Quote Originally Posted by Euphares View Post
However, getting greys doesn't mean you are bad forever, it just means you need a lot of improvement, so everyone should be given the grace and respect to improve, but in the same token, the grey player needs to understand that they don't have any credentials to back up their opinions, and will be treated as such.
When I decided to start trying current endgame content, I was... not good at it. Sure, I was a perfectly competent healer in casual content, but when I say I was "not good" at high-end endgame content I mean "even when I didn't eat floor, my healing choices were at best 'unoptimized' and at worst 'panicked and haphazard'." And in terms of DPS parses? Single-digit gray.

Which was, to put it mildly, kinda depressing.

But the thing was, I took those terrible parses as a measure that I needed to improve. And I figured out more of what I was doing wrong, and corrected that, and got to double-digit grey. Then green! Then blue! Sometimes purple!

And sure, DPS parses aren't a wholly objective measure of skill; they don't take into account differences between party performance as a whole, nor ilevel differences across the community between different parses, nor various factors in terms of avoidable party damage that can affect healer DPS parses.

But I could see my raw numbers aside from the parse rank -- "this is how much damage you did", "this is how much healing you did, and how much of it was needless overheal", "this is how many times you ate floor" -- and see that they were not-great, work on figuring out how I could improve, and see a new set of numbers be better. That made my progress actually concrete to me, something I could see from week to week. As much as it stung to see those terrible numbers at the beginning, I chose to approach it as "okay, this just means I have a lot of ground for improvement". And being able to see that improvement -- even as much of a margin of error and variance as parses have -- was definitely rewarding.

I mean, I am definitely not a super-elite raider or anything; I have defined myself before in many a thread on raiding as being "more an asset than a liability". But I am worlds better than I was in those early runs when I didn't have a clue what the heck I was doing, and I'd say that's because I took those terrible parses to heart not as "well, apparently I suck at this game entirely" but more as "okay, I am clearly not grasping some of the intricacies here and can obviously do better" and started working on figuring out how.

So for all that I remain absolutely convinced that introducing an official parser in-game would be taken by a non-zero number of jerks as implicit permission from the devs for their whole 'being jerks' thing, I also am firmly convinced that some sort of tool along those lines can be invaluable for improvement.