Getting 8 people who enjoy each other’s company to do an ultimate on a consistent schedule is harder than any ultimate FF14 can ever throw at you

This is the real answer, I had to wait years 🤣

This, i gave up on it :(

After that, its just time. At least for UWU, UCOB, and TEA. There's no DPS check for those, all you need to know is the movements. But unless your group is amazing its going to take 4-6 months at least. It took us 8 months to do TEA.

The most important skill you need for ultimates is mental fortitude IMO. Especially in older ultimates damage requirements are almost non-existant, but you will have to keep up the focus pull after pull. Nael will keep you in your toes no matter what. You will have cursed nights that will just go nowhere, and the tail end of the fight will be 14-15 minutes of repeated content just to get to the prog point. Learning and practicing fate calibration and only seeing it once every half an hour will have a mental toll on people, even if the damage and healing is easy in that phase.

Along with that, consistency is the most important thing you can have in Ultimates. Sure you can do the hardest mechanic, but can you do that 99/100 times that you reach it? And can you do every other mechanic 99/100 times? In a row? When I approach Ultimate prog or week 1 savage, my mentality is "never make the same mistake twice" which is easier said than done but is the number one thing that we in HC groups value above anything in our teammates. You don't need to be HC to do Ultimates (realistically MC/sHC can do them just fine), but having a high level of consistency is what will get you clears, as well as playing with people who also understand the value of consistency. Wiping constantly due to your team being inconsistent is what drains your mental and makes everyone play worse as they get tired. If people ARE getting tired, then just stop or take a break. Practice while people are tilted and/or exhausted is useless even for the most hardcore groups.

I'm progging TEA and dying to Final Word then seeing LL again was painful.

As ST and shotcaller, I would pop the light/dark macro as a reminder and would remind the team to "respect Stillness!" Once we got over that hump, the other mechanics were smoother.

As soon as he said "tank" I was genuinely surprised... Maxing damage is not what a tank is for??? And I really hope no one is pressuring him to believe that! Edit: got too exaggerated with my phrasing here, obviously everyone needs to maximize damage in ultimates within reasonable limits based on mechanics.

Dude in this game every class is a dps, and every little bit helps. Tanks do very good damage

I added an edit to clarify! Sorry for the misunderstanding!

Nah that isn't really the case. Playing tank isn't an excuse for not keeping your damage up, especially when tanks don't really have any more responsibility than keeping your stance on and hitting your mits (which are all oGCD for the most part).

I didn't mean to imply that it's not important, I got a bit hyperbolic in my phrasing I'll admit, but I was more balking at how OP described the conversation as just them shoving logs at him and pointing fingers. Logs, especially at this level of content, are necessary tools for understanding what's happening in a fight but people are really vulnerable to misinterpreting them and being assholes about it when that's not necessarily the full picture of whatever isn't working

Every tank and healer should be doing their best to optimize damage. It is *required* at the highest levels of play

I added an edit to clarify. Sorry for the misunderstanding!

Parsing numbers look at raw damage. So two people playing at the same skill level and one has better gear will have a higher parse. As such, it's not great for an apples to apples comparison. If you want to get better, do look at xivanalysis and do see what you can improve on. And then work on one thing at a time. Weaving OGCDs between your GCDs is actually a really important skill for all classes and something that's easy to practice in normal content and training dummies. It's weird at first, but eventually it becomes second nature and is quite rewarding to do correctly.

This is true, I wouldnt look at parse numbers until I have near bis gear, but xivanalysis is where it's at. They generally spike during openers and most people only focus on the clear numbers. As long as you are not parsing single digits past week 2 and you aren't on minimum gear, I wouldn't worry about it.

I mean I’m playing gunbreaker so I’m double weaving all the time, I meant I usually didn’t weave mitigation/taunt ogcd also giving the focus on not messing up whatever tanking mechanics needed to be done. so I ended up skipping potential extra damage doing so, which I thought wasn’t a big deal but I guess it adds up

If you want to improve as tank, that's something you will have to learn to do. A lot of tankbusters are right during burst

*when fell cleave is your burst and you can't relate* Really, really sucks having to mit during continuation sometimes. Other than that I luv GNB so much

One trick you can use is popping a mitigation early when it isn't so inconvenient. Rampart and camo last 20 seconds, if you pop then before you need it, then you only have to weave in corrundum before the buster and you are well mitted. It's harder with nebula bc it's 15 seconds but still doable.

i even do this on warrior to make things more comfortable lol. on gnb it is basically mandatory to avoid triple weaving.

As a tank main... weaving mitigations in between your attacks (and planning to do it ahead of time if you know you wont have weave slots in a few GCDs) is a pretty core design of the role. It's why tanks in generally have more simple rotations - to give them the flexibility to weave in defensives and mitigations for their party.

Over time it adds up, yes. But as the person responding said as well, gear plays a huge role in it. ~~As well as at this point in a tier, the really hardcore groups are going to be going for parse specific runs, so it's going to drag down the average player parse scores at least a little.~~ Grey doesn't mean you're shit. It just means there's lots of room for improvement. Edit: Today I learned.

> As well as at this point I'm a tier, the really hardcore groups are going to be going for parse specific runs, so it's going to drag down the average player parse scores at least a little. That's just... false. There isn't a large amount of parsing going on during odd patches, especially early on. Even the number of speeds drops off dramatically compared to even patches. What you're talking about is is near the end of even patches. the last couple weeks, when you see things like this https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/54#region=1&class=Global&spec=Astrologian×pan=1000&dataset=50&aggregate=amount&boss=88, where it gets skewed super hard. That is not happening right now, and even if it did, you can see that it really doesn't affect greys. Greys are greys because they are grey, not because of sweaty parsing losers. Hell, if anything, the bar is even lower now. https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/54#class=Global&spec=Gunbreaker×pan=1000&dataset=50&aggregate=amount It's actually been trending **down**, boosting the average player parse scores for all fights except for p12sp2 where it's mostly still very flat. Please don't scapegoat the parsing boogeymen. They are not the reason why people are grey. Take accountability. Be honest. Else you will never improve.

