Thread by @FFXIVMomo

[Long thread]

Posts about hitting enrage and blaming crit rng while deflecting saying they played perfectly is so common in the community. Even if you 'hypothetically' did play perfectly, it's a team game. Who's to say the seven other members of your team also played perfectly?

Players don't really see how much damage they are losing when they do something sub-optimal even if very slight. A missed positional, a slightly delayed raid buff, even bursting wrong in buffs. They'll make an error and brush it off but over the fight they will add up fast.

It's hard to put blame though since they don't have the tools required to actually see what they're doing is really making an impact because unless you have a sim or spreadsheet showing you a big number then you're not really going to understand the full scope of things.

The reason you that you didn't beat enrage is not because of crit rng and chances are you did not play 'perfectly'. Stop blaming reasons outside of your control and become a better player for it. There's always something you can rotationally improve on from pull to pull.

In speeds we'll have a sim calculate optimized rotations - that took hours to map - perfectly without fault and then run a log of our rotations from that night through a sim and that can sometimes be a hundred off. If that's the case where do you think a prog rotation places?

<MATH TIME AKA HOW MUCH ARE WE ACTUALLY LOSING? SOME VALUES WILL VARY BASED ON TEAM COMP TOO>

A trivial error like using a raid buff a single cd late cascades into a fairly large loss on a pDPS scale - not even accounting for the raids loss. This not only ruins your buff synergy for the rest of the fight but potentially misses early heavy hitter moves from the team too.

With the mention of raid buff alignment what would it look like more jumbled up, each one being a second ahead or below the other? The losses don't look very big on an individual scale but this compounds with the other 7 party members also taking losses.

Positionals, something you don't really generally care to notice during prog because they simply aren't worth the risk of dying but they are also something that amalgamates with your pre-existing mistakes. Here I just found some random P8P1 week 1 logs.

Not rolling your GCD can be another staple of prog. Sometimes you'll be forced to take downtime or just play safer in general. The outcomes can vary depending on the job. Some jobs suffer a bit more when their GCD gets misaligned or they aren't able to build resources effectively

Dark Knight is a job that can accumulate losses at a very high rate. Something as simple as pressing Living Shadow a GCD late can net you a hefty loss in damage. This combined with improper edge lines or simply not pooling properly can get you losses in the hundreds.

Astro is probably the most sneaky when it comes to losses due to being reliant on individual player skill. Precise timings where a one second variance or a misplayed card on the wrong person can drastically change your raid output. Values of which are amplified with worse play.

Healer resources can be a enrage killer. Healer opti has been and will probably always will be the end all be all of enrage prog. After all it's one of the easiest forms of damage optimization you can gather. If you have exceptional healers you'll hardly ever wipe to a DPS check.

Other miscellaneous funny things I cba to write out since they were kind of just for fun to see.

The point being out of all of this is that the average player in a prog environment is probably taking 10 to 20+ small losses over the course of an encounter which in itself can rack up to the hundreds of DPS individually. Putting the team in the negative thousands overall.

This also is only highlighting smaller mistakes, there's also the argument for just bad standard rotations overall that only later clearing groups can even attempt due to the time investment to make (or just to copy) but they are never needed to actually clear a fight.

Extra diagram to reiterate my point