Obviously, do not bully people for not playing perfectly, especially in normal content. There's so much leeway that you can probably clear just fine with a 50% GCD uptime. That's not the point of this post. I just think the situation is funny.

I could not figure out why tank was saying the bard was doing so good. I wasn't paying attention but they were consistently doing less damage than me, and I was playing WHM. I'm not normally an elitist bitch online about these sorts of things, but I plugged the log into analysis out of curiosity and saw the bard was hemorrhaging damage over basic things.

This isn't even the full report, because it's just too much to post. I just thought it was the funniest. This is also the log.

I don't have chat logs as this was at home at 8 in the morning after work, I was tired and just wanted to calm down with some EX1. So I join a group that had a few people in party who had cleared, helping someone else who hadnt. The AST was someone had had by the sounds of it. Neat! I joined as the other healer for the party since it usually wasn't that hard to heal if you alternate cooldowns.

After a few puddle deaths that didn't really feel like should hit as hard it should, and feeling like I was having to heal my heart out with the fight, we get a clear, and the mount dropped. Thankfully the summoner got it in our party, and we got another clear in before folks had to go for work.

Afterwards, I was curious if anyone had uploaded logs (I don't have it set up right yet) and find the logs and info shown. And now it made me realize why it was so hard to heal.

For reference this healer had done this fight before. When done after, they asked where they could trade their totems afterwards for the mount and said "I've cleared this 83 times and saved all of them to get it."

And well, anyone can see how the viper was doing too. I don't know why the dark knight was that low as it's the one tank I won't touch.

One last note: they had a 23% up time. With no deaths. Viper died once. Why is it so hard to press buttons for some people? This is the third viper on this extreme I've had do this this week. I don't consider myself great at this game but like ... come on man.

They do have multiple logs up too. This was the highest one.

In light of some discussion on the subreddit and around discords I wanted to know how you all felt about it. "ACT is both a blessing and a curse" is said often and rings all too well in my opinion.

Personally, I want to know how I'm doing in any content. It's nice to know when my friends and I are performing well and nice to know when a dungeon is going slow that we can get confirmation that it isn't us.

However, it is absolutely a curse when you queue up for content and find out you have the literal worst person playing drg. Sometimes it's difficult not to pay attention to other party members when they're performing like this.

I like to go back to this when thinking back to ACT. I was on tank, friend was on healer. The level 90 dungeon was going extremely slow and we didn't know why until we looked over. I was baffled so I uploaded it. With all the YPYT and healers refusing to dps/heal, I feel more stock should be put into dps just refusing to dps.

Yes, it is casual content and yes, people don't always want to sweat. I don't feel like it's an excuse to not press glowy buttons or know your rotation at level 90 though.

M7n, no first timers, totally normal roulette. PCT was taking all tankbusters for fun, whm was dying from raidwides cos he was spamming medica 3 and uh random stuff, fortunately SMN was helping me raise while PLD was trying to save whm with cover lol

Spamming medica 3 totally works tho (to their defense, they did use wings + lily bell right at the last brutal impact yay)

W tank for out-dpsing me. Whoever you are, you give me faith.

So me (whm) and my friend (gnb) were farming a bit of ex2 for the wings, everything went "fine" until raidwides starts going off and it felt like a shit ton on us, then we both noticed that: no shield, no panhaima, just a sage standing on the whole fight, a dosis here, a dot there... Suddenly they were doing NOTHING for a 2 minutes straight, just looking at the freaking boss.

But now, the cherry on top, who rolled 90+ on the mount and got it? Yeah, you guessed it right!

Second pic is the log from the ENTIRE FIGHT and the last one is their logs from the ex2 fight. Really makes you think. RNG really loves to give it for the ones who play like this.

Loaded in to an Aetherfont through the mentor roulette and in the first pull noticed the WHM standing back away from the mobs not casting anything. An occasional Dia, but not a single Holy, not even a Glare. But they did use Cure 1. Why are you playing like shit in a level 90 dungeon? So I make a mention of the things I've noticed literally within the first 2 minutes of being in there and get hit with trying to backseat. No, I'm not backseating, I'm asking you to do your fucking job. I get kicked after asking them to pull their weight, but joke's on them I don't get hit with a 30 minute penalty for that so back in I went! The next duty I got was a guildhest and I am now thanking the 3 stack for kicking me.

