Quote Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu View Post
But here's the thing: If you have only one casted nuke and one DoT, I can easily criticize you for not pushing them because it's absolutely trivial for me to look over at the party list and see whether that nuke is going off at the same approximate frequency as my own GCDs, or to check the enemy's debuffs and the timers on them. In essence, your kit gives you nothing to hide behind.

If instead you have multiple buttons, maybe one of which is an instant that gets pushed with some relatively high frequency, maybe some or all of which tie into a gauge spender/builder thingy, then it becomes much more difficult for me to judge whether you're DPSing optimally. Maybe I didn't see a cast because you hit an instant instead. Maybe I didn't see some skill because you don't yet have the gauge for it. Your kit gives you plenty of places to hide. I'd have to specifically be gunning for you or just assert rudely, without evidence, that you need to "git gud."

And anyone who's going to be rude in the "more buttons" scenario is assuredly going to be rude in the "fewer buttons" scenario, so there's no loss there, only a potential gain.
In theory you certainly could criticize the exact cadence of a person's timing. But I'm not concerned about that for a few reasons:
In all the casual content I've done with less-skilled players, I've never seen anyone make that kind of criticism. I've seen lots of criticism about not casting specific spells, though.

And that's probably because "You aren't pressing your buttons at optimal times" and "You never cast Glarega" are two very different kinds of criticism. One is talking about never using a valuable part of a player's kit, while one is much more down the nitpick road. Given that difference, I don't think there's a reason to presume that in the absence of Glarega, good faith criticism about never casting Glarega would simply be replaced by good faith criticism about button timing optimization. Again, I've never seen such a criticism.
Have you ever seen criticism like that while running a dungeon? And if so, how frequently?