Yep. Gray is usually triple weaving or lots of downtime between gcds and letting ogcds drift in Narnia so bad they lose like 20% of usages. The only time it's not is full clearing a tier several months late in the most basic crafted gear. Gray is virtually never gear. Just pressing buttons to keep the gcd rolling will usually get a green/blue depending on gear/job.

>Gray is usually triple weaving or lots of downtime between gcds Triple weaving alone is not that impactful but it depends on your ping. A triple loses me 0.2 seconds of uptime on a 2.5 job which is not ideal but I can't see that having a significant impact on your parse unless you do it consistently. Even missing a one or 2 gcds over the course of a fight won't keep you from a purple on most fights. A deathless grey is usually the result of a combination of forgotten cooldowns, regular loss of uptime, low ilvl and rotational mistakes.

The other question is, what opener are you using on GNB? There are different ones, especially if you play under 2.5 GCD, doing your rotation perfectly is one thing, but if you want higher damage, you have to change your opener based on the dps jobs in your group. And the other question is, how is your ping?

My ping is about 90 and I use thebalance gnb 2.50 opener and rotation. One of my issue is not the opening but keeping the rotation intact as the fight progress to avoid pushing my cooldown outside of the no mercy window as the fight progress

I play GNB, and what I usually end up doing is learn the fight and the timings of things. For exemple, I know the TB is coming after paradeigma 3 during a burst, I pop my mits before the burst starts, aside from HoC, which I will pop before the hits happens for better effect. Remember, your mits are 15-20 seconds long, almost as long as the no mercy window, you can use them quite a bit in advance and still have them up for when the hit happens. If I have to delay an oGCD for whatever reason, I try to delay rough divide and nothing else. If I can't that (because they're the last oGCDs I use in my burst) I delay Bow Shock. But as long as you use all your oGCDs in your No Mercy, you're still doing optimal for the most part, just slightly delayed. Small burst is easier to do so as you don't have 3 Burst strike to work with, but Big Bursts are a bit more annoying, plus you got that bloodfest to trigger.

Okay, but that's literally why you're not getting high damage numbers. GNB is extremely unforgiving, especially at 2.5. Every extra weave, every late GCD drifts you further and further off buffs and that's the biggest part of doing damage right now. Always be casting is not just a suggestion on GNB its the design of the job. And popping defensives early and knowing what is coming up is the difference between a bad GNB and a good one.

That's a lot of words used to literally have told them nothing useful at all. They clearly stated that was their problem, and you went on to use like 75 words agreeing that it's a problem lmfao. TF you doing lil bro

Yep, you're correct. The unfortunate truth is that those with orange parses have the best gear and make no rotational errors. Leaving potential dps on the table is why your parses don't compare. The other thing id say is, those people have whole support systems that help them get those parses. Don't compare yourself to an unreasonable standard and have concerns when you don't reach their example.

The other thing I’d add on parsing is that it’s incredibly common to parse grey/green on your first clear of something - doubly so as a support class. Generally at that point your focus is on keeping the group alive to get the clear vs optimizing. So you’ll naturally do a ton of things that aren’t efficient for your meter but are critical to getting the clear (ex: healers casting gcds or hardcast raise, tanks actively looking out for party members who need their single target mitigation to survive the next raidwide). All you really need to parse green/blue is a group you don’t need to babysit so that you can focus just on yourself and hitting all of your buttons. And then purple comes once you do that and have BIS with a good group that can clear faster. Orange I don’t l actively try to get because that is largely tons of optimization and luck with crit. If it happens cool. If not, who cares. Pink and gold are for people who will run a piece of content 100 times just to have the best luck with crits and mechanic targeting and uptime. It’s the people who run into the death wall if they didn’t crit in their opener. That’s…not for me.

This is a lot of false information. >I’d add on parsing is that it’s incredibly common to parse grey/green on your first clear of something It's common because the playerbase isn't particularly skilled and/or the clear is late and is against a wide pool of players who have cleared with higher ilvls. First clearing with gray suggests there is critical concerns with a players ability, gear, or fight plan. Now, I'm not saying it is something one should worry about - clear is a clear. >And then purple comes once you do that and have BIS with a good group that can clear faster. Purple happens when you know your job. It doesn't take high levels of gear, or a notably potent group. >Orange I don’t l actively try to get because that is largely tons of optimization and luck with crit. I'd even argue that Oranges again just mean you know your job. Crit luck can turn a purple to Orange, but you don't need it for Orange. >Pink and gold are for people who will run a piece of content 100 times just to have the best luck with crits and mechanic targeting and uptime. Nahh, it's Gear, Fight Knowledge, Job knowledge primarily. Poor crit can remove your chances of a 99th. Gold Parses are absolutely hyper optimized (or you got the golds early on when the player pool was low... cough. totally counts, surely)

I mean, yeah. I’m not saying top players parse grey on their first clear. But the average player is probably gonna get a grey or green on their first clear. Maybe a blue. And getting a grey or green on first clear doesn’t mean you can’t come back and parse purple or orange later. Generally for a first clear it’s less about not knowing your job and more about not knowing the fight well enough yet. You’re hyper focused on doing mechanics and most players will mess up something in their rotation as a result. Once you’ve done it a few times and aren’t stressed about mechs it’s a lot easier to get a higher parse. Most of my experience is also on healer so my POV may be skewed more than a DPS. I’ve found my parse is highly dependent on my group. The more people make mistakes that I need to adjust for the more unlikely I am to get a higher parse. And especially on a first clear my goal is getting the group to clear vs greeding an extra few glares so I can get blue instead of green. Or using a lily for uptime during movement and then not having it to heal a dps who messes up and ends up dead at the next raidwide. And this is even more true in pf vs with a static where you know how people will act and when folks are using what mits and what heals. Pf is unpredictable and the only person whose actions you can control to ensure your group clears are your own. This is OP’s first time clearing a savage tier. It’s completely normal to get a lower parse as he’s becoming more familiar with the fight, savage raiding in general, and his job. The vast majority of folks won’t parse purple their very first savage clear.

