Quote Originally Posted by Packetdancer View Post
Relying on Cactbot makes you a careless player. But relying on a human raid caller does the same thing.

A raid caller -- whether automated or human -- should be a sanity check on your own read of mechanics, not a drill sergeant whose orders you blindly follow.

Sure, Cactbot can read a mechanic earlier than a human can in some cases. On the other hand, as I understand it there are mechanics Cactbot can't read/call in a sane manner, so will just be like "Do the mechanic now!" where a human could actually give better guidance. (Witness I've seen people blindly following Cactbot in P1S who die to Shackles of Time during Shining Cells consistently, and I've been told it's because Cactbot calls that in some sort of weird way.)

So it seems like there's places Cactbot will absolutely be better than a human raid caller, and there's places it'll also potentially be worse. And if you're relying on one rather than reading the mechanics for yourself, it seems like fundamentally the same problem to me regardless of whether it's Cactbot you're blindly following or, well, me.

I mean, the reason I raid-call is that it forces me to learn the fight's timeline and mechanics well enough that I can call them for other people. But I tend to assume they're going to be treating my callouts as reminders or a sanity-check, not as something they should blindly follow without question.
this is true.

Shining Cells it calls out the colour only (which you can literally see being casted anyway) and no text for the flails, you have to figure that out yourself.

The element stacks, it will only give you the colour you are debuffed by and nothing else, it will not solve the puzzle for you, you have to do that yourself.

Fourfold it will give you the debuff description as you get it (i.e 18S) it's up to you to solve it and it won't solve it for you.

It's basically just giving you the information you already have in a more easy to quick read format.