What is parsing?

[HyoMinPark]

I never denied that the players who make the guides use parsers. Never denied it isn't helpful for new players etc. who maybe want to get into the endgame quick buy boosters and need to learn quick how to perform well.

Your post I replied to insinuated the complete opposite. You asked how guidemakers found out what rotations were, and then pointed to the game telling them. Not a parse. This game gives you tooltips and base potencies, and it lights up for straight combos. It does not tell you how to string them together in any form of a rotation. Guidemakers configured this using parse and simulation data.

But sorry to burst your bubble, the game is really straight forward when it comes to rotations. There isn't any variables like for example on world of warcraft where you can use differend specs or talents and all that stuff. In XIV there is one fix rotation made by the developers, there is one way how a job is meant to be played. And you don't need a guide to tell you that especially if you play from lvl 1 up to max level where you can get used with every new action to said action and new combo chains they give you.

Except this game is not straight-forward at all when it comes to rotations. One can figure out a basic one on their own, but the game does not tell you nor illustrate it for you. It gives no hints on it outside of relying on you, the player, to read the tooltips and figure it out. Which, I recall someone else saying in this same thread, people are very bad at doing.

Take BRD for example. This game doesn’t tell you what your song rotation is. Instead, it hands you the songs in the following order: Mage’s Ballad, Army’s Paeon, and Wanderer’s Minuet. But that is not the correct rotation in a single target situation. The correct rotation is Minuet > Mage’s > Army’s, with Army’s being clipped at 10 seconds remaining to re-enter Minuet the second it is off cooldown. Does the game tell you this? Not at all. Does it tell you to use Raging Strikes with Minuet in a single target scenario? Not at all. What about Apex Arrow at 95-100 gauge and not a second before (in a single target scenario)? Not at all. Parsers and simulators found this out. None of it is explained in the game.

Same goes for all jobs. DNC and GNB start at level 60 and what does the game tell you to do in terms of a rotation for them? Read tooltips and figure it out. Doesn’t sound very straightforward and handholdy to me. Not in the way your post I replied to implied.

And it still doesn't answer the question, how do you guys (and gurls) think they did it before parsers and guides? Guess fellas never cleared stuff before these people descended from the heavens to bless us with their wisdom cause we can't use our brains. Guess back then in ARR all our clears were just pure luck, especially when the game came fresh out. Weird.

Clear rates weren’t that high in ARR (buggy raids aside), and people didn’t really know how to play the game just yet. However, there were still add-ons even back then. Just not the ones we’ve developed and use today.

[Xuled]

Unimportant in 14. Absolutely all important in WoW.

Factually untrue. Even if you disagree with it don’t downplay the legitimate (read: not harassing) usages.

[xxmiamorecadenza]

It’s interesting how a majority of folk who have harsh opinions against parsers and their general use are people who have either no experience in higher tier content or people who have deep, deep gray parses to show off.

[SwordswornFox]

It’s interesting how a majority of folk who have harsh opinions against parsers and their general use are people who have either no experience in higher tier content or people who have deep, deep gray parses to show off.

I don't do high end content and usually avoid the talk of parsing in threads. Been bullied in several games 'casual' content for poor numbers in a parse when I even flat out told people I'm learning content/class/etc. And that just turns me off of the whole thing.

I have no problem with people using it for personal improvement, just don't talk to me about it.

[Naaura]

I don't do high end content and usually avoid the talk of parsing in threads. Been bullied in several games 'casual' content for poor numbers in a parse when I even flat out told people I'm learning content/class/etc. And that just turns me off of the whole thing.

I have no problem with people using it for personal improvement, just don't talk to me about it.

I wonder what made parsing so popular in FFXIV. Surely lack of dps meters is to avoid bullying and gameplay compelling. And the increase demand in popularity is a result to off-FFXIV gamers such as WoW gamer's habits leaking into FFXIV? I hope not.
I understand the need for it, I am just concerned with the toxicity that gets generated from it :/

[Risvertasashi]

I wonder what made parsing so popular in FFXIV. Surely lack of dps meters is to avoid bullying and gameplay compelling. And the increase demand in popularity is a result to off-FFXIV gamers such as WoW gamer's habits leaking into FFXIV? I hope not.
I understand the need for it, I am just concerned with the toxicity that gets generated from it :/

FF14 has a lot of strict and difficult-to-meet DPS checks. In high end content, failing to meet the DPS check is one of the most common failure points, especially with pug/PF parties.

