Quote Originally Posted by Absurdity View Post
It is however hard to gauge your own performance without those tools, but that is an issue with the game, not necessarily with parsing. The game doesn't tell you anything about your performance, it doesn't tell you if you're pressing your buttons in the correct order or not because there is basically no feedback from the game itself and no, the enmity meter is not in any way useful for judging your own performance.
The only somewhat useful implementation in the game itself is Stone, Sky, Sea and even that suffers from tuning issues that can make it impossible to beat on certain jobs, regardless of how good your dps actually is.

So while parsing is in no way required for good dps it is often the only way to know whether you're doing good dps or whether you have to improve.
The most important thing here however is not using a parser but wanting to improve, that's the thing that actually makes you better. For that a parser is definitely useful but no requirement. Optimal rotations have been found out by the community and are readily available for people looking for them. At that point it's just practicing the execution of them.