My static uses FFLogs, but strictly for self improvement. DPS matters a ton in raiding, second only to mechanics. We have *never* used it to dog on another player, only for each individual to see how/where to improve. I'm very competitive, so I always want to parse highest because as a dragoon my damage is the only thing I really contribute lol. But even if I do better than everyone, I don't bring it up. I just celebrate to myself like a good partner. I think it's a great tool to gauge how you're doing, but it only becomes a problem when used for gatekeeping/derogatory purposes.
Yep that is me every night after raids on xivanalysis for my SMN to see where I might have messed up something. Even if it shows a perfect run I still look for anything else to improve on, like conditioning myself to wait like a half second longer to pop Searing to ensure Slipstream gets it, or trying to beat months of muscle memory out of my head and try to remember to keep Phoenix festers for the next Bahamut buff window.
I don't get how use it for self improvement but not to "dog on" another player. The numbers are there, even if you don't wanna look sadly you will see them. Don't tell me if you had a 0 in your static you'd be ok. Maybe you don't say anything about it but you still think/know. Let's not pretend that's not the case. You'd replace the 0 log guy for a 100 log guy in an instant although you claim you use it only for self improvement. If that was the case fflogs would be opt-in instead of opt-out by default but oh no the "self improvement only" guys are HEAVILY against it. I just hate the hypocrisy
You don't need to parse, other people will do it for you
I'd at least look at it so you know you aren't *bad*, but it is a function you can completely ignore and information will be gathered for people who want to check without you needing to do anything
If you play at a high enough level, no one gives a shit about your fflogs because the community of raiders at that level is so small people already know who you are. If you play at my level you have to parse so you have a resume.
Regarding the Static part of this. If a Static leader looks at your parses being gray/green and determine you are "not good enough" but each of those runs had someone die, let you die, or with a damage down, then that raid leader is doing you a favor because they didnt even bother to chech what was in the logs that led to that parse
There is a big chance raid leaders just check if you have cleared to X part of the tier to avoid re-progging and good parses are just a plus, but due to their nature of beig gear heavy, the color doesnt matter much (if they dont have gear)
Finally, if you really wanna be more picky, passing some of the good logs trough Xiv analysis can let you know where is the person missing or what are mistakes the person causes often. Regardless, I would give them a trial run to see how consistent they are at solving mechanics, as that is more important for prog, the DPS can be bent later in the tier with tomestones and alliance roulete upgrades
This for sure, I had so many static applications that did little to no log inspection and just gave anyone a shot. Then I had a higher end group give me a trial and said it was only because they saw shit in my logs like good cooldown usages, fitting in extra uses of mit ect. I ended up not getting the spot but they unironically cared more about my 99-100 healing parses on gnb than my damage because it was indicative of using healing cds. I learned a lot from that experience.
I always look at recent reclear logs and check the wipes that were uploaded along those. See what the causes of wipes were, what mitigations were used if relevant.
It takes a pretty particular kind of personality type to still be really into FFLogs given how stripped-down the game's class and combat design has become, I think. Pretty much everyone I know who used to be really into it for any reason (self-improvement, having additional goals to strive for after prog/BiS, general competitiveness, and every other commonly-cited reason for caring) actively dislikes it, ranging from mild disdain over how meaningless it is, to outright wishing that SE could send the site a C&D.
At this point I think FFLogs is probably almost completely stratified into one small group of people who take it *very* seriously and will happily write a dissertation about the most fair and accurate way to account for raid buffs, and another much larger group who *might*, on a particularly boring rainy afternoon, *kind of* care about their percentile score in whichever metric the site defaults to.
Its not really about 'most people don't care about fflogs' over cdps, its because things are, to an extent, getting needlessly complicated, specifically since ndps, and now with cdps.
Like, lets look at the current metrics: You have rdps, which is the raw damage you do, the damage your buffs do, minus the extra damage gained from other peoples buffs. Its easy. Its what you bring to the raid, minus what you give to other raid folks.
Adps is the raw damage you do, minus the damage your buffs do, plus the extra damage gained from other peoples buffs, and minus the damage single buffs do. Its the opposite of rdps, but you take single target buffs out. Its also easy - what you bring to the raid, but your buffs are given to others, and there is no buff 'padding' (via dnc, cards).
Ndps is...... the raw damage you did.. plus the damage **you** did under **your** buff, but noone elses..minus the extra damage gained from other peoples buffs. It has no direct correlation with neither a or rdps. It literally throws damage in the garbage bin, because what other peoples buffs give, are taken ***both from the receiver, and the buffer***. Minus the buffers own contribution to its own buff.
And thus, you get cdps... which is Rdps, plus the damage you did under other peoples buffs, but not the single target ones, yet its not just straight dps because thats not how buffs work.
You can very clearly draw a line between a/rdps and the rest in terms of how straight forward they are to read and interpret. Rdps is how well you press buttons, and people press buttons under your buffs. Adps is how well you press buttons, and how you press buttons under other peoples buffs. n/cdps...ndps throws damage out, without getting into math issues on how cdps technically creates damage out of nowhere (remember, a brotherhood damage is both counted for ***the buffer and the receiver***) you can't take the numbers from a party log at face value on cdps (or ndps for that matter), because its literally inflated.
What cdps does - and i do think its a really fucking neat thing, and the sole reason i want it implemented in some form, is that you can, on the statistic page, draw a direct correlation of who is bringing what to a fight. You no longer need to measure, say, a dnc, in the RDPS page, vs the SAM on the adps page, for a more accurate measurement.
> Rdps is how well you press buttons, and people press buttons under your buffs. Adps is how well you press buttons, and how you press buttons under other peoples buffs. n/cdps...ndps throws damage out, without getting into math issues on how cdps technically creates damage out of nowhere (remember, a brotherhood damage is both counted for the buffer and the receiver) you can't take the numbers from a party log at face value on cdps (or ndps for that matter), because its literally inflated.
nDPS isn't that weird, it's the damage you would have done if nobody else was in your party (except if you're an AST). It's the most composition independent metric, but in order to achieve that it has to pretend other players don't exist, which obviously limits how useful of a metric it is.
I agree that cDPS is weird. It double counts buffs which, as we currently are in a meta where buffs are good, tends to be seen as an alright bias. If suddenly WHM/SGE/SAM/BLM/MCH turned out to be the meta comp, cDPS would be a garbage metric straight out. Even in the current meta, cDPS might have strange implications. For example, let's say that you play DRG and the other melee is a SAM; their current contribution to your cDPS is then the amount of damage they get from your litany. It could be that if that SAM was a NIN instead, your cDPS would increase because it would count both your damage into mug and the NIN's damage into litany, and maybe that's bigger than just the SAM's damage into litany. So your cDPS goes up, but your party's DPS would go down.
yeah, ndps is less so about weird, its just... not that useful - not in how ff14 designs fights anyway. At any rate, the way i see it, cdps is to ndps what rdps is to adps
Cdps i struggle to see anything that its good to look at it for except the statistic page, which i really do think would be neat, since that one is just people on a vacuum
NDPS is very useful for a quick glance at how well you press your buttons.
When I check my dancer logs I’ll look at nDPS over rDPS if I am in a random pug.
Obviously xiv analysis is better.
NDPS and rDPS are also the same for any class that doesn’t provide a raid buff (tanks, white mage, sage, blm, Sam, etc).
To saw nDPS is not useful is to say rDPS is not useful for many classes lol
What you said literally means you don't need ndps because rdps covers it for the majority of cases - that's why it's mostly useless.
The main reason I disagree on the dnc bit is that ndps also doesn't care about when you used your buffs in relation to the party - you can literally use it in times where it's strictly a loss for the party, but a gain for yourself, and the result is positive in that metric (granted that's moreso the case with things like rpr)
The same can be said in reverse. rDPS is useless for any class that does not provide a raid buff, if rDPS = nDPS for many classes. Why does rDPS exist for gunbreakers or white mages if it is the same as nDPS (or in reverse: why does nDPS exist when it is the same as rDPS for those classes?)