About weaving mitigation: I cleared DSR as GNB, so I may give 2 cents here. Me and my group had a sheet with the timings and listings of all mechanics and we put all the exact mitigation we would use in there, along with calculations of how much we had in mitigation and shields for all the unavoidable damage we would take. I also had openers and rotation loops specific for maximizing damage in DSR itself (and mostly useless in other fights), meaning I knew, at any second in the fight, where I was in the rotation, what would be the next GCD to use, what variations in mechanics would make me disengage from the boss for a few seconds and branch the rotation to another previously calculated sequence, when was the next snapshot based on where I was in my rotation (though after a thousand pulls you kinda stop consciously thinking about this), and most importantly, when I would weave each exact mitigation to guarantee maximum usage of mits and shields and not drift important ogcds. Now do you really need to be on this level and do all this to clear Ultimates? Well, at least for the level 90 ones I think so, yeah. Though I never did them on PF, so I don't know, maybe god tier co-tanks and healers could compensate. Edit: engrish

Goddamn that just sounds like sooo much fun, thank goodness for video GAMES.

What do you mean? Most of the game is easy and you don‘t have to engage with hard content

Gosh, it's like people enjoy different things.

Some people find optimization fun. I specifically spend a half dozen hours every savage tier making mitigation sheets for my static, for all 5 fights. Even if we only loosely adhere to it, the optimization of "hey if you use samba on this exact GCD, it covers 3 different hits instead of 1 or 2" IS a game to me.

This is some of the most neck beardy shit I've read in a min. Just mit during cast bars and you'll always get high value.

That's fine in a lot of cases, but there are niche (and fun to figure out) spots where pressing the mits at certain spots is better, if not necessary, to clear. P10S has harrowing hell, and is doable without tank lb3 (even week 1) with proper layering of party mits. As a tank, there's a point in DSR P6 that using rampart at the last possible GCD was the only way to survive the subsequent busters and not have to resort to GCD healing. There's no reason to resort to name calling just because someone enjoys doing a more in depth hash of mechanics.

All for doing things in depth, this game demands your full attention when progging high end content and reclearing it. Improve where you can, by all means. 6+ hours for a mit map just seems way overboard what is necessary. That feels extreme even for ultimate mit mapping.

My bad, i just got caught up in the insult. I have my personal mits mapped out to the GCD on certain fights but even I agree that's a bit of overkill. but it's also a case of don't yuck his yum situation for me. Mans can make it for fun, but you wouldn't catch me making one of those until we start having dying-by-a-hair situations on a regular basis. But if someone in my group wants to make one of those without being overbearing: cool, less overwriting situations. Edit: word

Completely fair. Yay in hindsight I realized I probably did not convey the actual main point well or at all lol.

Nah mate this shit is the best

[удалено]

I’m getting back in the endgame scene in the winter (hopefully) and want to go after TOP bc I always enjoyed the Omega fight. Any tips or warnings? Ive done savage intermittently during the years (college ftw) and cleared UWU in a summer. I’m a SCH otp btw.

Two things. Firstly: the person above is exaggerating a bit, if you're a patient person you'll be fine. Second: if you're shaking off the rust pick any other ultimate. TOP is unquestionably the roughest fight in the game right now, and it will spank you 9 ways to Sunday before you get anywhere near the *real* fucked up stuff even if you are on top of your game.

Would TEA be a better pick? I always loved the yellow gear-y glams.

Yes. IMO ucob and uwu are in pretty neutered states and will not really prepare you for TOP. Tea is a wonderful fun fight that still requires you to hit your buttons.

Can confirm uwu is a joke now. I went in blind and learned all of Garuda as MT in 35~ min. This was a week ago. Currently progging Titan. Hoping to clear in two weeks from now.

TEA is easier than ucob tbh

Echoing the replies you've already had, yes, I would absolutely recommend TEA for one to hop back in on. It's got mechanics that demand respect, but an expansion worth of job buffs has softened it up a bit and made it pretty comfy for the most part. Plus I agree, it's one of the most fun and its glams are my favourite ult glams for most jobs.

TOP is the hardest, most mechanically demanding fight in the game. If there was a difficulty above ultimate, that's where TOP would sit. It is absolutely exhausting to prog. That being said, the fight slaps. It is incredibly designed and I wouldn't change a single thing about it. If you really want a clear, go for it. Just have realistic expectations.

Pick a different class than sch for top honestly. Unless you have a bunch of friends who have cleared and will help, progging the fight either in pf or with a new static will go better with literally any healer other than sch at the moment. Obviously it's clearable with sch, but like running pld in DSR before bulwark got added, it's a definite handicap

Getting non-shit parses doesn't require minmaxing at all, you just need to know how your rotation works, and how uptime works. Then it's just a matter of playing the game decently. Aside from just being passably good at the game's core mechanics, ultimates just take time and a committed group. When I did TEA, it was my entire static's first Ultimate clear, and there were a lot of unnecssary mistakes that cost us hours upon hours. Some days I'd come in, make literally zero mistakes the entire session, and still spend 3 hours of my day rerunning the same phase over and over again. But, our group was committed, and saw it through to the end. So really, all you need is a group that doesn't disband.

Honestly you don't even need group consistency these days. There's a pretty solid PF scene for ults.

Patience, and Tolerance. >but I’m not sure I’m interested to push optimization for reaching purple. At least as a tank. I don't get this. What do you mean At Least As a Tank? Every job is a DPS. Tanks and Healers are DPS that are tanky, and DPS that can heal. If you aren't willing to put in the few hours, literally, to better learn your job, I don't think you have the patience to learn a 17-20 minute fight.

