If running a parser makes you cynical and depressed, why do it?

[Reap00]

Proof?

I mean, even mentioning you parse is against ToS so who are you going to brag to? I've ran hundreds of EX trials for example, I know they parse because the run appears on fflogs, but I've never once had someone brag over it.
Or do you mean that they simply like to privately feel good about a fight they did well on? How dare they.

I don't have or need to prove anything to you. You stay on your ACT band wagon. That is a good way to be popular on the forums. What a rebel.

[SaberMaxwell]

I don't have or need to prove anything to you. You stay on your ACT band wagon. That is a good way to be popular on the forums. What a rebel.

Well enjoy Hitchens' Razor then.

[Alucard135]

I don't have or need to prove anything to you. You stay on your ACT band wagon. That is a good way to be popular on the forums. What a rebel.

How can you be a rebel and follow the bandwagon?

[Hash_Browns]

I don't have or need to prove anything to you. You stay on your ACT band wagon. That is a good way to be popular on the forums. What a rebel.

Honestly sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder.

[LauraAdalena]

I see a lot of people complain about tank DPS or other people's DPS, why look at others numbers? or even your own if you think SAM or Ninja or BRD or DNC or RDM are now ruined? I really fail to see how people are enjoying the game when they complain about how numbers are so low or that their numbers aren't high enough compared to other people.

You can complain about how numbers are without a parser. Also, this is early expansion growing pains, there's gonna be a lot of people going "This needs improvement".

So really if looking that closely at numbers is hurting your enjoyment of the game, why do it? Does your numbers have to be X amount higher than someone else's for you to be having fun? I can understand running one for self improvement but it seems like this obsession over numbers is just ruining the game for people by causing them to be bitter and cynical.

That's fine then, if doing that isn't making you cynical or depressed then you aren't who this thread is addressing =)

Here's the thing. The title and this statement above sounds like you are specifically targeting anyone who does this and saying everyone who does is cynical and depressed. Entirely not true. You're taking comments about class improvement and lumping them in with parsing and then claiming that because you complain about something you're passionate about that you're cynical and depressed. I complain and ask for improvements on numbers for RDM because I love the class. I play it regularly and enjoy the way it plays but wish what I did had more impact. It's not ruined, in fact I really like where it is. It'll get better with the next patch for sure.

I agree with you 100%. I used ACT and spent the vast majority of my time comparing myself to other people and being generally very bitter. I stopped using ACT and my enjoyment of the game has greatly increased.

This sounds more like a you problem than an ACT problem. If comparing yourself to others gets you that bitter, then maybe you are correct in dropping ACT. You'll be happier if you drop it. That's fine.

People like to hide behind its just for self improvement. I am sure there are a select few that use it for this purpose. The vast majority use it for an ego boost. ACT should have been banned from the get go as it was part of the ToS anyway.

Generalization without evideeeeeeeeeence.

I don't have or need to prove anything to you. You stay on your ACT band wagon. That is a good way to be popular on the forums.

Translation: I don't have evidence to back up my case so instead of admitting that I'll just claim I don't need to prove anything to you so I can keep generalizing and generally lumping a majority of people into a group.

What a rebel.

You said it. Oh wait, that was aimed toward him? Wow irony.

[MrKusakabe]

I complain and ask for improvements on numbers for RDM because I love the class. I play it regularly and enjoy the way it plays but wish what I did had more impact. It's not ruined, in fact I really like where it is. It'll get better with the next patch for sure.

Now the question is: Are you using a parser or not? I mean, you "like the profession where it is" (at the bottom of the damage charts) but then you do not like it to be there. Then you love it despite the low damage again. Did you know all that without a parser, or do you need a parser for that?

To me it sounds like you like what you see and play, but then you see the parses and you don't like it anymore. You go back and forth. This is exactly what the OP means. I love Red Mage and I learned from my past decades of gaming that looking up patch notes or very direct numbers ends up in endless "The grass is greener on the other side" sort of thoughts that makes you wanna sort-of quit your profession over that. I do crunch the numbers about my beloved Red Mage too, but I also put other values in there (mostly the green dice in my signature) to even that up, and suddenly, allt he theorycrafting is being shoved into the background.

The "impact" you talk about is right now only measured in damage. And that is not all part of the truth, especially with our rich toolkit and possibilities we Red Mages have. And then, the (parsed) gap is not that high to begin with with the philsophy of RDM in mind. But still people get strange and mad and ask for buffs and nerfs and quit professions over parses instead of just enjoying the game and cope/work with it. It's called "rational game balance" to have charts with a gap. Else: Why pick A over B then? (I am sure you saw the other RDM thread, I won't pull my reasoning over here).

Mr. Lightbringer is pretty right with this assumption in the opening post.

What I was bringing up was merely the fact that Red Mage is not a top damage dealer, which does not requireany third party tool to realize. But here starts the real issue: This is just the profession's numbers. The vast majority use it to rate players, not professions, and now you have a critical mass of what the OP talks about when combined.

I am for sure that, if no numbers would be shown and no emnity bar existed, nobody would know how much people rank and just play and work together instead of monitoring and vote-kicking professioins or players they think underperform. Granted, it'd be a bland gameplay experience, but I am talking more of experiment regarding the mindset then. The obvious slackers still need to be kicked for sure.

Sincerely,

[LauraAdalena]

the question is: Are you using a parser or not?

Here's a better question: Should it matter? If we're only talking about how well classes do in performance it should not.

I mean, you "like the profession where it is" (at the bottom of the damage charts) but then you do not like it to be there. Then you love it despite the low damage again. Did you know all that without a parser, or do you need a parser for that?