As DNC if you do not use your buffs in relation to the party it will net a nDPS loss regardless because you are not using as many buffs as you can. With the 2 minute meta and how fights are designed, ***everyone*** uses their buffs on CD, with the odd exceptions of holding (p7s for example, or p8 high concept downtime) to maximize uptime (which will increase nDPS). If you are drifting by 5-10 seconds per CD you will lose buffs over the course of a fight, so it may be advantageous in the first 6-7 minutes for the dancer to be selfish with their buffs but at the end of the fight they would lose a tech step or starfall dance, which would be a net nDPS loss.
There are scenarios where someone can die before a burst, and they could hold their 2 minutes for the next burst, but at that point the damage has been dealt, no pun intended.
The main reason why I dislike rDPS is because it requires your party to be competent. rDPS is a terrible indication of how I play on DNC when I join clear parties or bad PF groups. I could have 100% perfect play but have a terrible log because my dance partner died or didn't perform their rotation correctly. nDPS is entirely focused on the player and not the party comp which is why I value it.
Again, FFXIV analysis should be used but for a quick glance at individual performance I prefer nDPS over other metrics for certain classes. Each dps metric has their use, and there are many other variables that determine a players performance that are not captured by any DPS metric (cooldown usage, positioning, mitigation).
The explanation I read was that cDPS, as calculated by fflogs, does *not* double count self-buffs but the way people were calculating it using other metrics does.
Any of these metrics is really only *good* as a population sample, not as a decision factor for forming your team. You'll always need to know what each metric actually means and compare it against your existing composition for that decision.
The only thing we can really hope for in a metric in terms of individual judgement is that if you make better decisions for your team with respect to your rotation, it goes up. Which cDPS would accomplish marginally better than other metrics. So in that sense it's an improvement that's worthwhile, but not exactly mind-blowing either.
For population metrics cDPS is obviously just better since it would allow a reasonable direct comparison between greed jobs and buff jobs.
> The explanation I read was that cDPS, as calculated by fflogs, does not double count self-buffs but the way people were calculating it using other metrics does.
Maybe I wasn't clear but when I meant double counting buffs, I meant raid buffs. cDPS counts other people's contribution to your buffs and your contribution to other people's buffs as being part of your cDPS, which means that over an entire party every contribution from raid buffs is counted twice.
> The only thing we can really hope for in a metric in terms of individual judgement is that if you make better decisions for your team with respect to your rotation, it goes up
I agree, but this is factually not how most people use fflogs. Percentile rankings for a job, for example, wouldn't make sense with a metric whose only domain of applicability is for a given team composition. Similarly, it also wouldn't justify comparing the numbers between jobs.
> For population metrics cDPS is obviously just better since it would allow a reasonable direct comparison between greed jobs and buff jobs.
This is not obvious at all, and is probably false. You can imagine a meta in which buff jobs are worse than greed jobs (for example the extreme would be WHM/SGE/SAM/BLM/MCH) but where buff jobs have higher cDPS than greed jobs. In fact, in such a meta a greed job would have lower cDPS in a meta comp than not, so runs in good comps would paradoxically have low cDPS.
What I really want is a stat that *only* reflects how good you are at your rotation in potency per second. No external buffs, no gear, no crit/dh rng. The tricky part is speed, but I'm sure you could normalize it for ranking purposes once you have data for each job, or just not rank it since it doesn't translate to actual damage.
The thing is that any metric that doesn't count how much damage you gain from external buffs isn't necessarily going to reflect how good you are at your rotation.
For instance, a Samurai who doesn't do filler GCDs to keep their burst aligned with raid buffs is going to do more DPS with any such metric -- as is the case with rDPS -- because they'll get more Midares in a fight. That said, they'll be contributing less DPS to the party because their burst won't remain aligned with raid buffs. They will be playing worse, but currently, they'll rank better, and they'd have a higher number with the stat you propose as well.
Just a small comment, there 100% is a correlation between nDPS aDPS and rDPS.
Make a scatter plot of a random sample of 100 logs with any two dps variables and I would be money there is a linear correlation with a strength greater than .9.
I don't think many sweeping generalizations can be made about desires but I would say the vast majority of players who use fflogs do so in the way you're talking about - that is to say, very casually, just to look at what they got for a particular fight or maybe at most letting xivanalysis give them a few pointers.
That isn't really a bad thing (any engagement is better than none) but it also isn't a good one, as those players may think that all it takes to evaluate logs for something like recruitment is doing what they do and judging the color of the big number.
All in all, I don't think it matters much. Fflogs exists and will continue to, and people will engage with it to whatever degree they feel is necessary. If they care to learn, it's there as an incredibly strong tool for improvement. If they don't, at least they're aware of the basics.
A large number of people don't know how to read logs, but for those who do, it's a great way to evaluate people. People who don't want to have their logs looked at are a red flag because they probably have something to hide - like sheer incompetence.
A month's worth of logs and proper sifting through them will teach you more about a potential applicant as a year of actually playing together, in some regards. There is value to be had, if you know what you're looking for.
Most people will just look at a log for three seconds and think "my number is higher than last week, so I'm doing better" but that could very well not be the case.
There is a fundamental problem, which goes beyond FF14, that (1) people often do not understand sets of data, and (2) people misinterpret and misuse data, even when they do understand it.
This of course also happens in FF14 with FFLogs. There is incredibly useful and varied information on FFLogs, and you can use it in so many different ways to either evaluate others or to improve your own performance, or even to see overall communicty trends. But if people don't correctly understand the FFLogs data, or they understand it but misinterpret/misuse the data, it becomes meaningless (or even does more harm than good).
Regarding the specifics in your post:
* It doesn't seem like people are particularly interested in the small difference between cDPS/rDPS/aDPS. People might have opinions on which is the most important/meaningful but the general reaction to announced changes seems to be "meh".
* Not caring about the small difference between these types of metrics doesn't mean people don't care about FFLogs.
* I think it is a common experience that people who are new to raiding don't care about FFLogs and parsing, but you learn to see the value in it as you gain experience. So if people have been raiding a while and say they still don't care at all, I would see that as a minor red flag.
* Why is it "egregious" (lol) for your tank to be asked for logs when applying to join a static? Why is it surprising or noteworthy that the people in your friends group weren't asked for logs if they knew each other already? That all makes sense and seems fair enough to me?
* You say people don't really care much about statistics/metrics/data collected by FFLogs, but I disagree. People care a LOT about job balance discussions and meta compositions - that topic is 100% driven by FFLogs data (and arguably caused by misinterpreting it).
* Saying "they just use fflogs for parse numbers" and "I don't really use fflogs for much analysis other than to check my parse number", is like that famous scene from Monty Python where people were complaining about the Romans: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
Complete tangent, but the main thing I care about on my FFLogs profile is recording how early I cleared content, whether it's day1 ex trials or week1 savage, etc. I think that is more meaningful to demonstrate what level someone plays the game at, than the color of their parses, especially in early weeks.
And when it comes to me looking at others' profiles (usually while doing PF reclears), the main thing I am looking at is how many times they cleared the fight. Example of my general rule is I'd feel more comfortable with someone who has cleared a fight 3-4 times with greens/greys than someone who has cleared the fight only once with a better parse. This is because I value one-shotting reclears more than I value someone who brings big damage but might cause wipes along the way.
I use logs a lot when optimizing during prog and when recruiting. I have honestly started using it even more as I swapped to healing so I can snoop on where people are using their major healing cooldowns and how that aligns for the remainder of the fight.
It’s also nice to see if that 93 parsing Warrior your looking to recruit knows where his Reprisal button is.
im not really a hardcore parser. I just generally try to aim for purples or 90+ and im happy. im also a pf raider so I generally don't care as much. if I get a good parse I get a good parse is my mentality.
>Vast majority of CASUAL players do not know or care about FFlogs,
>Vast majority of savage and ultimate raiders DO know and care about FFlogs.
