What is parsing?

[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.