And it's relatively obvious when other mechanics fail - like if someone didn't stack for the stack marker, or a DPS ate a tankbuster, well, it's pretty obvious from the sudden loss of health and life.

When the boss enrages you know there isn't enough DPS. But if people are just good enough at their rotation to look competent, it isn't obvious exactly where the problem is unless you turn to third party tools. (And if someone just wants to know if they're doing their rotation right so they're not bringing down a group, that also isn't really discernable via the tools and feedback mechanisms available in game)

[Shurrikhan]

I wonder what made parsing so popular in FFXIV. Surely lack of dps meters is to avoid bullying and gameplay compelling. And the increase demand in popularity is a result to off-FFXIV gamers such as WoW gamer's habits leaking into FFXIV? I hope not.
I understand the need for it, I am just concerned with the toxicity that gets generated from it :/

Toxicity tends to be proportionate to the (A) need and (B) room for finger-pointing.

If you think not having convenient information on hand somehow denies people the room enough for tossing blame, you're in for a rude awakening. Suspicion with no shared grounds or frame of reference only deepens that area of toxicity.

The only "advantage" you get out of DADT policy in regards to parsing is people are discouraged from telling you what you did wrong and will instead kick you in silence.

The only "advantage" you'd get out of having no parsers whatsoever (an impossibility, but let us imagine) is you'd have to roll the dice far more often before getting a party who are actually sufficiently prepared for the content they've signed up for, as you'd be that much less able to cut only the chaff and thus be forced to simply disband outright.

Far more of this community's toxicity is resultant from the soft-exclusion of parsers (and the ways that has bled over to soft-bans on advice or constructive criticism and expectations of at least minimum competence) than from parsers themselves.

[HyoMinPark]

I wonder what made parsing so popular in FFXIV. Surely lack of dps meters is to avoid bullying and gameplay compelling. And the increase demand in popularity is a result to off-FFXIV gamers such as WoW gamer's habits leaking into FFXIV? I hope not.
I understand the need for it, I am just concerned with the toxicity that gets generated from it :/

Likely because current encounter design focuses on damage and not much else.

There’s no such thing as debuffing the bosses anymore. Main stat debuffs like old Rage of Halone’s STR down and Dragon Kick/OG Delirium’s INT down were removed going into 4.0. DoTs are slowly being consolidated where they aren’t being outright removed. Enmity management died with 5.0. Healing requirements outside of early progression are not that strict. Even in the hardest content in the game, healers don’t spend 50% of their time healing. Crowd control hasn’t been an active thing in forever. Nowadays you have the occasional interrupt in a fight that is a must, but they aren’t that common.

In terms of design, gimmicks are few and far between. Most are not hard to grasp. Encounters are incredibly scripted. Some fights have some randomness to things like debuffs your character can get, but mechanically, the fights never deviate. Occasionally, you’ll have X mechanic pattern before Y mechanic pattern, but that’s not a normal thing.

A lot of emphasis is placed on pure damage. The developers have removed many of the other nuances from combat.


As for toxicity and gameplay compelling, that exists with or without a parser. It’s not tied exclusively to parser usage. You see it all the time in casual content where parsers aren’t necessary (and likely aren’t being used at all) in in the “slow pulls” versus “wall-to-wall pulls”/“dungeon speedrun” arguments. Somewhere, someone is being “toxic” and “forcing a playstyle” onto another person. Usually it’s the people who want to do small pulls/not rush the dungeon that claim “toxic speed runners” are forcing them to go too fast, but not always. That’s just the more often seen scenario that gets posted here.

[Risvertasashi]

If you think not having convenient information on hand somehow denies people the room enough for tossing blame, you're in for a rude awakening. Suspicion with no shared grounds or frame of reference only deepens that area of toxicity.

Just to add on to this, I want to note that from time to time, you'll still see things like, say, a tank or party blaming a healer for not healing, when the tank took 500k damage and so obviously failed a mechanic.

But a healer that knows how to use death reports or other info available to themselves can defend themselves from this.

But but but, even still, some people just really want to be toxic, and will (in this example) blame the healer or whoever else anyways, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

By the way, I do hope I'm not giving an impression that FF14 is super toxic. Some parties are, but most I've been in have been polite, and helpful when someone messes up (though if someone gets upset at being corrected, that can go downhill...), and so on.

[Katie_Kitty]

Lots of haters here. It's for people who like seeing numbers, simple as that.