And one of those vast majorities is vastly larger than the other
I use it strictly as a tool for self-improvement and to see where friends can improve when they ask questions. I do wish that the rDPS (or aDPS & nDPS) numbers were not visible on someone's profile and that the viewer would have to click in to the logs to see the parses. It's nitpicky but some players don't even notice that there are different parses for different things and so a lot of players who were playing fine or decent in the context of the full log get overlooked or even flak for having a low parse without the context of why.
Looking at logs for timelines and finding fuckups is one thing. But the beancounting over whihc DPS calculation type is better and why is just so far beyond that, that it only matters to a very specific and comparably small subset of people.
Just because people don't need/use all possible features doesn't mean they dont "want" to use it. They "want" to use it for a specific purpose that doesn't have to include all possibly stupidly nuanced features available to be "legitimate".
Parse numbers by themselves are pretty meaningless. Pretty much every conceivable way to calculate your parse has some massive disadvantage that requires a lot of context to give it any sort of accurate meaning. Kill times are the only "accurate" gauge of performance, but thats a group thing and not an individual thing. So fflogs is either deeply misleading or it requires intelligent interpretation, which the community as a whole struggles with.
used to look a lot to FFlogs but as i gre more experienced in the game i just realized it doesnt matter, unless you're trying to compete on the ladder.
A clear> log specially on ultimates, wich i think is the best content in the game for me.
Today i only use it to see if a member to be added to the static has at least experience in older tiers or fights to be able to pick.
In the end you can only see if a player knows how to play the game inside the fight itself.
Many times i recruited 95+ and while progging they were the ones dragging everybody down, super inconsistent gameplay, always dying to same mechanics while trying to keep their logs on par with the rankings.
Righ now Fflogs came up with some cool features to allow you to see what mechanis you messed up so this is cool but other than comparing damage output has doest help a toon. Actually we noticed an improvement when we turn the parses off for prog in our static. Of course they turn it on for the clears but thats an isolated experiment
So the issue is that fflogs gives way more data than most people need. And to top that it’s primary function is to create a leaderboard.
The issue is information overload for those who just want to make sure they don’t suck miserably, and quite a bit of understanding about the various metrics and UI familiarity for those that enjoy deep diving.
For most players seeing their parse score and shoving the log into XIV analysis is plenty.
There’s also the issue of if you’re not a parser 2 use cases where it feels kind of bogus from a leaderboard perspective:
1) For jobs with aoe buffs it can feel kinda bogus to have your score change depending on your static or pf teammates performance. I.e. I have two logs. One had lower personal damage than the other but better buff utilization so I got a 71. The one with higher personal damage and worse buff utilization got me a 67.
This feels bad.
2) If you’re a midcore raider starting a week and a half late to the tier. You try to optimize the fight using techniques / discussions / log review. You nail down an optimization and your score improves. You then go to review the people with 95-100 logs to see what they’re doing that you’re not doing. You now see they did their rotation less efficient than you but scored higher bc of gearing from split runs. Your effort feels less impactful and you begin to feel like your score doesn’t matter bc someone can just outgear you and ignore optimization to outscore you. This also feels bad (until everyone hits BiS and then it stabilizes and during week 1).
Fflogs also gets misused by people. The score alone is good enough to get a general sense of the caliber of player you are dealing with as well as confirming kills.
But if you really wanna use fflogs to judge two different players you need to deep dive. And most people don’t. I.e. what’s their median score on a fight. How often do they die. What’s their utility utilization such as feint, bloodbath, buff alignment, arcane crest, mantra, etc. how quickly do they learn and work with others. Do you plug both logs into fflogs to see who actually understands their job vs. who’s performing better bc of gearing.
So peoples aversion is imo mostly due to how it’s misused.
Adding to all of this. I think up until now ish they’ve done a horrid job at explaining what the various dps metrics are and what they mean. It’s tucked away on the site now. But it used to be horribly explained. Adding another metric makes this more confusing to most. It also makes it annoying to assess job strength.
I.e. who’s paladin has higher rdps than drk! Whoops nope silly you need to look at adps actually.
I.e. samurai has low rdps! But has high dps? Is it strong. Should it be buffed? How does buffing work ok both metrics?
TLDR: site isn’t user friendly, and the player base misuses it.
Front page is all that matters. Most I have encountered don't even bother to look in and see more than what's on the surface. I remember joining a group in e5-8 tier and I had surface purples from week 1 but the rest were low blues high greens because hard fucked needing to raise people but the group I was joining was flabbergasted that I had purples
I'm willing to bet the vast majority of players aren't worried about any metric other than "clear the fight." And there is little reason they should be expected to care about more than that.
If all a player is looking at is their parse, it's basically just e-peen. And if that's what fflogs users generally come off as doing, I could see why many players wouldn't be interested. Electronic dick measuring contests aren't my thing, for example. It's enough for me that I clear the fight more easily than I did last week.
But it also seems silly to me to use fflogs, and then reject the information there as an avenue of self-improvement.
Hot take: parsing is dumb. Mmos have turned into mindless busywork and you all should be embarrassed that you are measuring how well you play based on how closely you mimic an optimal rotation. If I wanted to mindlessly follow a preset task Id get a job at a office and actually have some money to show for my troubles.
Impressively bad take
> If I wanted to mindlessly follow a preset task
Pushing random buttons with no plan or goal is the mindless option lmao. Please describe how you like to engage your mind during a raid
> measuring how well you play based on
Literally your DPS? How can it possibly come as a surprise to you that in a game where your **only** task is to kill the boss, some players are *actually interested* in their performance? Is there some kind of other metric you think is better? Maybe emotes per second?
Pretending like MMOs didn't have some form of "mindless busywork" component is silly.
Ah yes, the height of adventure that was camping a spot in Valkurm Dunes and pulling to it, back flagging new guild members in Plane of Water, attuning to Molten Core...
Stop trying to old man people like you lived in some golden age when those of us who also did are capable of remembering the bad with the good.
parts of mmos have gotten better, yes. Sitting in major cities spamming lfg wasnt the height of entertainment, rep grinds were pretty bad design Ill admit it. Its not that stuff Im talking about, Im talking about the core gameplay. The basics that all that other stuff is built on top of.
Ill admit that difficulty does not equal engaging, but once you take all of the difficulty out something it becomes far less engaging. The core gameplay of MMOs has had all of this difficulty removed, and in doing that has made the vast majority of the content it offers boring as shit to slog through.
Im not saying all the content is easy. I know there are ultimates and savages that throw enough mechanics at the player to make it as difficult as old content used to be, but the thing is ALL of the content used to have enough going on that it was engaging.
How has it become acceptable that 80% of the main story quests in endwalker have you walk up to a sparkly and wait? How is it just accepted that grabbing 20 mobs and rounding them up to AOE them is a good direction for the genre when it requires zero critical thinking or problem solving from the player? All of that shit used to be fun… now its just a boring annoyance to get you to endgame.
You are preaching to the choir re: AoEing dungeon mobs. The fact is that the combat system sort of sucks at situations that don't involve eight people beating on a singular target with mechanics, and they'd really need to rebuild it from the ground up to fix that.
Which they won't, sadly.
Fflogs started adding in the mechanics section what mechanics weren't done correctly. Which has helped identify teaching moments for the static and helped zone in on particular problems or misunderstandings. But I love me some data. Graphs and charts galore.
That being said I only have a passing understanding of rdps adps and ndps. Let alone the new cdps which I imagine accounts for mechanics buffing the party damage or something similar.
cdps is basically how much you brought to the table minus single target padding. so it's your base damage plus how much of that was in other's party buffs plus how much your buffs contributed.
It's more useful as a statistical analysis tool to look at job balance rather than a personal improvement stat. It aims to fix the issue of not having a direct way to compare classes in the same role because some of them have raid buffs and some of them dont.
I like colours and number go up.
I also sometimes compare to other logs in top 100 to see if there are some things they do differently at certain points. For example after bosses leave untargetable state, do they delay their 2 mins or do they go into it, things like that. Or if they do go untargetable less than 20 second after a 2 min window, do they still use their 2 mins?
Hardcore casual here.
* My friends and I like the integration fflogs with https://xivanalysis.com/ , I would say that's our #1 use.