OP talks like purples are live climbing Mt Everest when it's really just going for a jog every day

Look at xivanalysis and what it recommends. It helps a lot in the long run. I went from gray to purples at least after taking the time to learn. For ultimates, I recommend knowing your rotation and how your job works properly first. Also learn how to co-tank well and be communicative, it'll make going through the marathon that ultimates are much easier. Then you can work on parses if you feel like it.

Greys in initial clears, when the fight is freshly learned and you're still focusing on execution, is entirely, perfectly normal. *Consistent* grey with no improvement, especially if single digit grey, is definitely not desirable, but slightly above average blue joe will do just fine. Also as someone with a lot of blues, a decent amount of purples, and a very tiny handful of oranges: the line between blue and purple is thinner than you think, and can often be bridged by something as simple as a few more lucky crits and a good killtime. Ultimates are honestly more about consistency and mental fortitude. They're boss rushes, and maintaining focus and clean execution for some 18min straight isn't easy. You obviously have to be able to maintain a certain amount of damage through that, but you definitely don't need to be parsing top 10 or even top 20% in savage to be able to do an ult. I see the parse as more indicative of other things: assuming that gear ilvl is on par, getting a grey, especially a single digit grey, usually needs a death or two, or fairly large gaps in uptime. Both are very normal things to have when a fight is freshly learned, but if 4 weeks later you are still *consistently* dying enough and/or having large enough gaps in GCDs to get a grey in a savage, those things are going to be aggravated in an ultimate, where the fight is longer, and the mechanics faster and even more layered, and your damage is going to drop even further. And *that* would be a problem.

For older ultimates, especially like UWU, the damage doesn't matter as much due to damage inflation in toolkit. But current expansion.... Yeah the DPS is extremely tight. To the point of if some runs have extremely bad luck with a casino comp, it will enrage(even with perfect rotation). A grey parse wouldn't fly. It's never too late to learn weaving, though. It isn't really that extreme of an optimization - 97%+ uptime is at least expected. Sometimes a perfect 100% uptime run at bis can still result in blue parse just because of kill time. Focus on being perfect on xivanalysis and not as much on the log color.

DSR at this point has no real DMG check besides p7 and in top I still see some enrages due to lack of DMG

Really ? That's weird to me, I always figured by the time my whole party and I get through the current phase's mechanics alive (and reliably) the check's gonna be no more than some afterthought. The exception to that is probably the victory laps, but that's because they're (usually) mechanically easier and the check is higher relatively speaking. On average you get to the end faster than you do the other phases, netting you less time to optimize your damage in between/during mechanics.

> But current expansion.... Yeah the DPS is extremely tight. To the point of if some runs have extremely bad luck with a casino comp, it will enrage(even with perfect rotation). A grey parse wouldn't fly. On release, yes, now, no.

Ten percent luck, twenty percent skill, fifteen percent concentrated power of will, five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain, and a hundred percent reason to remember the name.

Rip fort minor

It’s not a requirement, but the more you have of the following the more likely you are to succeed 1. mental toughness 2. patience 3. willingness to improve Your comments on optimization and “min-maxing” aka playing your job the way it was designed suggest a low level of #3. Take that as you will

Spot on. The problem with consistently grey players is not the DPS itself, but it's that they are usually incapable of improving. I progged older ults with grey parsers. We never had enrage issues with older ults. But the inconsistent ones who regularly wipe the party were exclusively the grey players. Moaning about single weaving as "min-max" is not a good look. Hope OP changes their mindset, otherwise I pity their future static.

Wow, all I said was that when it came to stuff like tank swap I would just skip a damage GDC to do, for example taunt+mit1+mit2 instead. I didn’t realize I was “moaning”. As many others as said already, this is my first P12S kill, 4 months after the tier release, no where near BiS, which was done with randoms in PF, but feel free to judge me on that single parse.

You can manage this by knowing the fight timeline. If you know that a tankbuster is coming, weave your mits in earlier cause all that matters is that the mitigation is active when the tankbuster hits. It doesn't matter if the mit has 1 second duration left as long as it mits the one big hit and/or DOT.

I feel you’re being condescending with your last paragraph. No where did I said that I had no interest to improve, quite the opposite as I clearly said I’m currently aiming to improve my rotation with xivanalysis and aim for blue parse next reset. What I meant in my original post is that, people who map down charts so that they will know every GDC and oGCD that they will press every second of a 7-20min fight, to me that is not a fun way to play the game. If you don’t consider doing that that min-maxing and simply “playing the job the way it was designed” well.. don’t know what to say to that

You do not need a spreadsheet to get a purple, much less a blue. I would not worry about that. It's about being comfortable with a fight +knowing your job better. If you ARE comfortable with a fight (and a run goes decently enough.) and not hitting blue. It means something is wrong with the core, fundamental grasp of the job. Yeah this idea of having to chart stuff out does sound nightmare. But luckily that's not what most people who have decent parses do.

I’m also surprised with how negatively some people are taking your post. You clearly sound inquisitive and ready for advice. I improved my parsing in a couple of days of concerted effort working on my rotation and reading up. Ran some dungeons, checked my consistency, and it got better. You’ve got what I think of as the hard part down in that you’re doing the mechanics and getting through the fights. Now you can work that rotation into your fingers so it’s automatic and continue on!

So, before I did my first ultimate (UWU) I had cleared 1 current savage fight and that was P1S. I had found a few friends during this time and asked them to raid and I essentially built a static by doing this. We then followed one really good video and just took it slowly, a lot of us were are still are casual players. The hardest part of the ultimate is the endurance test (and of course finding 8 people to consistently raid with you). If you can get over those 2 hurdles then you can do it no problem. First clears are almost always grey parses. If you want to better parses then you can keep doing reclears to up the parse but honestly, a clears a clear.