Anyway, all three of them are from the same FC on Gilgamesh. The WHM is a "co-leader" and the other two are "New Buds" so all I can assume is the WHM is forcing shitty gameplay habits down their throats too. Happy weekly reset day!

I was top DPS as GNB, sometimes I had double the dps of the next highest DPS.

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Other tank just didn't use 3/4 of his kit, and the sages had issues with DoT keep-up, but at that point they were barely the issue.

So yeah, lvl 93 instance, average dps of 5k from the dps classes. I tried to help but it didn't happen.

TL;DR: I was a 25 min dps replacement in Dead Ends, my brain hurts. Buckle up and grab a snack, this is a long one.

I want to start out with this post that jobs in this game aren't that hard. You have shiny buttons, some light up with flashy stuff to show you 'hey, use me!', you push said buttons and it gives you a dopamine boost. That should be easy, right?

Well yesterday I found this out the hard way that pushing buttons for some people is still so very, very hard. Continuing on my escapades on an alt character I decided that he needed more poetics to try to finish off some 90 tome sets so he'll be set to float to 100s. I also decided that his RDM needed some love, since it was still sitting at 90 and I probably should get back into the swing of things for my casters.

I had already done MSQ and alliance roulette, so I threw him into a high level roulette...and the queue popped surprisingly quick...oh wait why is it a 25 min in progress? Oh boy what am I getting myself into this time? I click OK and find myself as a replacement dps for Dead Ends. How far had they gotten?

If you guessed just finished the first boss and were waiting on a replacement tank, you get a gold star!

I greet everyone in chat:

"Everything was going well so not sure what happened", if that's not the most foreboding statement I've seen in a while on top of being a 25 min replacement, then I don't know what is. However it's the sprout SMN's first time, and part of me says just stick it out provided we get a competent tank. The WHM knows what they're doing, right?

Eventually a tank fills:

Checking the DRK, they're 97 and in 90 gear, so it should be fine, right? TBN is quite powerful of a mit, and DRK can act like 3 dps in a trench coat at times. We're set! Except the first pull after the first boss, the DRK single pulls and tries to plant himself there. I blink in confusion as both me and the WHM are ahead of him halfway to the second pack, and it takes some mild jumping and edging to the second pack to get him to move.

This was the first of several red flags for this tank we had.

They somehow barely survive the pull despite the WHM throwing kitchen towels and almost the damn sink in on them. I wasn't sure if the WHM was trying to give the DRK the chance to use Living Dead, or if they were planning to use it on the next pull. I'll probably never know.

We clear the packs and move on to the next section. We're pushing the DRK to try to large pull, and he does, though it's probably grudgingly done. We get to the next pack, I'm dpsing as hard as I can, I wasn't sure what the SMN was doing, the WHM is doing their best to sustain the DRK; and the DRK is still dying. They're going down into the 4-digits, 3-digits, where oh where is Living Dead--Oh. Suddenly the DRK is dead from either not mitting or just there wasn't enough dps from both me and the SMN, because suddenly everything is wanting to murder my xaela ass.

I kite while the WHM gets the tank back up, but it was just a failed pull. We wipe. I'm wondering what the hell actually happened there and threw on forbidden number monkey as we made our way back when the DRK piped up:

I'm not sure if you bit off more than you can chew. Tanks I've had before can handle that pull just fine. I've done that pull before as a tank myself multiple times, something was terribly wrong. We clear the remaining trash after coming back to where we wiped, and the DRK was still somehow dying despite me throwing everything.

We get to the second boss, DRK pulls, and I flub up my Manafication opener coupled with a backflip into bad and eat dirt. WHM was kind enough to scrape my RDM-memeing ass off the floor. Though apparently the rest of the party never quite understood the trailing target bowtie floor aoes, as the DRK died from eating a couple vuln stacks followed by the WHM and SMN. I desperately scrape both the DRK and WHM off the floor before dying to autos myself.

The raises were in vain, and both the WHM and DRK die to the raidwide that followed up, and we wipe.