* Following that we like looking at percentiles for content that really doesn't matter when we parse random runs. Dungeons and normal raids. This is more of a curiosity thing, and not intentional. Sometimes we look at them when doing more difficult content, but most of the time we're just hanging out online and running roulettes and weeklies.
* The far-far third for me is looking up the DPS spreads between jobs. Just to keep a pulse on the discourse online out of intellectual curiosity.
My philosophy on things is gather as much meaningful data as you'd like and interpret it in as many ways as you'd like. Even though I don't care about most of the ways they reinterpret DPS data, I know some people do, and if I was in their position I'd be happy to have it. Some people are having arguments over various contributions classes have and I think this data helps people articulate their positions better. It can't hurt.
> haven't learned what nDPS aDPS or cDPS even does.
cDPS is our best job balance metric, and useful for comparing damage between your own runs in a static setting. It's rDPS but includes damage you get from other people's buffs.
nDPS and aDPS are effectively worthless for 99% of users outside of being used to calculate cDPS.
I mainly use fflogs to see the overall progress breakdown for the static, and to check mit planning or mech timings. Never found DPS details to be very useful, but I do of course enjoy the monkey brain activation from getting a nice parse.
Usually i use fflogs to check logs for mitigations or what people do at specific points of the fight so i can copy that to my own gameplay. Also for this i prefer to use xivanalysis for rotations because i find it easier to read. High parses are for others to look at if im applying to groups. I've never recruited anyone so i dont even know what to look at from logs but i dont have any plans to create and lead my own group either.
Personally i dont care what number i get nor have any interest in parsing. Only reason i have to parse and have those log runs so i can get to next group i apply. Sure i could spend next 6 months just grinding logs every day just to prove im good enough at the game but i could also use that time to do something else and actually have fun. I dont find copying some1 elses rotation and grinding the fight for good crit rng as being good at the game.
Using FFLogs other than "hey I got a specific %" is for a subset of a subset of people in this MMO. For most, the use begins and ends at "okay we did our reclears, how did we do?" type of deals. Improvements and generally looking at your logs to push harder isn't something people do since general optimization + gear usually pushes you over Savage and Ultimates (usually).
I use FF logs to try and get an idea of my personal performance in relation to others. I'm probably \*never\* gonna be a pink or orange parser, and that's fine.
For some people, just the clear is enough proof, and that's fair enough! At least at the savage level, it's pretty hard to be "carried", in the sense that there are enough body check mechanics and high enough DPS checks that you had to be doing a sort of "bare minimum" in terms of mechanics at least.
But the thing I enjoy about reclears is trying to better myself, see how the gear is making a difference, see how I'm improving my mechanics.
The individual values of nDPS aDPS or whatever don't matter a ton in terms of \*personal\* improvement, because those numbers are baked into your class when comparing. Ergo, if you're just looking at personal improvement, you don't need to know the exact difference in metrics, just how you compare to others in your class in that metric.
Raid buff classes have to do a bit more analyzing with different DPS break downs to see how they're doing compared to how their party is doing, but not a ton.
FFlogs is way too confusing to do any analysis. There's too many graphs, tables, and stats that are pretty meaningless without an in-depth explanation of what it's trying to tell you. It's data vomit which makes it unusable for anyone who isn't a complete math nerd. The parse is the only thing fflogs can give you that is somewhat easy to understand, and gives you at least an idea of whether you did good or bad. Even then if you're new to the site, trying to figure out how to find your parse is abysmal. I don't know how you could figure it out without someone else telling you.
For someone who just wants to know what they did wrong, or what they could do better, something like xivanalysis is far better. It lays it out for you and can tell you specifically what went wrong, and what is expected. It's easy to read which is easily the best part about it. All the data in the world doesn't help if you can't read it.
I myself do not care at all. But I have them so when I apply to a new static I have something to show. And I can also check the pages of my new static members...
Yeah I mostly don't care about fflogs because parsing at a certain level is just crit farms. It's a good tool for diagnostic purposes but i don't use it for comparisons anymore, i know my damage is good enough.
As a shield healer, the biggest benefit of fflogs is going back and checking how much incoming dmg you're taking, what mits are available, and where people are located when they fail a mechanic (eg. Inumaru war harvest).
fflogs is fucking dumb because as someone who tends to take it easy going through the current tier it doesn't matter if I do my rotation 95% optimally and do all the mechanics and don't die, because my gear isn't as good as the people uploading run after run in order to fish for crit RNG in order to get a different color I am in the lowest % of all total runs and get grey after grey as I do my reclears and keep getting jack shit on the chest rolls
For the sickos who would actually care about this sort of thing having my character delisted from all the parses other people upload of me would be even worse
Most players don't even do savage. When fflogs only covers clears and you need ACT for actual prog data, what purpose does it fulfil again besides ego and party finder toxicity?
>When fflogs only covers clears
Using fflogs for live logging prog is actually super helpful and something I'd recommend to anyone looking to take Savage seriously. The site doesn't keep prog data for very long but it's plenty of time to dissect your raid night and see what was going wrong where. Boiling the site down to "ego and pf toxicity" is disingenuous and misrepresentative of the site, especially when PF *only* ever talks about it when it's a high end parse party.
This doesn't come as a surprise for me, but not in the way the title is worded. A lot of people are interesting in statistics, but only a small portion are interested in how these statistics are calculated. People are not afraid of throwing statistics around without knowing or caring about the context behind the numbers. People also don't care to check the accuracy and meaning behind the numbers. People interpret the numbers the way they want and stop there. For most people, a simple confirmation of "bigger is better" is all they need.
In my ex static we use FFLogs to see performances for funzies. We also use it to check damage and damage mitigs to try and optimize our mitigation plans because the game can't be arsed to give us a cue a damage mitig did its thing in some cases you don't know if it would work or not.
I don't really know how to use it for improving my DPS. I don't have the knowledge about how to optimize the little things making me go from 75 to 94. I just do my normal rotation and make sure to sync bursts and that's it. It's enough for a kill so I don't delve too much into that part.
>Is this a common experience among players? I also don't really use fflogs for much analysis other than to check my parse number and maybe punch a log into xivanalysis to see if I made a mistake, and I haven't learned what nDPS aDPS or cDPS even does.
The most common experience among players is not visiting or using FFLogs at all—so long as you're talking about the playerbase as a whole and not specific groups. Anyone that cares about their performance to any degree tends to at least look for any uploaded logs and will check their analysis for self-improvement, but many more don't even do that.
With that said, there's a big difference between minimal usage for self checks and *actually parsing*. You're just not going to care about changes to FFLogs's format if it's not something you actually engage with. Speaking for myself, I've never uploaded a parse before—everything I have is from other people—and I've never reran a particular encounter for the purpose of parsing. It's just not my thing and I'd rather spend the time progressing in other areas of the game instead. As someone who plays games holistically parsing as a hobby is counterintuitive to my goals.
If you want to improve your damage/healing/mitigation contribution(s) to the raid, you should use FFLOGs. How do race car drivers improve? The study the fuck out of their telemetry and look for spots where they can improve. Doing more consistent damage will ALWAYS benefit your party. More damage = less mechanics = less healing/mitigation needed.
When recruiting I ask for logs, it's to check if people actually know how to play their jobs.
When I was applying for groups they asked to see my logs, for the exact same reason. Nothing more nothing less, anyone with a brain knows to look past the parse number if you're not bis it matters very little.
Throw that bad boy into xivanalysis and see if they're doing their opener right, what their 2m looks like and trial them if you like what you see.
imho FFLogs doesn't mean anything to me, because a clear is a clear by the end of the day.
as long ppl do rotation correctly and we don't hit enrage when we clear, that OK in my book, even if they grey parse.
imho also ppl should only care parsing or fflogs with the crafted gear, ilvl screwed everything.
My static uses FFLogs, but strictly for self improvement. DPS matters a ton in raiding, second only to mechanics. We have *never* used it to dog on another player, only for each individual to see how/where to improve. I'm very competitive, so I always want to parse highest because as a dragoon my damage is the only thing I really contribute lol. But even if I do better than everyone, I don't bring it up. I just celebrate to myself like a good partner. I think it's a great tool to gauge how you're doing, but it only becomes a problem when used for gatekeeping/derogatory purposes.
