Quote Originally Posted by Dracosavarian View Post
A few things overall. I’ll try to be succinct due to my own time limits. It sadly won’t go over every detail and outright specifics.

I have a Co Tank that I work with explicitly on runs. He a warrior, I as Dark Knight. ( Used to anyways, really not happy with Drk at the moment and thus have abandoned it as protest. Until they fix it. ) But he and I operate on a near instinctive level. Whereas others need to communicate often, he and I just synchronize on runs like jaeger pilots and automatically do what is needed in concert with one another with next to no verbal communication. Sometimes it’s kind of scary. But we both use that as a tool to gauge how well we are doing in our fights. If something falls out of sync, we discuss it and go over the details. We both know each others class, so we observe one another and give constant feedback.

This is in addition to frequent communication, and planning with the team that I run with. We break down each others good points and weaknesses and provide feedback to each other, using various end game content as our active yard stick and the speed with which we tackle it.
While communication is great, as is discussing rotations, mitigation uses, etc., they don’t give you a metric to measure your performance. They don’t give you hard and fast numbers—at most you understand that you have met the minimum required to clear, or that using Reprisal here versus there was better with you and your co-tank. But they don’t tell you your damage threshold, which isn’t very high in most fights since they don’t have enrage timers. In others, like Extremes, they are very generous with their DPS checks, so even with a myriad of deaths, a group of half-way decent players can clear them.

Without, you don’t have a metric to determine if you are playing your role better or not. All you really have is “feelycraft”.

An example I can use is Hades Ex, and the frequent checks the fight involves. If we as a group are able to burst him down to 3% hp in 1st phase in relatively short order, we know our checks are on point, as is our rotations. We also communicate damage windows, etc to help. Eventually, you run with the same people enough, it kind of becomes second nature.
Even so, this isn’t giving you a metric to measure performance. It is telling you that you have met the bare minimum required. Depending on when you’re attempting Hades EX would also depend on how much of this is attributed to skill and how much is attributed to simply outgearing him and rofl-stomping him. It’s not a decent metric to measure personal performance or your level of skill. While skill is measured as more than just a pretty number, the number is still just as important as communication and proper toolkit usage. They all go hand-in-hand.

Another tool is Stone, Sky, Sea for Heavensward back in the day, or more common now, Circles of Answering and The Lawns. I use these to calculate and adjust my rotations for things, to see if I can shore anything up. It’s not the same as a boss fight directly, but ESO uses what is effectively the same method in their game with their own parsing dummies you can place in that games housing.
SSS and the like are flawed. In Stormblood and Shadowbringers, there were dummies present for some jobs where they straight up could not kill them in the time allotted despite having a near-perfect rotation. Versus the actual fights where the jobs had no problem performing at an average or even above average standard. In SB, it was common to see the physical ranged lack the personal damage to kill the dummies—BRD especially since so much of its damage could be skewed by piercing resistance down and snapshotting critical hit buffs for more Repertoire procs. The RNG nature of the job worked against it for the SSS striking dummies, yet it was considered insanely strong by the end of the expansion and highly valued in groups.

I’ll also go in solo on some bosses in ex trials ( used to do this a lot back in the day ) to push my limits and see whether I could solo the boss or not just by myself as Drk. And I would use various bosses as trials by fire to push myself and see what I could eke out.
If you mean soloing old EX bosses, that is also meaningless. What use is soloing ARR or HW primals as a level 60, 70, 80 or 90 job? It doesn’t tell you how well you’re performing. I could duo ARR extremes with a friend back in HW on DRK. That didn’t tell me that I was performing DRK at any sort of decent level—all it told me was that I was overtuned for the boss I was currently fighting, and that worked to my advantage. It gave me no information on if the rotation I was using was optimal or not; if I was maximizing my oGCD usages; if I had used my mitigations correctly; if I was even doing decent damage for my item level. It told me none of that. It’s not a good metric.

Even being in a group for current EXs won’t tell you that. Despite what some people think. I always think back to when I once was kicked from a Tsukuyomi EX “farm” party by a SAM and DRG pair. I died due to lack of healing, and remained dead on the floor for a full minute before I was raised. And I was still ahead of both the SAM and DRG in damage by about 1,000 DPS—as a BRD. After we proceeded to wipe, another person commented that they didn’t think we had the damage to clear—and I was blamed for that because I died. Not the DRG or the SAM, who automatically assumed that just because they didn’t die and were melee DPS that they were doing more than me, the BRD. Except that wasn’t the case. How do I know? Well, a parser told me that. Unfortunately, I was unable to defend myself and just had to take the blame in silence.

That’s some, but not all of it. But it’s worked for me overall through the years.
Unfortunately, your methods yield no hard and fast metric of your performance. Just because you can string the buttons together as they light up doesn’t mean that you are actually performing well. You will never know your true individual performance without a parser because this game does not give any indication that you are doing well or doing poorly. Especially in content that’s just a war of attrition. The best it gives is for bosses that enrage—but even that won’t pinpoint the blame. It says there isn’t enough damage, but it doesn’t point to the source.

Without clearly knowing what you are doing wrong, you cannot improve as much as you think.