Quote Originally Posted by tdb View Post
Furthermore I wouldn't call using an external tool to analyze your combat performance cheating. The game saves combat events to a log file and parsing those is fair game. Intercepting network traffic is a bit of a borderline case, but as long as no packets are injected and the data is only used after the fight is complete, I'm willing to give it a clean pass as far as cheating is concerned. It probably does violate the ToS though.

Now, some combat tracker programs are able to provide realtime alerts for certain events, such as when an important ability is about to come off cooldown or when the boss is about to perform a big attack. Those I would call cheating because they directly help the player to perform better in the fight.
I've been in BA groups where they had someone doing callouts using a combat tracker and it did legitimately feel like cheating as they were able to identify mechanics like Proto Ozma's shapeshifting before it even visibly started transforming (I believe the reason is because those moves have an invisible cast bar which the tracker is able to detect).