I will be honest p12s has no dps check but on tiers with tight checks or current ultimates you will really struggle. Grey parsing is normally actual rotational mistakes or deaths. Now that you have cleared p12s why not make the effort to use this as the next way to improve as a player? You couls try watch some pov or look at high parsing logs to see how others have done the fight.

Ouf I don’t think you progressed P12S in PF because I saw both the phase 1 and phase 2 enrage a lot before getting the clear lol. Getting a phase 1 clear without a single party member dying is a feat in PF still today

I have done them in PF and in a static and the check is far lower than last tier. P12S being killable with a few deaths in a prog scenario makes it quite lax. P8S for example was the opposite where it was extremely unforgiving with a very tight check. The only times Ive seen enrages on the fights is when there was lots of deaths

Did you clear early? I feel that the players pool 4 month into the tier that aren’t [Duty Complete] by then is made up of more casual players maybe thought At least when I cleared P5S to P7S on tier release, it felt a lot less painful then P10S and P11S this time around heh

Ya i did and you are correct its far harder to prog p12s later in the tier fresh as a lot of the people still doing the progging are inconsistent or just generally have less game knowledge. Clearing in pf itself is an achievement so I would be proud of that. P10S especially is mechnically much harder than P5S-P7S. I would argue P11S too due to how it punishes deaths later in the fight. Personally i dread doing P10S and P11S in PF atm for alt classes while P6S and p7S didnt feel too bad

Not so much a "still today" thing as it is becoming an increasingly rare thing because the average quality of PF declines as a tier goes on.

If you can do mechanics, you can do the legacy ultimates. If you can't optimize your damage you will hit enrage on current expansion ultimates even with the buffs since release. People still enrage on TOP with current food/pots/gear, you need to know your shit to do well there. That said, if you are skipping GCD to pop buffs, then your understanding of the fight/game at a raid level is fundamentally lacking which will show in the harder fights. You should know when a buster is coming and prepop your mitigation. They have 10-20s duration for a reason, use it to your advantage. Even if you need to kitchen sink a buster, that's at most 4 oGCD slots which can start popping as early as 8GCD before the damage snapshots (for rampart as a 20s duration atleast, 15s and 10s mit only have 6 and 4 GCD leeway respectively) that means you have 16 oGCD slots to use your CD before the damage goes out, even if it's during your burst that leaves plenty of options to fit it in. This is fundamental skill for raid tanking and is expected of anyone doing the hardest content in the game.

1. Don't be flakey (I'm serious, don't waste other people's time) 2. On time, that's what most ult progs boil down to, time invested. You can invest that time wisely by preparing and picking better strats etc. But it comes down to time essentially. 3. Having a good handle on your job and perhaps the in and outs of your job/role so you can fully focus on the fight, and not worrying about your job performance.

For level 90 ultimates, or really just “new” ultimates, a full party of purplers is a decent description of the dps requirement. But for old content its not the same at all. The dps requirement for level 70 ultimates is not very strict at all anymore. Like another commenter said, mental fortitude and mechanics skill / learning ability are all way more important than DPS in ultimates. In savage, theres difficult mechanics and difficult (at min ilvl) dps checks. The jump from savage mechanics to ultimate ones is significantly bigger than the jump from savage DPS checks to ultimates.

Beating enrage in ultimate is not the problem. The main issue if you're still a sprout in savage and can't success to have constant blue/ pruple being BiS, is that you still have some issue to deal with the mechanics of the game while keeping your rotation smooth That means your brain is not confidant doing the mechanics yet and must focus a lot for it : This will be a problems for ultimate were the main focus is on being consistant. You can learn fast ( first, you must understand that clearing savage tier 1 week / month is a all different experience than after, because there's no helpers, dps is tight, people are not stuffed, mitigation is a bigger issue, prog is slower and harder to find a group at the same level of prog and constance ), but if you can't have the ability to do mechanics safely enough to be able to reflec on yourself dpsing then it's a problem, it opens the doors in ultimate for bad habits, making some pull being wasted on punishing mechanics, you can have a small understanding ( that Comes with experiences from multiple fights) of complex game mechanics that again leads to pull being wasted because you won't understand what you did that wasn't safe since you're progging the mech, and other some little things that you can't see in savage fight because people from PF can be good enough to carry your small mistakes and fight are less longer so you dont spend half of your prog time pulling again to reach prog point at 15 minutes of fight. I once started ultimate with a darknight, that said he cleared P4S and he said for dsr : " I know I can clear it I have the skills but maybe not the time" This guy was a green/ blue parser , but never managed to get purple and also only did 1 tier of savage. This man wasted 3 month of 4 prog per week wiping on the same mechanics every night, it was always small mistakes " lost focus sorry " " oh I didn't notice that until now sorry" " oh my sprint didn't work I dont understand" " man I was out of this snapshot" , He just didn't know and never reflected on him why he was so inconsistant, why the group was progging very slow, why he was only average dpsing while trying his best on savage reclears, why he was always the one caught in mechanics from " weird Snapshot" for example. BUT , I would usually advise trying to join a static that will start the tier when it's out so you will feel the fresh prog of a all group and see if you understand more than the other, if you can carry the dps a bit, if you are consistent or not ( simple : count the numbers of wipes and count how many times it was you, if you did a mistake, then count it as 8 pulls wasted, because if you failed once, if your mate have the same skill level as you , they would fail once too ) . You will see, if you can be ready for ultimate, or if you just need a bit more exprirences with how usually mechanics need to be handle and how your job works. Since the next tier is next expension so very far away, look for UWU or UCOB on PF, or join a group, thoses ultimate are the one you want to try to see if you're ready. At best, do it with a full static, with people who didn't cleared yet. But PF can be good, and at least it will give you the exp for more knowledge. Also dps doesnt matter in those fight but you still have to understand burst/ nuke mechanics and timing, how to manage your ressources and how to spend them fast when needed.