To keep this short, since I know I can ramble on, I like it because of how it plays. I "like where it is" in a gameplay sense. It's "fine where it is" because I'm in a raid group and I get clears on a job I really enjoy playing. That's all, there's nothing complicated about it. We'll get to the numbers stuff later in this post, but that's why I love the job. The way it plays.

The "impact" you talk about is right now only measured in damage.

No, Impact is a Red Mage ability.

Jokes aside, no it's not. It's animations as well, The fast and fluid melee combo and Ver Holy and VerFlare feel so nice, and the way your character recoils when the Scorch animation goes off is great. And the way each spell ends with a pose by the character for flourish feels so great and the fast spell-into-instant-cast-spell feels great. And Red Mage was the first class I picked up in Stormblood and I immediately fell in love. After trying it out on a dummy and feeling that melee combo I knew I had to clear PotD and future content on it, and I did. It felt great.

And then, the (parsed) gap is not that high to begin with with the philsophy of RDM in mind. But still people get strange and mad and ask for buffs and nerfs and quit professions over parses instead of just enjoying the game and cope/work with it. It's called "rational game balance" to have charts with a gap. Else: Why pick A over B then? (I am sure you saw the other RDM thread, I won't pull my reasoning over here).

Mr. Lightbringer is pretty right with this assumption in the opening post.

I pick Red Mage over other casters because Black Mage has never been my thing and Summoner is the other one I love so much but with how many people were complaining I felt it would get changes in 5.1 (I was right) and so I decided to stick with what I knew best and what I loved more gameplay-wise. That being said, it is called "balance" to create it with a gap but the gap right now is a little skewed and that's fine. It's just because it's early expansion, this is how most of the jobs looked in Stormblood and it's kind of a growing pains of a new expansion. Asking for buffs isn't because you are displeased with a job, it's because you love it and want to see the best for it. And this is where I'm noticing a sort of misunderstanding between OP and you here.

I'm not asking for RDM to be the top. It is fine if it's not the top because of raise, Embolden, and especially VerCure with how well it can solo content with just VerCure on its own, what we're asking is to make the gap seem a little more reasonable because we love the job. Just because we say we want "buffs' doesn't mean we are furious and hate the class until it gets numbers, if that's the case we'd ask for it to be deleted... and I'm sure as hell not asking for it to get deleted.

Let me state this again. I love the way Red Mage plays. I'd really appreciate some buffs since it makes my decision to not go as a Black Mage not feel as much of a punishment on me as a player for choosing A as my main class over B (A being Red Mage in this case and B being Black Mage). And I don't use mains lightly, if I main a class its because I love the class a serious degree. I even put my favorite glamour on Red Mage! And ever since I made it I've not gone back! It's probably my most played class on its own if they had individual statistics for it, and this was long before it was even doing "well" by Stormblood Standards. Back when people would leave it alone because "it doesn't do enough damage" and stuff.

What I was bringing up was merely the fact that Red Mage is not a top damage dealer, which does not requireany third party tool to realize.

I agree. In fact, I think we both agree here.

But here starts the real issue: This is just the profession's numbers. The vast majority use it to rate players, not professions, and now you have a critical mass of what the OP talks about when combined.

And this is where I understand. I get that people do that. But that's not what OP said. OP was specifically targeting players who either ask for nerfs/buffs to the class or feel depressed/down when they don't do well enough which I, personally, have never heard of. If this was what we were addressing, then I'd continue further. However, this will derail us from the topic too much if I continue from here.

I am for sure that, if no numbers would be shown and no emnity bar existed, nobody would know how much people rank and just play and work together instead of monitoring and vote-kicking professioins or players they think underperform. Granted, it'd be a bland gameplay experience, but I am talking more of experiment regarding the mindset then. The obvious slackers still need to be kicked for sure.

First, emnity bar comment I must adress. The emnity bar is a very disingenuous way of gauging one's DPS. Even before the changes to tanks in 5.0, it was wildly inconsistant on what was actually doing good damage. Bards would be higher because of higher APM (if they were playing well) and constant buffs thanks to songs. So if someone told you you were doing worse than the bard over the emnity bar, you had every right to be upset. That's a completely unfair comparison regardless of how well you're doing since a good bard would always be 2. And now its even moreso because it's just numbers and a single Red Mage raise can immediately switch them to being #2 or 3.

Second, we have two very hard extremes that could happen without a way of knowing how well we are doing (let's just assume that striking dummies don't exist either just to be safe), the first extreme are people who watch cast bars and animations doggedly to make sure your rotation is perfect and doing that with every player (and yes, these people already exist. As someone who leveled every class just to find out what all the animations look like so I can help newer people who might be struggling at the game I know there must be people even worse than I who do this in raids and tell people to shape up or gtfo if they don't.) Or, we have so little feedback each group has no way of knowing who is messing up so they just kick whatever the unpleasant jobs are or people that disagree with them without ever knowing they are the ones who are bad or etc if we hit a DPS wall at all. And both are very hard extremes. I'm not saying that parsing is a great thing, or saying that people who harass based off of parses are good (I'd rather kick them from parties) but just figuring out how to do a good rotation and why is a lot easier when you have something telling you how much damage you are doing in the end. Even if it's just a dummy in Kholusia you practice on every now and then.

Let me end this with a TL;DR
I chose RDM because of style and gameplay
Wanting a class you like playing as to do better compared to other classes is not a bad thing and it's not disliking or being bitter about it, it's showing you love it.
Despite all that is said both positive and negative, it's what gives us our rotations and makes it so we can play better than what we have now now that we have rotations and openers and makes the game slightly more interesting.

I'm sorry for the long post, I try not to make long posts like this but this feels like it had a lot I needed to address int his post since it was quoting me.