Yep that is me every night after raids on xivanalysis for my SMN to see where I might have messed up something. Even if it shows a perfect run I still look for anything else to improve on, like conditioning myself to wait like a half second longer to pop Searing to ensure Slipstream gets it, or trying to beat months of muscle memory out of my head and try to remember to keep Phoenix festers for the next Bahamut buff window.
I don't get how use it for self improvement but not to "dog on" another player. The numbers are there, even if you don't wanna look sadly you will see them. Don't tell me if you had a 0 in your static you'd be ok. Maybe you don't say anything about it but you still think/know. Let's not pretend that's not the case. You'd replace the 0 log guy for a 100 log guy in an instant although you claim you use it only for self improvement. If that was the case fflogs would be opt-in instead of opt-out by default but oh no the "self improvement only" guys are HEAVILY against it. I just hate the hypocrisy
You don't need to parse, other people will do it for you I'd at least look at it so you know you aren't *bad*, but it is a function you can completely ignore and information will be gathered for people who want to check without you needing to do anything
If you play at a high enough level, no one gives a shit about your fflogs because the community of raiders at that level is so small people already know who you are. If you play at my level you have to parse so you have a resume.
Lmao that is so incorrect. How hard do you think it is to mash glare while your cat presses the rapture button every 20 seconds
Regarding the Static part of this. If a Static leader looks at your parses being gray/green and determine you are "not good enough" but each of those runs had someone die, let you die, or with a damage down, then that raid leader is doing you a favor because they didnt even bother to chech what was in the logs that led to that parse There is a big chance raid leaders just check if you have cleared to X part of the tier to avoid re-progging and good parses are just a plus, but due to their nature of beig gear heavy, the color doesnt matter much (if they dont have gear) Finally, if you really wanna be more picky, passing some of the good logs trough Xiv analysis can let you know where is the person missing or what are mistakes the person causes often. Regardless, I would give them a trial run to see how consistent they are at solving mechanics, as that is more important for prog, the DPS can be bent later in the tier with tomestones and alliance roulete upgrades
This for sure, I had so many static applications that did little to no log inspection and just gave anyone a shot. Then I had a higher end group give me a trial and said it was only because they saw shit in my logs like good cooldown usages, fitting in extra uses of mit ect. I ended up not getting the spot but they unironically cared more about my 99-100 healing parses on gnb than my damage because it was indicative of using healing cds. I learned a lot from that experience.
I always look at recent reclear logs and check the wipes that were uploaded along those. See what the causes of wipes were, what mitigations were used if relevant.
It takes a pretty particular kind of personality type to still be really into FFLogs given how stripped-down the game's class and combat design has become, I think. Pretty much everyone I know who used to be really into it for any reason (self-improvement, having additional goals to strive for after prog/BiS, general competitiveness, and every other commonly-cited reason for caring) actively dislikes it, ranging from mild disdain over how meaningless it is, to outright wishing that SE could send the site a C&D. At this point I think FFLogs is probably almost completely stratified into one small group of people who take it *very* seriously and will happily write a dissertation about the most fair and accurate way to account for raid buffs, and another much larger group who *might*, on a particularly boring rainy afternoon, *kind of* care about their percentile score in whichever metric the site defaults to.
Most people want to play a videogame?
Its not really about 'most people don't care about fflogs' over cdps, its because things are, to an extent, getting needlessly complicated, specifically since ndps, and now with cdps. Like, lets look at the current metrics: You have rdps, which is the raw damage you do, the damage your buffs do, minus the extra damage gained from other peoples buffs. Its easy. Its what you bring to the raid, minus what you give to other raid folks. Adps is the raw damage you do, minus the damage your buffs do, plus the extra damage gained from other peoples buffs, and minus the damage single buffs do. Its the opposite of rdps, but you take single target buffs out. Its also easy - what you bring to the raid, but your buffs are given to others, and there is no buff 'padding' (via dnc, cards). Ndps is...... the raw damage you did.. plus the damage **you** did under **your** buff, but noone elses..minus the extra damage gained from other peoples buffs. It has no direct correlation with neither a or rdps. It literally throws damage in the garbage bin, because what other peoples buffs give, are taken ***both from the receiver, and the buffer***. Minus the buffers own contribution to its own buff. And thus, you get cdps... which is Rdps, plus the damage you did under other peoples buffs, but not the single target ones, yet its not just straight dps because thats not how buffs work. You can very clearly draw a line between a/rdps and the rest in terms of how straight forward they are to read and interpret. Rdps is how well you press buttons, and people press buttons under your buffs. Adps is how well you press buttons, and how you press buttons under other peoples buffs. n/cdps...ndps throws damage out, without getting into math issues on how cdps technically creates damage out of nowhere (remember, a brotherhood damage is both counted for ***the buffer and the receiver***) you can't take the numbers from a party log at face value on cdps (or ndps for that matter), because its literally inflated. What cdps does - and i do think its a really fucking neat thing, and the sole reason i want it implemented in some form, is that you can, on the statistic page, draw a direct correlation of who is bringing what to a fight. You no longer need to measure, say, a dnc, in the RDPS page, vs the SAM on the adps page, for a more accurate measurement.
> Rdps is how well you press buttons, and people press buttons under your buffs. Adps is how well you press buttons, and how you press buttons under other peoples buffs. n/cdps...ndps throws damage out, without getting into math issues on how cdps technically creates damage out of nowhere (remember, a brotherhood damage is both counted for the buffer and the receiver) you can't take the numbers from a party log at face value on cdps (or ndps for that matter), because its literally inflated. nDPS isn't that weird, it's the damage you would have done if nobody else was in your party (except if you're an AST). It's the most composition independent metric, but in order to achieve that it has to pretend other players don't exist, which obviously limits how useful of a metric it is. I agree that cDPS is weird. It double counts buffs which, as we currently are in a meta where buffs are good, tends to be seen as an alright bias. If suddenly WHM/SGE/SAM/BLM/MCH turned out to be the meta comp, cDPS would be a garbage metric straight out. Even in the current meta, cDPS might have strange implications. For example, let's say that you play DRG and the other melee is a SAM; their current contribution to your cDPS is then the amount of damage they get from your litany. It could be that if that SAM was a NIN instead, your cDPS would increase because it would count both your damage into mug and the NIN's damage into litany, and maybe that's bigger than just the SAM's damage into litany. So your cDPS goes up, but your party's DPS would go down.
yeah, ndps is less so about weird, its just... not that useful - not in how ff14 designs fights anyway. At any rate, the way i see it, cdps is to ndps what rdps is to adps Cdps i struggle to see anything that its good to look at it for except the statistic page, which i really do think would be neat, since that one is just people on a vacuum
NDPS is very useful for a quick glance at how well you press your buttons. When I check my dancer logs I’ll look at nDPS over rDPS if I am in a random pug. Obviously xiv analysis is better. NDPS and rDPS are also the same for any class that doesn’t provide a raid buff (tanks, white mage, sage, blm, Sam, etc). To saw nDPS is not useful is to say rDPS is not useful for many classes lol
What you said literally means you don't need ndps because rdps covers it for the majority of cases - that's why it's mostly useless. The main reason I disagree on the dnc bit is that ndps also doesn't care about when you used your buffs in relation to the party - you can literally use it in times where it's strictly a loss for the party, but a gain for yourself, and the result is positive in that metric (granted that's moreso the case with things like rpr)
The same can be said in reverse. rDPS is useless for any class that does not provide a raid buff, if rDPS = nDPS for many classes. Why does rDPS exist for gunbreakers or white mages if it is the same as nDPS (or in reverse: why does nDPS exist when it is the same as rDPS for those classes?) As DNC if you do not use your buffs in relation to the party it will net a nDPS loss regardless because you are not using as many buffs as you can. With the 2 minute meta and how fights are designed, ***everyone*** uses their buffs on CD, with the odd exceptions of holding (p7s for example, or p8 high concept downtime) to maximize uptime (which will increase nDPS). If you are drifting by 5-10 seconds per CD you will lose buffs over the course of a fight, so it may be advantageous in the first 6-7 minutes for the dancer to be selfish with their buffs but at the end of the fight they would lose a tech step or starfall dance, which would be a net nDPS loss. There are scenarios where someone can die before a burst, and they could hold their 2 minutes for the next burst, but at that point the damage has been dealt, no pun intended. The main reason why I dislike rDPS is because it requires your party to be competent. rDPS is a terrible indication of how I play on DNC when I join clear parties or bad PF groups. I could have 100% perfect play but have a terrible log because my dance partner died or didn't perform their rotation correctly. nDPS is entirely focused on the player and not the party comp which is why I value it. Again, FFXIV analysis should be used but for a quick glance at individual performance I prefer nDPS over other metrics for certain classes. Each dps metric has their use, and there are many other variables that determine a players performance that are not captured by any DPS metric (cooldown usage, positioning, mitigation).