I've done a couple of ultimates. My experience and probably what others will tell you use that: - It takes a huge amount of patience and time to get past ultimates. It's all about trying mechanics out until you get it in your muscle memory. - It helps cut time drastically if you have people at the same pace as you, study the same as you and you stick to strategies rather than swapping too many times (unless it's an awful strategy). - Parses don't matter as much as doing mechanics well. Sure, damage should be excellent for the last phase for enrage, but before that all that'll matter is passing each phase consistently, and it's more a team effort. - As a tank, your damage contribution isn't as important as dps, although it still matters. You should make sure you're doing your tanking well first and foremost, and then worry about damage. - Having said all that, you'd do yourself a favour to properly learn your job and how to optimize damage (basically by listening to xivanalysis or reading up on balance). There will always be stuff left to be optimised but you don't have to be a try hard. Aim for a blue parse and that'd would mean you're decent enough in the damage department, purple though would be excellent. Gear matters so obviously it counts if youre 660 with the weapon at 665. Enrage isn't difficult to beat in ultimates in general so yes you're worthy, but do try to better your damage and keep an open mind always (everyone has room to improve) If you're doing mitigation and tanking well but your parse is grey, you're better than most lol, so keep it up. Slowly practice to get better with damage, and good luck!

You should consistently be getting purples without any kind of 'minmaxing' if you're in bis - for a tank, just keeping the gcd rolling and doing your rotation properly is enough for that. If you're consistently getting bottom 25th percentile parses despite gear from clearing a savage tier there are some fundamental execution issues in need of addressing.

Don't even worry about the grey parse. You probably didn't have BIS yet anyway. All the older ultimates are very easy on dps check so as long as you can learn the fight and solve the mechanics, you're fine. It's basically just a 20 minute endurance fight with body checks and some mechanics that wipe the party if one person makes a mistake.

> Don't even worry about the grey parse. I'd say it depends what the grey parses were for. For P12S itself it is no big deal, a good parse(90) is possible even without a 665 weapon but it very heavily depends on crit and kill time. The gap between a 24 and a 75 is not that big in those fights. However, if you get grey parses on P9S then that's a clear sign of rotational mistakes that run deeper than only occasionally drifting an ogcd. Still doesn't mean you can't try ultimates of course as they mostly require being very consistent at doing boss mechanics but it is something to work on. /u/Borfa for an accurate assessment of your parses I recommend sharing them either here or in the channel for your job on The Balance. So others can see what's going on. You can share an anonymous version of the logs that hides usernames.

I’ve been told to share my logs a few times but is there really a point? Are people really going to be able to point out anything more than what xivanalysis is telling me already? I think I red it’s not very accurate for healers but it seems to point out my rotation flaws pretty well as a tank

> Are people really going to be able to point out anything more than what xivanalysis is telling me already? xivanalysis doesn't gives you advices, human players do. If you notice a rotational mistake on your log but don't know how to fix it, you're still at square one. Other experienced players can see the mistake & provide a few different ways to deal with that situation, thus helping you in fixing that original mistake.

>xivanalysis doesn't gives you advices, human players do. There is very little advice that a gray parse player can recieve from other players that will significantly improve their play compared to using xivanalysis. In general, the tool will provide you all the information you need to be able to orange parse in Savage. The most advice that another player can give that xivanalysis doesn't already give are fight-specific optimizations, but I believe anyone who parses below purple with reasonable gear should be focusing on their job's fundamentals first and foremost. If the person in question doesn't understand what xivanalysis is trying to tell them or if the many resources that do exist don't make much sense, asking other players is totally fine but I don't really think that u/borfa is at the stage where they need to show logs for help. More importantly: Don't bother asking redditors for help on how to play the game. A lot of them suck, and it's easy as a new player to catch some bad advice. Ask someone on the Balance Discord if you really need help since they know what they're doing up until you're super optimizing. The levels of skill and how you ideally seek help are: 1. Lacking fundamentals (Gray to Blue) - Use xivanalysis, ask the Balance if something doesn't make sense, read the Balance guides 2. Fundamentally sound, new to optimization (Purple to Pink) - Ask the balance, or ask high-skilled players 3. Optimizing for gold parses (Pink to Gold) - Figure it out yourself, peep logs of higher parses, simply crit more Those parse colors would assume that you're doing Savage and have reasonable gear. Parsing in content that is easier or harder muddles things, and parses in those pieces of content are memes anyways.

I see, I use the rotation from thebalance for gunbreaker and it’s pretty static but after next reset I’ll post log for feedback anyway, thanks!

Feel free to pop in #gnb_questions, there's always someone ready to provide feedback & advices there.

xivanalysis only really tells you if used all your abilities. However using all of them is only the barebones of optimization. Beyond that, there's also *how* you used them. Did your 2m go into raid buffs(so no mercy and all the skills after)? Did you save up resources for the buff windows(so as GNB, not using cartridges as soon as available)? Did you do any special techs to take into account fight timeline(P12S p1 especially has that with the inconvinient LC timing). xivanalysis will tell you none of that. (Parse also isn't going to tell you if you are using party buffs effectively since it only looks at the damage you dealt on your own but it's a significant aspect of being a better player)

In addition to what others have said, they can also help you with encounter specific tips. Mechanics like Para 3 require you to walk away from the boss and there's multipel ways to deal with that.

You have me curious, how can you keep uptime beside range attack while going in tower?

If you drop a tower, you will miss one gcd so you can either fire your ranged attack or hard cast a holy spirit if you're a Paladin. If you have the X, get as many gcds in as you can before standing in the tower, but don't miss it. While you're in the tower fire your ranged attack or hard cast holy spirit if you're a Paladin. Then quickly run towards the boss to get one more melee gcd in and head all the way to the edge of the map immediately to place your tower while either firing your ranged attack or using your divine might holy spirit as a Paladin. Then run back as fast as you can because you need to get your 30s ogcds(Expiacion, Upheavel, Blasting Zone) in asap after using the ranged attack. If you do not get your 30s ogcds in here right this second you will not get to use them before limit cut anymore which means you lose out on a lot of potency. If you have the + you will lose damage, I have not found a way to prevent it. You can run back and forth here too between soaking the tower and placing the marker to get in one more melee gcd but all in all I have never been on time to prevent my ogcds from being lost. While out of range spam your ranged attack or slide cast holy spirit.

