Just give us a list of what addons we can use.

[HyoMinPark]

First of all you can look at logs afterwards. Second of all are you advocating that parsers are necessary and content is designed around the idea that everyone is using them? I get it. We humans, gamers especially are self centered half brained idiots that won't be able to recognize their mistake unless something points it out with irrefutable proof. We loathe the idea of putting extra effort into anything which can lead for some to expect instant gratification for little effort. But at that point I have to ask. Why the hell we beg for harder content if in our perception we need 3rd party tools to complete it in the first place?

Well, first of all—you completely missed my point. Quite gloriously at that.

You insisted that the individual will “figure it out eventually” when it comes to the mistakes they are making. I said that the actuality is they likely won’t because this game does not tell you you are ever doing anything wrong when it comes to your performance or rotation. Just like it doesn’t tell you that you are doing anything inherently right. There is zero feedback provided, so there is no sure way for you to know what mistakes you made and how to rectify them. In my 6+ years of playing, I’ve met more individuals who thought they were doing absolutely nothing wrong when it was clear that there were issues present. But the game won’t tell them what that is. Heck, it does not even tell you how to string together a rotation beyond “this button lit up after that one, maybe press it now?”.

This is not saying that add-ons are needed to clear high-end content. You are deliberately misconstruing my argument. However, they are used when it comes to formulating the basics of any job rotation all the way up to the min-max optimization level. These things weren’t just “figured out eventually”. They were calculated over hours of testing and simulations to find out what the rotation should be for this job or that. They are also used in tandem with other third-party platforms such as The Website That Shall Not Be Named and XIVAnalysis to troubleshoot issues that might be causing a roadblock in prog. A good example is figuring out deaths due to taking too much damage from a raidwide. Will this game tell you why people died outside of they took more damage than their HP pool? No. Will it tell you that you needed an extra 10% mitigation to survive comfortably? No. Will it tell you in a non-convoluted way that the NIN missed your shields and that’s why they were overkilled by 5,000 HP? Not without scrolling through a cumbersome combat log. Why do that when a third-party application can simplify the information the same way copying it into an Excel spreadsheet to parse would? You cannot reasonably expect anyone to sit there combing over the in-game combat log over using a tool that streamlines the information. And that doesn’t make them stupid, since that’s what you want to insinuate here.

Utilizing these things doesn’t make you stupid, nor any less capable of clearing high-end content. Anyone who argues that it does is foolish.

If you want to say that you are a “self-centered, half-brained” individual for utilizing additional tools to troubleshoot problems and improve yourself and the performance of your team, per your response to me, then you can do that. However, using a tool to optimize and figure out mistakes doesn’t make you one. If anything, it shows a desire to expand on your own growth when it comes to proficiency at a job, its rotation, and the content you are in. The opposite of a “self-centered, half-brained idiot”, in my opinion.


This has nothing to do with the third-party apps that automate gameplay. I’m talking about the barebones here: parsers and the programs that exist to use the data obtained by the parser (which is information streamlined directly from the game itself). If you think a calculator is cheating, I hope you never made use of one for any sort of exam while you were in school. That’s all a parser is: a calculator.