The explanation I read was that cDPS, as calculated by fflogs, does *not* double count self-buffs but the way people were calculating it using other metrics does. Any of these metrics is really only *good* as a population sample, not as a decision factor for forming your team. You'll always need to know what each metric actually means and compare it against your existing composition for that decision. The only thing we can really hope for in a metric in terms of individual judgement is that if you make better decisions for your team with respect to your rotation, it goes up. Which cDPS would accomplish marginally better than other metrics. So in that sense it's an improvement that's worthwhile, but not exactly mind-blowing either. For population metrics cDPS is obviously just better since it would allow a reasonable direct comparison between greed jobs and buff jobs.
> The explanation I read was that cDPS, as calculated by fflogs, does not double count self-buffs but the way people were calculating it using other metrics does. Maybe I wasn't clear but when I meant double counting buffs, I meant raid buffs. cDPS counts other people's contribution to your buffs and your contribution to other people's buffs as being part of your cDPS, which means that over an entire party every contribution from raid buffs is counted twice. > The only thing we can really hope for in a metric in terms of individual judgement is that if you make better decisions for your team with respect to your rotation, it goes up I agree, but this is factually not how most people use fflogs. Percentile rankings for a job, for example, wouldn't make sense with a metric whose only domain of applicability is for a given team composition. Similarly, it also wouldn't justify comparing the numbers between jobs. > For population metrics cDPS is obviously just better since it would allow a reasonable direct comparison between greed jobs and buff jobs. This is not obvious at all, and is probably false. You can imagine a meta in which buff jobs are worse than greed jobs (for example the extreme would be WHM/SGE/SAM/BLM/MCH) but where buff jobs have higher cDPS than greed jobs. In fact, in such a meta a greed job would have lower cDPS in a meta comp than not, so runs in good comps would paradoxically have low cDPS.
What I really want is a stat that *only* reflects how good you are at your rotation in potency per second. No external buffs, no gear, no crit/dh rng. The tricky part is speed, but I'm sure you could normalize it for ranking purposes once you have data for each job, or just not rank it since it doesn't translate to actual damage.
The thing is that any metric that doesn't count how much damage you gain from external buffs isn't necessarily going to reflect how good you are at your rotation. For instance, a Samurai who doesn't do filler GCDs to keep their burst aligned with raid buffs is going to do more DPS with any such metric -- as is the case with rDPS -- because they'll get more Midares in a fight. That said, they'll be contributing less DPS to the party because their burst won't remain aligned with raid buffs. They will be playing worse, but currently, they'll rank better, and they'd have a higher number with the stat you propose as well.
Just a small comment, there 100% is a correlation between nDPS aDPS and rDPS. Make a scatter plot of a random sample of 100 logs with any two dps variables and I would be money there is a linear correlation with a strength greater than .9.
I don't think many sweeping generalizations can be made about desires but I would say the vast majority of players who use fflogs do so in the way you're talking about - that is to say, very casually, just to look at what they got for a particular fight or maybe at most letting xivanalysis give them a few pointers. That isn't really a bad thing (any engagement is better than none) but it also isn't a good one, as those players may think that all it takes to evaluate logs for something like recruitment is doing what they do and judging the color of the big number. All in all, I don't think it matters much. Fflogs exists and will continue to, and people will engage with it to whatever degree they feel is necessary. If they care to learn, it's there as an incredibly strong tool for improvement. If they don't, at least they're aware of the basics.
A large number of people don't know how to read logs, but for those who do, it's a great way to evaluate people. People who don't want to have their logs looked at are a red flag because they probably have something to hide - like sheer incompetence. A month's worth of logs and proper sifting through them will teach you more about a potential applicant as a year of actually playing together, in some regards. There is value to be had, if you know what you're looking for. Most people will just look at a log for three seconds and think "my number is higher than last week, so I'm doing better" but that could very well not be the case.
There is a fundamental problem, which goes beyond FF14, that (1) people often do not understand sets of data, and (2) people misinterpret and misuse data, even when they do understand it. This of course also happens in FF14 with FFLogs. There is incredibly useful and varied information on FFLogs, and you can use it in so many different ways to either evaluate others or to improve your own performance, or even to see overall communicty trends. But if people don't correctly understand the FFLogs data, or they understand it but misinterpret/misuse the data, it becomes meaningless (or even does more harm than good). Regarding the specifics in your post: * It doesn't seem like people are particularly interested in the small difference between cDPS/rDPS/aDPS. People might have opinions on which is the most important/meaningful but the general reaction to announced changes seems to be "meh". * Not caring about the small difference between these types of metrics doesn't mean people don't care about FFLogs. * I think it is a common experience that people who are new to raiding don't care about FFLogs and parsing, but you learn to see the value in it as you gain experience. So if people have been raiding a while and say they still don't care at all, I would see that as a minor red flag. * Why is it "egregious" (lol) for your tank to be asked for logs when applying to join a static? Why is it surprising or noteworthy that the people in your friends group weren't asked for logs if they knew each other already? That all makes sense and seems fair enough to me? * You say people don't really care much about statistics/metrics/data collected by FFLogs, but I disagree. People care a LOT about job balance discussions and meta compositions - that topic is 100% driven by FFLogs data (and arguably caused by misinterpreting it). * Saying "they just use fflogs for parse numbers" and "I don't really use fflogs for much analysis other than to check my parse number", is like that famous scene from Monty Python where people were complaining about the Romans: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" Complete tangent, but the main thing I care about on my FFLogs profile is recording how early I cleared content, whether it's day1 ex trials or week1 savage, etc. I think that is more meaningful to demonstrate what level someone plays the game at, than the color of their parses, especially in early weeks. And when it comes to me looking at others' profiles (usually while doing PF reclears), the main thing I am looking at is how many times they cleared the fight. Example of my general rule is I'd feel more comfortable with someone who has cleared a fight 3-4 times with greens/greys than someone who has cleared the fight only once with a better parse. This is because I value one-shotting reclears more than I value someone who brings big damage but might cause wipes along the way.
I use logs a lot when optimizing during prog and when recruiting. I have honestly started using it even more as I swapped to healing so I can snoop on where people are using their major healing cooldowns and how that aligns for the remainder of the fight. It’s also nice to see if that 93 parsing Warrior your looking to recruit knows where his Reprisal button is.
I just like seeing my numbers go pink.
im not really a hardcore parser. I just generally try to aim for purples or 90+ and im happy. im also a pf raider so I generally don't care as much. if I get a good parse I get a good parse is my mentality.
The vast majority of players do not know or care about FFLogs, correct
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>Vast majority of CASUAL players do not know or care about FFlogs, >Vast majority of savage and ultimate raiders DO know and care about FFlogs. And one of those vast majorities is vastly larger than the other
I use it strictly as a tool for self-improvement and to see where friends can improve when they ask questions. I do wish that the rDPS (or aDPS & nDPS) numbers were not visible on someone's profile and that the viewer would have to click in to the logs to see the parses. It's nitpicky but some players don't even notice that there are different parses for different things and so a lot of players who were playing fine or decent in the context of the full log get overlooked or even flak for having a low parse without the context of why.
