SE: How do I know if I am doing enough damage in Savage?

[Hastatus]

First it was hitting enrage in M5S at 10% health remaining and now I am bored as hell repeating the Desert phase of M6S just to wipe to adds. Let me be clear I can get two perfect grooves and no DDs and still see 10% and I know how to aoe/cleave and choose priority targets. In M5S I have seen parties who I thought sucked because there were DDs and deaths all over the place get less than 1% because somehow one or more are doing insane amounts of damage while other groups who have almost no DDs are barely able to get to 5%. Unless I have died or got a DD it is nearly impossible for me to know comparatively how much damage I did from one pull to the next. And I certainly do not know if I have done my share of the damage compared to the other players in the PF.

I can't change any parts of my rotation to see if one way is better than another. I can try to use three pots in M5S or use two with one at the 6-minute window and I have no means of gauging whether one method does more or less damage than the other. If I changed my rotation or used a certain pot combination and get a clear I might expect the lower damage method was better but in reality someone else might have done some godly amount of DPS...but I will never know. I can try and meld Determination and Direct Hit Rate just right but again I have no way of comparing my cumulative damage from one pull to the next.

The Battle Log is a joke. It's like you want us to do complex math using only Roman numerals and that is if the Battle Log still has the entire fight. The in game recorder might have been useful but you refuse to allow us to use it when it would be useful. How is the Stone-Sky-Sea striking dummy tuned to a raid? Am I supposed to use food or pots on it? Is killing it with 5 seconds left on the timer enough or does it require 10, 15, or 30 seconds? How am I supposed to know whether my gear is good enough at my skill level when I don't know if I am doing enough damage?

I never know how much damage I am doing and thus I never know if I am improving or whether I have reached my blind skill level cap that doesn't reach your hidden expectations. When will you explicitly state what percentage of the player base you are hoping will not clear the content. The more raids I do the more it feels like they are intended to be lootbox battles: you want to trick people into thinking they can clear the content but you only want so many clears. This is terrible game design. By the time I and other players get enough gear where the newest raids might be more fun than tedious because we have higher hopes that we can do enough damage some other content will have priority and finding players will become the tedious part.

You have obfuscated cumulative player damage so much all the while making it the most important requirement in harder content. These two things should not coexist. You need to show cumulative damage over time and or grade player performance in game on each pull. Players who do this harder content should be able to handle critiques from you. If we are supposed to use third party tools to read the Battle Logs ourselves then you need to openly tell players which types of third party tools are acceptable.

There is no worse feeling in this game than being able to do all the mechanics of a raid but not knowing if the failure in DPS is because of your skill or the skill of one or more of the other seven players. If I suck, tell me so I can stop wasting my time and the time of others.

[Sunako]

There is Stone sea sky training dummy for that.

Level 60 - The Dravanian Hinterlands (18, 11)
Level 70 - The Fringes (30, 11)
Level 80 - Kholusia (24, 38)
Level 90 - Thavnair (30, 17)
Level 100 - Heritage Found (16.5, 9)

[KageTokage]

It's honestly hard to be bad at DPS in XIV as long you're following the basic principles like:

1. Always be casting.

2. Align your party buffs with the rest of the group and pop all of your offensive cooldowns while they're active.

3. Don't overflow on resources like ninki, awakening gauge, etc.

4. Don't sit on offensive cooldowns unless you can get more use out of them from delaying them briefly due to elements like adds spawning, forced downtime, etc.

[Gurgeh]

But it's not surprising if OP has forgotten and is oblivious to it.
Where in Dutyfinder is the instance you should just be able to queue into, to remind you it's there and make it convenient.
The NPC isn't even clearly marked on the map. (Or at least it wasn't last time I looked in EW.)
Just doing that shouldn't be a big deal. Ought to be possible by next minor patch once the decision is made to do it.
It's probably even quite fun for some people.
Who knows... if you wanted to be really ambitious, you could even add healing checks for Healers. Maybe even mitigation check for tanks.
Adding it for Expert dungeons might be nice to get people in the mindset. Although, I rather fear, is 'auto attack enabled', would suffice.

[Supersnow845]

Stone sea and sky is completely useless as a mechanic to judge your DPS because it basically just tells you if you sufficiently understand the fundamentals of your rotation, but absolutely nothing about how you are performing on a fight specific basis

[KageTokage]

...Yeah, just because you can kill the dummy for a fight like M8S does not mean you're gonna be able to maintain that number in practice when the fight is extremely movement heavy and rough if not impossible for some jobs to keep full uptime in.