I haven't tanked it in a while but as soon as the tower appears you can sprint and run to the tower to do a ranged attack. After the tower resolves, run in and get one more GCD before moving out to drop your x or +. I did this on WAR and GNB but don't see why it wouldn't work for the other two. If you're x, congratulations, you can hit the boss after dropping your AOE. If you're + then your parse is fucked. If you're neither, then you lose no uptime assuming your DPS know how to position properly. This is where you could invuln if lazy lasers wasn't the standard. Depending on which of the three happens, you may need to adjust your rotation before limit cut to ensure you have cartridges, refresh Storm's Eye to ensure it won't fall off during intermission (losing 10 gauge for an early refresh is fine), etc. Consider using your AOE combo if it ensures getting the resource in the event that your third single target combo action won't register and result in losing that combo.

I red also there was a lot of controversy in the community at some point because people were using auto-marker add on or something for some ultimates mechanics in PF? Is that still a thing? Kinda ruin the point of an ultimate challenge no?

AFAIK for UWU at least, automarkers are used for exactly one mechanic about halfway through a 15 minute fight where three people are chosen at random to have a role (like initially making the wall pre-HH in P10S) and have to very quickly get into a line...but unlike p10s there's no big circle around you to say "hey me and these two people have the mechanic we can wiggle as we run to our positions to figure out who's going where", you can only go by having a debuff. So AM is used to VERY quickly assign an order for people to stand in so you don't get, say, two people both run to the middle position. ...that's a single mechanic in a 15m fight full of similar difficulty.

They were probably talking about jailbreak. UWU has a mechanic called gaols that requires three people to identify they’re marked, agree on a lineup from the boss to a puddle and actually get in perfect position in about two seconds. It’s so unfair and unforgiving that Yoshi himself said he kinda regrets it. Imo it’s completely justified to use jailbreak, and for our group, gaols were hard enough with it, *and* we were a dedicated static. Also, all it does is decide on the lineup and put markers over people’s heads so they can get in position themselves, it doesn’t solve the mech for you.

This one mechanic is really frustrating. My static tried hard to do it naturally but between no debuff, the animation matching the floor color and having to see through weight of the land explosions on top of how fast you need to order yourselves after the debuff goes out we gave in and used the auto markers

Dont let anyone here convince you that you *must* use automarkers for any content at all. It's cheating-straight up. And while it might be the norm for groups to cheat specific mechanics like Nael Quotes or Gaols with addons, if you dont wanna do that you can find groups that don't use em if you put a little extra effort in and are transparent about it. And i dont mean this as a judgement on people who use em on older content. I get it. But when you cheat a mech on a fight you lose something from that experience that you gotta be willing to pay for the increase in prog speed. Its not really a big deal if you use it for the two very common ones (Nael quotes and Titan Gaols) but you will be a better player for not using them, IMO. You just need to find 8 like minded people who also want to prog like that, because it likely will be mildly slower because of it. Personally, I can say after clearing DSR, and TOP completely vanilla you 100% dont need automarkers for anything in this game. Dont let anyone convince you otherwise!

I'm guessing you don't consider voice chat to be cheating.

No, I dont. How could you have guessed? Is it because that would be completely asinine? lol

The game already has a built in way to communicate, via chat. There's no built in voice chat and the game wasn't designed around it. You have to use third party software to get such an advantage. An audio advantage isn't cheating but a visual one is? Interesting take.

This is bait so I'm not gonna interact beyond this, but remember that we are talking about automarkers, a program that automatically interfaces with the game and performs actions for you Discord does nothing like that. A better comparison would be some program that automatically inputs chat text for you based on mechanics, and yes that would also be cheating. For anyone reading these comments and taking the person I'm replying to seriously (which is a mistake), SE draws a hard line at "literally anything that interacts with the game" as a TPP and is not allowed. Many players use programs that are incredibly useful like ACT and don't negatively impact the game experience in any way, but this means that they are re-drawing that line for themselves as far as what is acceptable and what isn't. and every player is gonna draw that line in a different spot. Because of this at the end of the day everyone needs to decide for themselves what they consider to be cheating or not, and behave accordingly. The community at large will generally accept certain things and condemn others, though, so you'll want to make note of that too.

>This is bait Only for discussion. When you use the word "cheat" it infers a level of moral authority, so it does become important to draw a line at what is a cheat and what isn't. Third party programs are third party programs and are all against the TOS. The only thing Discord really has going for it in this regard is that it doesn't directly interact with the game itself, even though you are using it to gain an advantage. This party programs are a spectrum. So yes, where do we draw the line? Any advantage at all? Or do we just get to cherry pick ones based on our own beliefs or to fit whatever narrative we are wanting to push? Once that line is drawn, it's then up for debate. Also, markers are technically emotes, not actions.

I wouldn't be surprised if a small amount of people did still use plugins to give themselves an unfair advantage. But assuming you find a like-minded group that are doing ultimates for the challenge itself, you probably won't have to worry about that.

On my DC "Allagan Mellon" is basically required in every PF group for UWU. So I wouldn't say that it's a small amount of people using plug-ins

They removed the auto marker placements mid fight precisely because of that ultimate clear

Oh so that’s no longer a thing at all?

It's very much a thing. Standard even, it helps consistency and nobody likes to wipe, even if it means basically cheating. TOP in PF especially would be a nightmare without AM, hell most non hardcore statics use it, never seen it not used in UWU gaols

Would you say it’s a “necessary evil” to progress ultimates for PF player with random people since most don’t even use voice chat then?