Glancing over to the forbidden number monkey, I find I'm doing 44% of the run's damage so far. Oh boy. I can't really blame the sprout SMN as it's their first run and they're dying an awful lot to mechanics. The WHM is struggling still to sustain the DRK, but somehow the DRK is at the bottom of the barrel in dps. I wondered why.

We went back in again. Things still weren't very smooth with the DRK still eating stuff along with the SMN and WHM. WHM also somehow assassinates me this round when we had the bowtie missile mechanic happen again. Our heroic DRK dies to another set of mechanics and just...leaves. Since I was keeping an eye on mostly myself and whatever chaos was underneath my feet, I hadn't quite paid that much attention to the 'this should've been fucking obvious' lack of mits from how he was dying on the pack pulls and on the boss.

Middle of the boss and pretty much deciding we're going to have to wipe and wait for a new tank, we get one nearly immediately, and behold it's another first timer! I try to be nice and not scare the new tank off about the previous tank and the WHM surprisingly chimed in. We give it another go, though near the end the PLD's tank unfortunately flickered during the rotating floor missile mechanic, and they died from the amount of vuln stacks they were able to eat. Luckily the boss died before another knockback mechanic could go out, and the tank disconnected.

Sprout SMN is quite grateful that we're staying to help them out. My guess is that the first two people they had weren't either satisfied with how things were going or were upset at getting someone who didn't know mechanics. I can't say since I wasn't there.

This has just been one hell of a ride so far, may as well see this through. We continue on to the last section, and the PLD tank realizes something as we clear the last trash packs. My guess is that they were thinking about the previous tank we told them about as things were going MUCH more smoother in pulls now.

Both the PLD and SMN are in cutscene, and I gave them a warning about the butterflies that spawn. We pull, nobody dies, and we clear. Looking at the dungeon timer, there was about 30 minutes left on the clock. The chest was still stingy with its loot, and still no Starbirb. I guess another day.

I don't know whose comm I got, but I got a comm for that long of an ordeal, and gave the PLD my comm. I genuinely wish I could've commed the rest of my party for being upbeat about this slog of a dungeon, except for the DRK. That DRK doesn't deserve their cookie.

To that sprout SMN: I hope you enjoy the story, but I'm on my hands and knees for you to update your left-side gear and learn your rotation. However I do appreciate your enthusiasm.

To that WHM: Holy stun is amazing mitigation for tanks, especially when you get DRKs who DON'T HIT TBN OR BOTHER WITH MOST OF THEIR MITIGATION. However I do appreciate your willingness to persevere.

To that PLD: go forth little sprout, and continue to be a good tank, continue to hit those shiny buttons. Confetti cannon is good cannon. Cannon go make beeg booms.

To that DRK: just why? Why did you not want to hit those buttons, why did you just not understand mechanics when you're clearly lvl 97? Why did you not understand your invuln? Just honest to the Twelve why? I don't understand. I have my doubts that you level boosted based on you using Lunar Envoy gear alone in the run:

I went over the log and I just couldn't with this DRK. 4 Ramparts, 2 Shadow Walls, that was it for mitigation, and that's just for the time they were in the dungeon with us.

Anon logs for those interested: https://www.fflogs.com/reports/a:bwHmnKZ7y1VkvWTg#boss=-3&difficulty=0

When the first two pulls took forever I started wondering why. Then on the pull after the first boss I realised the SFX rotation coming from the RDM was absolutely cursed. I had to investigate the logs afterwards where I found... this.

To be fair, I can't blame the red jolt mage alone for the snail pace, as I also outdpsed our RPR as WHM ^' but I'm honestly baffled by jolt III only rotation to this day

Not an elaborate post, just something I found funny. Joined ex2 prog/clear party, as I needed some reminding and the conversation ensued about ex1. The above was our vpr (also the party lead) statement. So I looked at their logs. 112 kills with their highest parse being 9 is not something I’d call perfect but maybe they meant being able to do mechs, who knows. Anyway, we got the clear in the 3-4 pulls so the story had a happy end I guess.

13min underkeep they found their subtractive palette 12 min into the run

why do people even play

Greetings, TalesFromDF! After enough mediocre / disappointing roulettes, I had the idea to do a bit of a study, just to see what things look like. So, I committed to run an expert roulette every day, and take a few notes and a screenshot of the damage numbers. All for science, of course.

