Stowaways in High-End Content?

[Seera1024]

Are you actually complaining about players not being perfect in a prog party?

Last time I checked humans make mistakes and while I have learned the mechanics for Endwalker EX2 fight and have cleared it multiple times, I've yet to get through it without dying or getting a vuln stack. Doesn't mean I'm a stowaway if I join a prog party, It just means I'm not ready for a farm party with strangers as I mostly run with a static who uses discord for voice coordination.

ACT is a tool. Any static that solely uses the parse number and doesn't look into or ask about the why's isn't a static you want to join anyway. Even if you were someone who is playing at the top level of their class.

Players who properly use ACT are factoring gear into their interpretation of a person's parse. They're talking with the player to ask why a drop in the ABC - maybe their computer decided to minimize their game to inform about some update for a random program. And many statics will also look for multiple parses to gain a feeling of if the person is overall improving or their trends. And to remove the one bad run from consideration as we all have those days where we just play bad. If the one parse mentioned earlier was such a fun, any static worth their salt would know and either disregard or ask depending on number of parses available. If that run was an outlier, you're likely to remember the reason why.

Did you know that intentionally dying to mechanics in a prog party is not abnormal. Players will bait mechanics. While progging Endwalker Ex1, we had an early pull as we had someone seeing how close he could be could get and went one pixel too far. We had a melee DPS told to not worry about dying while seeing where the safe melee spot for a mechanic is. That that is part of progging. So the BLM standing in an AoE could be seeing how many casts he has until he sees to aetherial manipulate to a buddy and found out that number. So what you may see and think his a mistake may be that player learning the fight.

[Colt47]

Well, that and people label others who care about damage part of the ACT culture when there are people who don't even use ACT and just focus on resources like the balance to optimize rotation. The issue is that no matter how good someone is individually with mechanics and damage, if the group is full of inexperienced players or players that just fail mechanics consistently, it isn't going to matter.

I can tell you after swapping from warrior to reaper, I've had nights where I'm sitting there depressed, having used all tinctures, zero damage downs, full uptime, with the only sin being missing a gluttony window and being one second off on arcane circle, and you still wipe to p1s enrage because you have a black mage taking damage downs every other mechanic and a tank not going far enough out with chain of purgation. And then there is p2s where people can seem to execute everything right, but then it comes to overflow 3 and the party just dies due to not being on top of positioning after the first set of arrows go off.

With that kind of thing going on, can you really blame people wanting to use ACT just to make sure they aren't part of the issue? People are spending hours trying to clear and if they happen to make the brave sacrifice of running a static, they might even be giving up that ideal PUG clear window at the start of the week to try and get others through content.

And for the record I think the majority of woes with savage would go away if they changed the way they did the loot so that having people along who cleared doesn't reduce the reward. It's supposed to be a gating mechanic, but really it just enforces this day one "gotta clear this Tuesday or else" attitude. It generates the toxicity that lurks in the savage community probably just as much, if not more so, than bad players.

I'm also going to add that people who are new to savage and have challenges are not "bad players". The kind of people I'm referring to are those that have not even mastered the basics of their own rotations by level 90. The only thing people learn in savage is the mechanics of the fight and how to modify their rotation to deal with phases. It's not the place to learn basic gun breaker rotation or dark knight burst phases.