What is parsing?

[Avidria]

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There are actually some fairly odd or unintuitive things, and cases where you definitely need to adjust your rotation to optimize around a fight that aren't always obvious. I've run into plenty of dancers that didn't realize you're supposed to use standard step every time it comes off cooldown and not just to refresh the buff, and before it was baked into the bard rotation I'm sure there were plenty who didn't know it was better to clip army's paeon 10 seconds early in most cases.

I didn't play this game in ARR, but I'd actually be genuinely surprised if there weren't parsers then too? I mean, the only other MMO I've put serious endgame time into is WoW, and it had DPS meters practically from the beginning as far as I'm aware. Obviously people figure things out and clear stuff without them, nobody's ever said that wasn't possible, and a halfway decent player who takes any time at all to actually try to understand their class will probably do reasonably well. But to push top level damage and get really good... I mean. Fact is, you won't have any solid idea of whether you are really good if you can't quantify it. There's a huge and obvious gap between a bad player and a good one, for sure, but at higher levels of play, when everyone is at least kinda good? It's generally a little less obvious without the numbers, and even harder to gauge your own personal improvement.

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Also real good points. You can get pretty far without knowing any of this, but you're still likely to fall behind someone who knows this and knows how to use that knowledge.

Point being, parsers are a tool that makes it easier to figure out how to play your class well. Not one you absolutely Must Have, but one that absolutely does make a difference. The devs design the classes so they have some rotation, sure, but people tend to use whatever tools are available to figure out what that should be, and how it should change from fight to fight.