Quote Originally Posted by Oizen View Post
The entire Abyssos fiasco should tell us its not something they test that much anymore either.
The testing process was explained in detail so obviously they do. They just miscalculated it.

Lets be real, these are dogshit. I shouldn't need to go into why but fact of the matter is the game's rotations are community made nothing you really learn in game outside of the standard 123.
I don't agree with going so far as to say that the rotations are community made. Little optimizations about when to press things, maybe, but generally, doing your GCD combos that say "Combo Action:" and even show the combo in compact mode is simple and abilities you can just press off cooldown in most cases, even if optimizations can be made with that. You can usually tell what is more optimal by potency differences alone, or when something isn't meant to be hardcast because it's a really long cast. To me these things were obvious without looking anything up.

Stone Sky is Sea is not at all more useful than a striking dummy in your lawn. It doesn't really simulate uptime/downtime, mechanics or anything, its just there so people cant point to it and pretend there's actually a bridge between casual content and higher end content, which there is not.
You know if you're either significantly undergeared or executing the rotation poorly if you can't beat the 4th floor savage dummy though. You should at least be able to get it down in the crafted gear for that tier, or be within seconds of it. It's true that it doesn't simulate mechanics, but there is a way to tell if DPS isn't good enough in a raid: you will die to enrage.

I'd also say a lot of tool tips are very vague, poorly worded, or littered with so many "Additional Effect" that figuring shit out isn't as easy as you're making it sound.
It completely depends if you read the tooltips and job guide in the Actions & Traits menu. If you did that, the game explains it fine. But a lot of people are not as detailed as I am. Is it really the game's fault if people are not thorough and don't read things well? It would be ideal to have a training area for executing the basic rotation but I think their argument is it changes every expansion or even more frequently than that sometimes because it's an MMO.

Kind of? They do make high and low end content, but not in a way that's conducive of offering players a road to get into the hardest content on their own.
True, but the [Practice] tags on parties is inviting enough. The only thing they really need to know before trying out some practice is to check Party Finder.