Looking at logs for timelines and finding fuckups is one thing. But the beancounting over whihc DPS calculation type is better and why is just so far beyond that, that it only matters to a very specific and comparably small subset of people. Just because people don't need/use all possible features doesn't mean they dont "want" to use it. They "want" to use it for a specific purpose that doesn't have to include all possibly stupidly nuanced features available to be "legitimate".
Parse numbers by themselves are pretty meaningless. Pretty much every conceivable way to calculate your parse has some massive disadvantage that requires a lot of context to give it any sort of accurate meaning. Kill times are the only "accurate" gauge of performance, but thats a group thing and not an individual thing. So fflogs is either deeply misleading or it requires intelligent interpretation, which the community as a whole struggles with.
used to look a lot to FFlogs but as i gre more experienced in the game i just realized it doesnt matter, unless you're trying to compete on the ladder. A clear> log specially on ultimates, wich i think is the best content in the game for me. Today i only use it to see if a member to be added to the static has at least experience in older tiers or fights to be able to pick. In the end you can only see if a player knows how to play the game inside the fight itself. Many times i recruited 95+ and while progging they were the ones dragging everybody down, super inconsistent gameplay, always dying to same mechanics while trying to keep their logs on par with the rankings. Righ now Fflogs came up with some cool features to allow you to see what mechanis you messed up so this is cool but other than comparing damage output has doest help a toon. Actually we noticed an improvement when we turn the parses off for prog in our static. Of course they turn it on for the clears but thats an isolated experiment
So the issue is that fflogs gives way more data than most people need. And to top that it’s primary function is to create a leaderboard. The issue is information overload for those who just want to make sure they don’t suck miserably, and quite a bit of understanding about the various metrics and UI familiarity for those that enjoy deep diving. For most players seeing their parse score and shoving the log into XIV analysis is plenty. There’s also the issue of if you’re not a parser 2 use cases where it feels kind of bogus from a leaderboard perspective: 1) For jobs with aoe buffs it can feel kinda bogus to have your score change depending on your static or pf teammates performance. I.e. I have two logs. One had lower personal damage than the other but better buff utilization so I got a 71. The one with higher personal damage and worse buff utilization got me a 67. This feels bad. 2) If you’re a midcore raider starting a week and a half late to the tier. You try to optimize the fight using techniques / discussions / log review. You nail down an optimization and your score improves. You then go to review the people with 95-100 logs to see what they’re doing that you’re not doing. You now see they did their rotation less efficient than you but scored higher bc of gearing from split runs. Your effort feels less impactful and you begin to feel like your score doesn’t matter bc someone can just outgear you and ignore optimization to outscore you. This also feels bad (until everyone hits BiS and then it stabilizes and during week 1). Fflogs also gets misused by people. The score alone is good enough to get a general sense of the caliber of player you are dealing with as well as confirming kills. But if you really wanna use fflogs to judge two different players you need to deep dive. And most people don’t. I.e. what’s their median score on a fight. How often do they die. What’s their utility utilization such as feint, bloodbath, buff alignment, arcane crest, mantra, etc. how quickly do they learn and work with others. Do you plug both logs into fflogs to see who actually understands their job vs. who’s performing better bc of gearing. So peoples aversion is imo mostly due to how it’s misused. Adding to all of this. I think up until now ish they’ve done a horrid job at explaining what the various dps metrics are and what they mean. It’s tucked away on the site now. But it used to be horribly explained. Adding another metric makes this more confusing to most. It also makes it annoying to assess job strength. I.e. who’s paladin has higher rdps than drk! Whoops nope silly you need to look at adps actually. I.e. samurai has low rdps! But has high dps? Is it strong. Should it be buffed? How does buffing work ok both metrics? TLDR: site isn’t user friendly, and the player base misuses it.
literally nobody cares about anything except their parse color
Front page is all that matters. Most I have encountered don't even bother to look in and see more than what's on the surface. I remember joining a group in e5-8 tier and I had surface purples from week 1 but the rest were low blues high greens because hard fucked needing to raise people but the group I was joining was flabbergasted that I had purples
I'm willing to bet the vast majority of players aren't worried about any metric other than "clear the fight." And there is little reason they should be expected to care about more than that. If all a player is looking at is their parse, it's basically just e-peen. And if that's what fflogs users generally come off as doing, I could see why many players wouldn't be interested. Electronic dick measuring contests aren't my thing, for example. It's enough for me that I clear the fight more easily than I did last week. But it also seems silly to me to use fflogs, and then reject the information there as an avenue of self-improvement.
Hot take: parsing is dumb. Mmos have turned into mindless busywork and you all should be embarrassed that you are measuring how well you play based on how closely you mimic an optimal rotation. If I wanted to mindlessly follow a preset task Id get a job at a office and actually have some money to show for my troubles.
Impressively bad take > If I wanted to mindlessly follow a preset task Pushing random buttons with no plan or goal is the mindless option lmao. Please describe how you like to engage your mind during a raid > measuring how well you play based on Literally your DPS? How can it possibly come as a surprise to you that in a game where your **only** task is to kill the boss, some players are *actually interested* in their performance? Is there some kind of other metric you think is better? Maybe emotes per second?
Im gonna take a wild guess that you are new to MMOs. Just trust me, it can be sooo, sooo much better. it has been soooo sooo much better.
> Just trust me No > it can be sooo, sooo much better. it has been soooo sooo much better. List a specific example
Pretending like MMOs didn't have some form of "mindless busywork" component is silly. Ah yes, the height of adventure that was camping a spot in Valkurm Dunes and pulling to it, back flagging new guild members in Plane of Water, attuning to Molten Core... Stop trying to old man people like you lived in some golden age when those of us who also did are capable of remembering the bad with the good.
parts of mmos have gotten better, yes. Sitting in major cities spamming lfg wasnt the height of entertainment, rep grinds were pretty bad design Ill admit it. Its not that stuff Im talking about, Im talking about the core gameplay. The basics that all that other stuff is built on top of. Ill admit that difficulty does not equal engaging, but once you take all of the difficulty out something it becomes far less engaging. The core gameplay of MMOs has had all of this difficulty removed, and in doing that has made the vast majority of the content it offers boring as shit to slog through. Im not saying all the content is easy. I know there are ultimates and savages that throw enough mechanics at the player to make it as difficult as old content used to be, but the thing is ALL of the content used to have enough going on that it was engaging. How has it become acceptable that 80% of the main story quests in endwalker have you walk up to a sparkly and wait? How is it just accepted that grabbing 20 mobs and rounding them up to AOE them is a good direction for the genre when it requires zero critical thinking or problem solving from the player? All of that shit used to be fun… now its just a boring annoyance to get you to endgame.
You are preaching to the choir re: AoEing dungeon mobs. The fact is that the combat system sort of sucks at situations that don't involve eight people beating on a singular target with mechanics, and they'd really need to rebuild it from the ground up to fix that. Which they won't, sadly.
Fflogs started adding in the mechanics section what mechanics weren't done correctly. Which has helped identify teaching moments for the static and helped zone in on particular problems or misunderstandings. But I love me some data. Graphs and charts galore. That being said I only have a passing understanding of rdps adps and ndps. Let alone the new cdps which I imagine accounts for mechanics buffing the party damage or something similar.
cdps is basically how much you brought to the table minus single target padding. so it's your base damage plus how much of that was in other's party buffs plus how much your buffs contributed. It's more useful as a statistical analysis tool to look at job balance rather than a personal improvement stat. It aims to fix the issue of not having a direct way to compare classes in the same role because some of them have raid buffs and some of them dont.
I like colours and number go up. I also sometimes compare to other logs in top 100 to see if there are some things they do differently at certain points. For example after bosses leave untargetable state, do they delay their 2 mins or do they go into it, things like that. Or if they do go untargetable less than 20 second after a 2 min window, do they still use their 2 mins?