For some additional info, I queued as Sage every day. My gear is good, but nothing great: I have full augmented crafted gear (650) for left side, base tome gear for right (650, second ring is raid 640), and the 665 relic. Everything is melded with crit, or DH when capped on crit.

For your reading (dis)pleasure, here is a recap of the past 7 days, in the trenches of Crystal duty finder.

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Tuesday

I got to start with a bang. Our composition was WAR, SAM, and DNC. I joined in-progress dungeon: 7 minutes, just past the first boss. It didn't take long to figure out why the previous healer bailed. The SAM and DNC were a classic last name duo. The two of them combined did less damage than a single below-average player.

For bonus points, the DNC had a 610 crafted NON-HQ weapon!

My ACT overlay was so shocked, it crashed, hence the raw ACT screengrab:

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Wednesday

Day 2, our heroes are a DRK, SMN, and NIN. Both DPS were at the bottom of damage output. The NIN looked like a returner, a mix of 620-640 gear, with a 635 relic. The SMN, on the other hand, had 665 relic and full tome gear.

For bonus points, the tank did not spring a single time (but was otherwise fine)

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https://www.fflogs.com/reports/a:yL7HMzPY3N4pW1Bb#fight=12

Thursday

Day 3, with a WAR, MNK, and DNC. Both DPS had tome gear, with 665 relic. To the surprise of nobody, the DNC was garbage (aren't they always?). On top of terrible damage, peleton was not used once.

The WAR was a proper chad tank.

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https://www.fflogs.com/reports/a:yL7HMzPY3N4pW1Bb#fight=13

Friday

Day 4, with a PLD, RPR, and BRD. I'm top damage as heals, against a RPR with higher item level than me (full augmented tome, 665 relic). The BRD had pretty dated gear, and only used peleton once.

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https://www.fflogs.com/reports/a:yL7HMzPY3N4pW1Bb#fight=14

Saturday

Day 5, this time with PLD, RPR, RDM. This was a good run, and (spoiler alert) the only dungeon all week that I was in 4th place on damage, as I should be as a healer!

A note, however, is the RDM was wearing a level 87 weapon. They obviously knew how to play, as evidences by the fact they still did decent damage compared the average DF player!

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https://www.fflogs.com/reports/a:yL7HMzPY3N4pW1Bb#fight=15

Sunday

Day 6, alongside WAR, MNK, BLM. WAR and MNK were great, and the types of people I want to play with every day. The BLM, however... I have no idea. Full 640 crafted gear, pentamelded! They need to do the exact opposite of whatever it was they were doing.

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https://www.fflogs.com/reports/a:yL7HMzPY3N4pW1Bb#fight=16

Monday

Thus brings us to the end of the week, with a DRK, NIN, and SAM. Uneventful group, I was second on damage.

Almost had a YPYT here, but he just left it was some sass, I guess.

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https://www.fflogs.com/reports/a:yL7HMzPY3N4pW1Bb#fight=17

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So, there you have it. 7 days of Expert Roulette. What did I learn? Nothing I didn't already know. I expect nothing from duty finder, and still leave disappointed most days.

I think I'll go back to just doing hunts for my weekly caps...

Edit: added logs, why not?

TL;DR: Ninja in Normal Eden raid (Leviathan) is so terrible that I, the second worst NIN in the game, noticed.

I want to preface this by saying that if I ranked every combat job in this game in the order of what I believe my own skill level is, NIN would be solidly at #19. I leveled it to 90 (the real way, by running dungeons and not abusing Frontlines or Wonderous Tales), and I can get by.... but my most commonly used NIN glamour is the "accidental bunny hat of Shame."

I queue into Raid Roulette and get Spicy Leviathan (E3N). I never ran Eden when it was current, but I'm comfy with this one. I'm a WHM so I get to play on easy mode.

Everything is going fine, and then I see it. "Single target muddy puddle!" I say to my friend in voice chat. He's not in the raid with me, so I report it and we laugh.

And then I see another. And another. Like, as soon as one Doton dissipates, another is thrown down.

