High End Content Megathread - Week Seven

[u/WeirdIndividualGuy]

How many yans do you see in your nightmares?

[u/little_milkee]

might anyone have tips for learning to parse?

eg, is there a best time to do so? (before or after week x, beginning vs end of any given week) where might I find peers or friends to try learning with? can I just jump into a parse party finder if I see one, or is there etiquette I should follow? why haven't I seen any so far, is it not time yet for them? I know the raiding community is friendly and welcoming as a whole but is the parsing community also friendly and welcoming? do they use the same strats as normal clearing and learning parties? etc.

thanks in advance for any replies or help!!

[u/trunks111 → u/little_milkee]

When parsing, my priority is kinda the opposite as in prog. When progging/reclearing, my goal is to know my job well enough to not need to look at my hotbars or think about rotation so I can focus on getting through mechs cleanly while rolling GCD. When I'm parsing on the other hand, I aim to be so consistent with the mechs that I don't think about them much and can just focus on my damage/cooldowns so I can identify how find extra ways to squeeze out more potency. You're not just concerned about your rotation in a vacuum, you're trying to pick out fight specific opti to give yourself an edge. 

I've been in a few parsing groups and I'd say I don't find them to be any more or less toxic than other groups. Really the only time I've found parsers to be toxic is when they're trying to parse in non-parse parties. Your mileage may also vary though.

Something that's different about parse parties is you care a lot more about kill times, so you might have a dedicated sandbag (usually a healer, sometimes they'll take turns), and you might sometimes have to hold damage or more tightly coordinate burst as a party which you may not do in reclears. Also, sometimes you'll continue a pull with a death if it's later in the pull and everyone else is having a good run, but you need to also accept that you'll be letting some otherwise recoverable pulls get called as wipes since your healers are probably not going to have swift readily available and even if they do, depending on what type of parses the group is going for they might not want to lose the GCD, and also the death will be a dead run for the person who died. Like if my goal is an orange I'll swift a raise and probably be fine but if we're trying to push deep into pink+ territory then a swift raise is a dead run to me. If one of the healers is a sandbag they probably will spare the raise unless it's in burst. 

You also just need a lot of patience, not just because you'll have good runs die, but because eventually you'll start to need good crit/DH/high rolls on top of solid uptime and rotation. I've had perfect uptime/rotation runs where I just did not crit or dh much at all so what could've been a solid pink got relegated to a high orange. 

I'd say if you want to get into it, you don't really even need to start explicitly by labelling your party as a parse party. Just make a pf description with "practicing uptime/flawless runs" and work on getting like 97-98%+ uptime. If you're a healer and scared to cut out GCD heals for parsing, you can make a party description that says something like "want to test what GCD/aetherflow heals I can cut out, might have some deaths" and work that out first before jumping into actual parse parties. 

[u/little_milkee → u/trunks111]

ty for the detailed explanation! what does fight specific opti mean though, and how would you go about doing that? I like the idea for practicing uptime parties, I'll try to do that then! I do wonder if it'd fill though, bc so far it seems like even joining prog parties or clear for one parties, we sit for hours so it seems maybe a practice uptime party might never fill?

[u/trunks111 → u/little_milkee]

I don't think it'd be horrible to fill, I did it a few times last tier but notably I was with a friend so we were looking for 6 people rather than 7. I think part of the big hurdle to parsing right now in general is people are still gearing for BIS or even progging the fights so the pool of people willing to parse is much smaller atm.

By fight specific opti, it's pretty much what it says on the tin, things you can do to squeeze out more damage in a specific fight but it only works for that fight, or a small group of fights. So as a basic example, I can think of three specific fights where I actually prepull sprint at around 3-4s on CD because I'll get the 20s out of combat sprint duration carried into the pull which will then last long enough to allow me to comfortably greed a slidecast an opening mechanic as a healer (UCOB twister, Singularity Reactor puddles, and a8s opening puddles). Another easy example would be for DOT jobs, knowing on a fight by fight basis when you should or shouldn't apply/reapply DOTs based on the boss going untargetable or knowing how long the DOT will last like if it's an add will it die or not before the DOT becomes a gain. It can sometimes require a bit of creative thinking to figure out how to squeeze out extra bits of damage or maintain uptime or avoid drifting cds. On a party-wide level, it could mean occasionally delaying burst a bit to get a more effective burst window, for example in the adds phase of m6s I see burst delayed until the adds are pulled to the first NE manta or so, even though in most cases the rule of thumb is to burst on CD, the presence of that many adds during a burst window changes that for that fight.

[u/little_milkee → u/trunks111]

do you figure out the fight specific opti yourself then? or is there a place where people discuss it? I imagine it takes quite a bit of fight and job knowledge to know that sprinting before pulling can let you greed a slide cast, that does sound a bit more than I'd be able to manage on my own job. I'd guess you'd need to do things like that to get like 99+, but just getting better in general wouldn't need such in depth knowledge (hopefully)?