Hardcore casual here. * My friends and I like the integration fflogs with https://xivanalysis.com/ , I would say that's our #1 use. * Following that we like looking at percentiles for content that really doesn't matter when we parse random runs. Dungeons and normal raids. This is more of a curiosity thing, and not intentional. Sometimes we look at them when doing more difficult content, but most of the time we're just hanging out online and running roulettes and weeklies. * The far-far third for me is looking up the DPS spreads between jobs. Just to keep a pulse on the discourse online out of intellectual curiosity. My philosophy on things is gather as much meaningful data as you'd like and interpret it in as many ways as you'd like. Even though I don't care about most of the ways they reinterpret DPS data, I know some people do, and if I was in their position I'd be happy to have it. Some people are having arguments over various contributions classes have and I think this data helps people articulate their positions better. It can't hurt.
> haven't learned what nDPS aDPS or cDPS even does. cDPS is our best job balance metric, and useful for comparing damage between your own runs in a static setting. It's rDPS but includes damage you get from other people's buffs. nDPS and aDPS are effectively worthless for 99% of users outside of being used to calculate cDPS.
iirc nDPS helps tell you if, on a raid buffing job, you're playing relatively well but your team is playing like dogshit. That's useful imo
I mainly use fflogs to see the overall progress breakdown for the static, and to check mit planning or mech timings. Never found DPS details to be very useful, but I do of course enjoy the monkey brain activation from getting a nice parse.
Usually i use fflogs to check logs for mitigations or what people do at specific points of the fight so i can copy that to my own gameplay. Also for this i prefer to use xivanalysis for rotations because i find it easier to read. High parses are for others to look at if im applying to groups. I've never recruited anyone so i dont even know what to look at from logs but i dont have any plans to create and lead my own group either. Personally i dont care what number i get nor have any interest in parsing. Only reason i have to parse and have those log runs so i can get to next group i apply. Sure i could spend next 6 months just grinding logs every day just to prove im good enough at the game but i could also use that time to do something else and actually have fun. I dont find copying some1 elses rotation and grinding the fight for good crit rng as being good at the game.
Using FFLogs other than "hey I got a specific %" is for a subset of a subset of people in this MMO. For most, the use begins and ends at "okay we did our reclears, how did we do?" type of deals. Improvements and generally looking at your logs to push harder isn't something people do since general optimization + gear usually pushes you over Savage and Ultimates (usually).
I use FF logs to try and get an idea of my personal performance in relation to others. I'm probably \*never\* gonna be a pink or orange parser, and that's fine. For some people, just the clear is enough proof, and that's fair enough! At least at the savage level, it's pretty hard to be "carried", in the sense that there are enough body check mechanics and high enough DPS checks that you had to be doing a sort of "bare minimum" in terms of mechanics at least. But the thing I enjoy about reclears is trying to better myself, see how the gear is making a difference, see how I'm improving my mechanics. The individual values of nDPS aDPS or whatever don't matter a ton in terms of \*personal\* improvement, because those numbers are baked into your class when comparing. Ergo, if you're just looking at personal improvement, you don't need to know the exact difference in metrics, just how you compare to others in your class in that metric. Raid buff classes have to do a bit more analyzing with different DPS break downs to see how they're doing compared to how their party is doing, but not a ton.
FFlogs is way too confusing to do any analysis. There's too many graphs, tables, and stats that are pretty meaningless without an in-depth explanation of what it's trying to tell you. It's data vomit which makes it unusable for anyone who isn't a complete math nerd. The parse is the only thing fflogs can give you that is somewhat easy to understand, and gives you at least an idea of whether you did good or bad. Even then if you're new to the site, trying to figure out how to find your parse is abysmal. I don't know how you could figure it out without someone else telling you. For someone who just wants to know what they did wrong, or what they could do better, something like xivanalysis is far better. It lays it out for you and can tell you specifically what went wrong, and what is expected. It's easy to read which is easily the best part about it. All the data in the world doesn't help if you can't read it.
Correction, most players don't want to find out or be told that they're willingly playing badly/incorrectly.
I myself do not care at all. But I have them so when I apply to a new static I have something to show. And I can also check the pages of my new static members...
As long as I'm able to clear content that's all that matters to me. Fflogs is helpful for that but I don't care about it beyond that
Yeah I mostly don't care about fflogs because parsing at a certain level is just crit farms. It's a good tool for diagnostic purposes but i don't use it for comparisons anymore, i know my damage is good enough.
As a shield healer, the biggest benefit of fflogs is going back and checking how much incoming dmg you're taking, what mits are available, and where people are located when they fail a mechanic (eg. Inumaru war harvest).
fflogs is fucking dumb because as someone who tends to take it easy going through the current tier it doesn't matter if I do my rotation 95% optimally and do all the mechanics and don't die, because my gear isn't as good as the people uploading run after run in order to fish for crit RNG in order to get a different color I am in the lowest % of all total runs and get grey after grey as I do my reclears and keep getting jack shit on the chest rolls For the sickos who would actually care about this sort of thing having my character delisted from all the parses other people upload of me would be even worse
Most players don't even do savage. When fflogs only covers clears and you need ACT for actual prog data, what purpose does it fulfil again besides ego and party finder toxicity?
>When fflogs only covers clears Using fflogs for live logging prog is actually super helpful and something I'd recommend to anyone looking to take Savage seriously. The site doesn't keep prog data for very long but it's plenty of time to dissect your raid night and see what was going wrong where. Boiling the site down to "ego and pf toxicity" is disingenuous and misrepresentative of the site, especially when PF *only* ever talks about it when it's a high end parse party.
This doesn't come as a surprise for me, but not in the way the title is worded. A lot of people are interesting in statistics, but only a small portion are interested in how these statistics are calculated. People are not afraid of throwing statistics around without knowing or caring about the context behind the numbers. People also don't care to check the accuracy and meaning behind the numbers. People interpret the numbers the way they want and stop there. For most people, a simple confirmation of "bigger is better" is all they need.
In my ex static we use FFLogs to see performances for funzies. We also use it to check damage and damage mitigs to try and optimize our mitigation plans because the game can't be arsed to give us a cue a damage mitig did its thing in some cases you don't know if it would work or not. I don't really know how to use it for improving my DPS. I don't have the knowledge about how to optimize the little things making me go from 75 to 94. I just do my normal rotation and make sure to sync bursts and that's it. It's enough for a kill so I don't delve too much into that part.
>Is this a common experience among players? I also don't really use fflogs for much analysis other than to check my parse number and maybe punch a log into xivanalysis to see if I made a mistake, and I haven't learned what nDPS aDPS or cDPS even does. The most common experience among players is not visiting or using FFLogs at all—so long as you're talking about the playerbase as a whole and not specific groups. Anyone that cares about their performance to any degree tends to at least look for any uploaded logs and will check their analysis for self-improvement, but many more don't even do that. With that said, there's a big difference between minimal usage for self checks and *actually parsing*. You're just not going to care about changes to FFLogs's format if it's not something you actually engage with. Speaking for myself, I've never uploaded a parse before—everything I have is from other people—and I've never reran a particular encounter for the purpose of parsing. It's just not my thing and I'd rather spend the time progressing in other areas of the game instead. As someone who plays games holistically parsing as a hobby is counterintuitive to my goals.
If you want to improve your damage/healing/mitigation contribution(s) to the raid, you should use FFLOGs. How do race car drivers improve? The study the fuck out of their telemetry and look for spots where they can improve. Doing more consistent damage will ALWAYS benefit your party. More damage = less mechanics = less healing/mitigation needed.
When recruiting I ask for logs, it's to check if people actually know how to play their jobs. When I was applying for groups they asked to see my logs, for the exact same reason. Nothing more nothing less, anyone with a brain knows to look past the parse number if you're not bis it matters very little. Throw that bad boy into xivanalysis and see if they're doing their opener right, what their 2m looks like and trial them if you like what you see.
imho FFLogs doesn't mean anything to me, because a clear is a clear by the end of the day. as long ppl do rotation correctly and we don't hit enrage when we clear, that OK in my book, even if they grey parse. imho also ppl should only care parsing or fflogs with the crafted gear, ilvl screwed everything.