[Jeeqbit]

You know if you are able to do enough damage by doing the Stone, Sky, Sea dummy for M8S. Yes, go right for the M8S test - don't bother with the M5S test. If you can defeat that in the timer, then you should be beyond good for M5S and are clearly able to do your basic rotation well enough that you can contribute the bare minimum in a vacuum. If you fail it with 1% left, don't worry, you can put that down to crit RNG and will probably beat it if you repeat it anyway.

You know if you, as a collective team, are doing enough damage, by if you see enrage or not. Seeing it means every member of the team should try to do more damage. They can achieve this by looking at:

• Aligning powerful attacks with raid-wide damage buffs better.
• Using the latest HQ food (Mate Cookie)
• Using the latest damage potions and aligning them with raid buffs (Grade 3 Gemdraught). Technically you can get up to 3 uses out of these, but often you only manage 2 before a boss dies.
• Avoiding damage downs.
• ABC (Always Be Casting). If the DPS check is not tight, it can be alright to focus on mechanics just so that you don't wipe the party and waste their time, but as you get comfortable with the fight, you'll probably find it easier to ABC during difficult mechanics.
• Crafted gear with full pentamelds (5 materias added, which involves losing lots of materia), and the Ornate body (5 guaranteed materia slots makes it almost as good as max ilvl gear due to crit+dh+det).
• EX4 weapon.
• As much Mathematics tomestone gear as you can get (currently 3 is possible, soon a 4th).
• Party composition - there is the 5% damage bonus for having 1 tank, 1 healer, 1 melee, 1 magic and 1 ranged physical.

In M5S I have seen parties who I thought sucked because there were DDs and deaths all over the place get less than 1% because somehow one or more are doing insane amounts of damage while other groups who have almost no DDs are barely able to get to 5%.

Pretty good sign that those party members were just not doing the above things that I listed. Probably new or casual players that don't know basic things like ABC, pots and snapshots. Having played this game 10 years I can tell you that beating enrage of the literal first floor in week 1 is only gonna be really hard if the rest of your party aren't good. I mean, in many tiers I've still seen enrage in the first floor up until the 7th week, but that was when the rotations were harder and more punishing, y'know.

I jumped into M5S yesterday again with a party that had just farmed out a full set of EX4 weapons and boss was melting during the first few mechanics despite damage downs or deaths. So it really does depend a lot on the group. Some of your parties probably didn't even get EX4 weapons.

Am I supposed to use food or pots on it?

I'd suggest doing that. Bring all your advantages to the table and don't hold back.

you want to trick people into thinking they can clear the content but you only want so many clears.

The savage clear rates are pretty high though. The last tier was cleared by over 50% in JP and over 30% in NA. I don't think they desire anyone to be unable to clear, but it is very frustrating in PF where your skill alone isn't enough and you have to rely on 7 potentially not-good players that are holding you back. The game design could be better, but a lot of people do it despite these issues.

If I suck, tell me so I can stop wasting my time and the time of others.

Well firstly, Stone Sky Sea gives a basic indication if you can do your base rotation. Being unable to do that suggests a fundamental issue such as breaking combos regularly or something. Then if you've gone through the list I made and are doing that, then it's probably not you that is preventing the clear.

SE intends players to interact with eachother and socialize. They say this occasionally when they release new rewards. "Ask players around you for hints about where to find it" (obviously people will just ask their FC or google it), but that's SE's intention, to get you to participate in the social fabric of the game a bit.

In this case, you can look up The Balance that give optimization advice. If you're following all that advice then, again, it's probably not you that is preventing the clear.

[Sunako]

...Yeah, just because you can kill the dummy for a fight like M8S does not mean you're gonna be able to maintain that number in practice when the fight is extremely movement heavy and rough if not impossible for some jobs to keep full uptime in.

I think dummy is scaled upwards for that reason and if you can execute your rotation against dummy, you most likely understand where you lose dps in actual fight as well.

[Aco505]

Stone, Sea and Sky has also been awfully balanced in the past and has a timer of... 3 minutes iirc, often forcing non-standard play to succeed with stuff like pre-raid BiS.

As a rule of thumb, make sure to ABC, to not drift your CDs and to avoid overcapping. Recording your game play and then reviewing it to spot potential mistakes is also a great way to improve or know that you're on the right path.

[brinn12]

Through legal means, you can't. And you probably never will. When it comes to discussing game balance, SE devs just pretend they don't see players admitting to breaking the Terms of Service. It's an unhealthy, 10-year relationship that benefits no one.

Also for some people here, striking dummies do nothing for a fight like M6S.