being counter-intuitive to the goal. Overall, if I wanted top DPS in our clear parties, I should've been taking more risks in the learning phase, die, learn, repeat lesson until I dont die anymore, and I wouldn't have run into my issue.

A death in the learning phase isnt nearly as frustrating as a death on our 8th weekly clear and everyone has memorized the fight.

[AxlStream]

Also maximizing your DPS means shorter runs, shorter runs means less damage to heal, less damage to heal means overall a better run. It's all a facet of the game that can actually help make things safer on the long term.