They Should Add An Official Damage Meter With One Condition

[Shurrikhan]

Why would DPS mains -ever- have anything that could possibly be construed as a benchmark for their success introduced into FFXIV? Whining about healers and tanks not doing their jobs is standard fare. Anything that could possibly reveal anything about a DPS's performance is vile heresy that blackens the tongue of any who dare speak it. FFXIV is way past giving the toxic casual playerbase any kind of pass/fail metric beyond just wiping in the content itself (where they can still imagine it's all the tank/healer's fault). Any remote potential that someone *could* possibly maybe pass any kind of judgement on a You Don't Pay My Sub player in any way, even if they don't say it out loud, if it puts the slightest judgemental thought in one single person's head, is strictly verboten.

DPS is the comparatively entitled role. Obviously so, since Shadowbringers. And I say this as a one who plays primarily DPS.

We don't have any short-term pass/fail metrics out of a few fights, from among a couple difficulty tiers, of one type of content. We don't have any further role-specific duties. Even while we might switch goalposts on a dime in regard to the other roles, such that their job is, above all, to hasten runs in one encounter, and to, above all, heal or mitigate our everything (including our blatant mistakes) in the next, measures of our own contribution, by being solely and directly damage and therefore most easily gauged, can be rendered as "toxic".

Yes, healers have their own Sylphies and tanks, much more rarely, have those who'd take their light party hostage over pairings of hypersensitivity and an oversized main-character complex if the remainder don't realize they can clear even without a tank (or a 4th for that matter), but getting past those are discrete milestones compared to getting past the idea that there is nothing wrong with learning from empirical data. Somehow the "numbers are scary (even when fully contextualized as to be far from abstract or misleading)" narrative is forever.

And the worry isn't even that it puts "a judgmental thought" in one's head; the rare wipe, or a run taking 30% longer than usual, is already enough for that. It's the worry that, empirically informed, people might better know what they're talking about, such that progress --rather than the stagnation of glaring matches, blind finger-pointing, or quickly disbanded parties-- becomes the norm.