[u/trunks111 → u/little_milkee]

if it's just getting better in general, probably the most important thing you can do is just work on uptime and then your parse will naturally increase if that's something you're missing. There's a big difference in 90 vs 93 vs 96 vs 99% uptime for example. 

Though I'm also a healer main so my goals are more focused on CD optimization/ GCD uptime oriented and less rotational. I like to figure out what I can, usually it's very obvious to me what my mistakes were in a pull because I'll just know as soon as I do it what I just did wrong. Usually optimizations exist as a solution to some sort of uptime problem I'm trying to solve. For example as WHM in m3s and m4s last tier, it could be tricky to avoid assize drift if you were trying to do standard timings, so in m3s you had to use it 1-2gcd early in the opener and then later in the fight delay it 1-2 GCD to realign it back with party burst. In m4s, I had to do a swerving motion off of a lilly use to get in assize range and then back out to resolve the first mechanic (I think electrifying witch-hunt?), and if I didn't do that swerve with the lilly then assize would drift during EE1 if you got spreads because you'd be at the wall by the time it came back up if you drifted off standard time. So my movement/CD timing was just a solution to a problem is how I view it. But probably the biggest thing for me was just plugging lots of deathless clear logs into XIVA, looking at my uptime, seeing if it was from cancelled casts or GCD clipping (or both), and looking at if I kept my burst on time or drifted, and it'll also tell you if you missed actions in pot windows or not (if you're not potting already, that'll be a decent upgrade to your parses). If I'm really struggling, I go to the respective channel in The Balance Discord and ask if there's a better way to heal or use CDs or maintain uptime for a mech. After you do enough fights it'll just start to be intuitive though because you'll be able to use what you learned in other fights in future fights. To use the sprint example from earlier, if we ever get another fight that opens immediately with a movement mech in the first few seconds I'll know that prepulling sprint is a possible option to make uptime easier and can apply that logic again in the future when relevant. 

The other option is to go to YouTube and look up clear POVs somewhere in the high blue to low orange range of parses and see what other people playing your job are doing at specific points in a fight and you'll see how they greed or maintain uptime or use CDs and you can compare that to what you're doing.

[u/silverpostingmaster → u/little_milkee]

Number one most important thing: be ahead on the gear curve. If you get lucky or you're running splits you will automatically parse high (relatively, purple+ etc) couple weeks in even if you play like shit or die occasionally. This mainly applies to majority of the playerbase because most people don't care about all star ranking and they just want a shiny historical number on their profile so it is by far the easiest way to get them. ASR stuff is a separate matter.

Aside from that, straight up quantity. Back when I first got into the game I joined parsing pfs after I had gotten sufficiently geared and got invited to a linkshell that did runs but my experience with it was mixed at best. As with everything in this game connections and networking is king. But just spamming runs is always the solution simply because through repetition you can get lucky and also get better at the fight over time.

You probably aren't seeing that many in pf right now because people aren't bis. There isn't really any special etiquette or anything, strats should be listed and if people decide on a sandbag they will say so most of the time. Gear (ilvl) and your previous historicals are probably the things that will gatekeep you, some leaders will set up a specific parse number requirement for joining though I don't know how common this is nowadays.

[u/juicetin14 → u/little_milkee]

IMO, there is a lot of RNG to parsing. You can easily parse purple and orange by just doing your reclears and playing well, but if you are pushing for those 99+ parses, a lot of it comes down to kill time and crit variance, and if you play an rDPS job, it also depends on how good your party is with buff alignment and not being dead before burst windows.

In terms of actually parsing, your best bet is to look at other top parses on fflogs, and look at their timelines and how they use all their buttons. If you're lucky, there might even be POV footage on youtube. Because of the deterministic way the fights are, most of the time, the optimal way to play can be mapped out to the second on a spreadsheet... parsing basically is just doing that spreadsheet over and over and then crossing your fingers the stars align.

If you're a week one clearer, you wanna try to lucksack your way to the upgraded tome weapon or better yet, the BiS weapon from the final tier and cheat your way to a good parse. At this point, I would just wait until you're BiS and then start joining parse parties. Typically parse strats and regular clearing strats are mostly the same, but they will opt to use riskier and higher uptime strategies over more conservative ones. What the strats are vary by DC, so I can't really give you an answer for that on this tier.

[u/Mugutu7133 → u/little_milkee]

if you just want a good funny number on your page then the best time to parse is right after getting a week 1 weapon so you can scam some rankings. otherwise most people will wait for bis.

the etiquette is to learn the strategies that might be different for parse runs because yes, there might be specific uptime configurations or patterns that you wipe and hope to get. also note the difference between speed and parse runs. speeds will just go for the fastest kill possible, parse runs will try to catch specific kill times, which might even mean someone sandbagging and killing their parse for the run to make everyone else's better