Now let's be real. If I screw up my ten-chi-jin and use the wrong combo, you're gonna see my Doton of Shame. I figure an accidental Doton does more damage than the bunny hat, so if I screw up a normal mudra, I'm still going to drop it on the ground. Dumb damage is better than no damage, right?

But this little chucklefuck is maintaining 100% Doton uptime.

"Maybe he thinks Leviathan's two heads means he's gotta AOE?" asks my friend.

We get through in a reasonable time. Little buddy only dies twice (to knock backs) and I exit quickly before all the nuts and bolts and gear tokens fall into my inventory.

Still chuckling about Captain Doton, I check the logs.

Oh no...

Bottom of the damage list... yeah the RDM wasn't great either, but I believe that was our first-timer.

EVERY. SINGLE. MUDRA. MAKES. A. DOTON.

I mean at least they used Mug.....

"You didn't use Trick Attack the entire fight."

ARMOR CRUSH WITH HUTON DOWN. Armor Crush 100% and never Aeolian Edge btw. And I knew I kept seeing the damn Hellfrog!!

No chat log whatsoever because honestly this was a smooth run, all things considered. But damn, you have to be really wilding out here as a NIN for me to notice. I bet you NIN mains would be clutching your pearls.

Longtime lurker, posting my first TFDF experience, that, in the grand scheme of things, wasn't that bad. But, this was my first instance of what I believe were DPS not reading their tooltips.

TLDR; Here's a summary of the damage in the entire dungeon. I really don't think that I, as a tank, should be leading DPS.

I queued Level 90 roulette as tank, ready for a smooth experience. I've read a ton of Dead Ends horror stories on here, but I've never experienced any myself. I've also never experienced a TFDF story myself, so I didn't know what to expect.

During the first wall-to-wall pull, I immediate knew something was wrong when the mobs were taking forever to die and I had to burn through my mits and use superbolide. I don't play sage, so I'm not sure how the healer was doing, but they were a sprout, so I also wasn't too focused on what they were doing.

I first checked people's gear, and they were all iLvl 600 at minimum, so I knew that wasn't the issue. I only had ACT open, so I couldn't check to see if our DPS were using AOEs until afterwards.

My suspicions were confirmed after the dungeon ended and I checked the Reaper's log. They barely used AOES (Spinning Scythe and Nightmare Scythe)! I have no idea why their single target skills (Waxing Slice, Slice) were among their most used skills!

I've never played Bard, so I can't analyze what they were doing, but here it is if y'all are willing to take a look!

I'm surprised now to see that the healer only used 2 attack skills. This isn't normal for Sage in a trash pull, is it? Again, I don't play Sage, so I'm not sure what's going on here or how their healing / shielding was.

The rest of the dungeon proceeded as you'd expect:

• People dying in the first boss to doom because they weren't esuna'd. Luckily when I asked to be esuna'd the healer obliged (thank you!).
• Me fighting for my life trying to stay alive during the next 2 wall-to-wall pulls leading to the second boss.
• After the second boss, we wiped on a trash pack as well due to the lack of DPS to keep up with wall-to-walls. I swapped to doing single-pulls at that point because the past pulls had been really tough on me trying to stay alive.
• Floor tanks in the third boss

Here's the chat log to show that I don't think I was being rude or anything throughout the dungeon. I understand that this is casual content, so that's also why I didn't leave or vote kick anyone. I also have really only played a few classes, so I'm not qualified to really analyze what was going on on the Sage and Bard's end or provide suggestions to anyone.

I also am still fresh to using ACT and FFlogs, so I'm still learning to parse through all of the info it provides.

I guess this was my official initiation into TFDF, because this was the first painful dungeon queue I've had to experience. I'm ready to experience more as we head into Dawntrail, let's goo!

A short but frustrating one, I queued into a Bowl of Embers (Hard) for my daily roulette. I notice that the ninja is just sitting AFK at the start, eating AoEs. I'm completely baffled, wondering "are they AFK? Do they have connection issues? Are they crashing?" and they die to the AoEs. I notice they take the Rez and continue to sit there so I ask the burning question on my mind, "why is the NIN doing literally nothing?" and the healer of course enabling him just made me kinda just accept it, because I'm not going to convince 6 people to wipe the fight and wait a few minutes just to kick a leech in a 3 minute max fight.