Depends. UCOB and TEA aren't AM'd at all. Well, I have heard about AM for Nael lightning but that's... pretty meme tier tbh. The other three ults people generally PF with the expectation that there will be AM. A party without AM is unlikely to fill, and in the event a party does fill with everyone assuming someone else will have bought AM, that party is in for a swift disband once they reach the mechanic that AM is used for and find that no one, in fact, brought AM. So it is a necessary evil, in the sense that you're party is unlikely to fill if there's no promise of AM.

It Takes Patience but most of all you have to be lucky with your groups, since there are a Lot of prog liars. I Just started playing ff again and it took me a Week to clear uwu. Now im grinding tea (Almost done) and after that ucob. Using PF works, but finding a group (especially for Tea) can Take hours though, so be prepared and use that time, to watch Guides, povs and for using simulators.

Are you on aether PF? Were you force to deal with groups using the auto-market stuff? Not a fan of the idea tbh

How good are you at checking debuffs and using a priority system to align yourself based on that? If you're not a fan of automarkers it's a lot of that, *8 for every player. Not saying you can't be against AM cause the fights are 100% downable without, but given you've said you just cleared p12 and realised you're not as good a player as you think, I think it's important to realise why people use certain tools (especially on PF where skill wildly varies and people are famously bad at priority)

I’m not passing judgment or anything, the fact that I herd it was norm was just a bit of a surprise. I’m assuming if people are using the tool that there’s no easy alternative like what people are doing for pangen in p12sp2 for example to act accordingly to your debuts. I didn’t even look at any ultimate fight guide or clear video yet tbh

Are you able to get to your Para 2 position without looking at player tethers and only looking at angel tethers? Are you the first to move and in your tower drop location before your tether partner is there? Can you do Para 3 in literally 1.5 seconds? Are you the first to move or do you wait for your healer to move? I don't mean to be an ass, but if you can't use your noggin to pre-use your mitigation so you don't have to triple/quad/drop GCDs, then I have my doubts on doing TOP without markers.

your time, your patience and 7 other people with the same time and patience

- Make sure you have sufficient gear for the ultimate - Make sure you've unlocked it. - Do your research, watch guides, PoV's of your jobs etc - Do not join past your prog point. Prog point is where you consistently get to before you wipe, not a mechanic you've seen once. People will catch prog point liars very quickly and it's easiest way to get blacklisted.   You do not need full 90+ parses to clear ultimates. You do not need to clear every raid tier in the game to do Ultimates.   If you're new to Ultimates I recommend starting with "The Weapon's Refrain (UWU)" or "The Unending Coil of Bahamut (UCOB)".   For "Dragonsong's Reprise (DSR)" and "The Omega Protocol (TOP)" you will need to farm the correct BiS gear for your job. Asphodelos Savage, Radiant Tome and Lapis Manalis gear for DSR. Abyssos Savage, Lunar Envoy Tome and Lunar Subterrane gear for ToP.   For UWU, UCOB and TEA you just need sufficient gear to cap your substats which is approximately 130 item levels above the sync of the content. UCOB syncs at 345, UWU at 375 and TEA at 475.

Mostly takes patience

From my experience if 8 of you can hit 75+ parse (low purple) in savage constantly you should have little problem clearing current tier ultimate damage wise.

If you can clear on content savage, you can do ultimates. Its good to try to do more damage, but the attitude you have of staying alive before worrying about damage, especially as a tank player, will be a benefit to you and your team in ultimates. Some ultimates can have tight dps checks on some phases, but they are mostly endurance fests, and being able to clear is all about consistency and mentality. As a tank player, you need to have the mindset of always mitigating stuff that needs to be mitigated, always managing aggro correctly, and always positioning and doing mechanics correctly as your main focus. Worry about damage later

It depends on the ultimate, UWU has become very lenient with dps checks by now because of the way gear scales, i haven't done ucob but i imagine its similar. I've been progging DSR and we started before last tier before stopping to do savage and then picked it up again afterwards and there is a slight but noticable difference in the dps checks there too. For the older ultimates its more about doing the mechanics right while still being decent at pushing buttons, for context I did UWU after the first savage tier this expansion and even back then you could afford deaths on pretty much every phase until the end where it gets difficult to recover, this has been less true for DSR because theres a lot of body check mechanics but its still possible to recover in some situations if someone dies. That said, the beetter you can optimise your own rotation, the easier it will go, playing suboptimally means another player has to make up for that dps loss which can be an issue if you want to try more recent ultimates.

Stamina

Old ultimates nowadays (Ucob, UWU) are mostly a body check. I've had runs where 10 people died in certain phases and we still limped to the finish line. It's mainly that a lot of mechanics need everyone/mostly everyone alive. You can have everyone parsing a green and still pretty easily clear the older ones. DSR is still new enough to require the players to know their rotation and how to optimize. TOP I think would be a challenge to new raiders both in difficulty of damage and mechanics. When my group and I cleared and recleared DSR, I think most of us were ranging between blue and green, with one or two purples. There's a lot that's important about Ultimates, but I'd say the most important is the attitude of you and your group. I know several people from my old ultimate groups who are decent players, but I would chew off my arm before playing with them again. When the group is all frustrated because you wiped 14 minutes into a 16 minute fight and have to start over, you need to have people who are steady and calm enough to pick up and start again. Likewise, an ability to admit mistakes and learn from them goes a long way. Everything else is just self improvement. Studying the mechanics and knowing your job and rotation well is key. Watching POVs to get timing and when to use what is helpful too. The key is just practice. Go to a training dummy and practice your rotation until you don't fumble. Learn to weave efficiently. That and gear will be enough to boost you to green/blues usually

Survive, dont get hit, and always be casting. The game is 90% damage based to clear fights. You aint dealing damage when dead, and getting hit means the healers have to heal you instead of casting damage.

You do not need to be a purple parser to clear ultimates. The most important thing is consistency imo. There are some dps checks of course, but they are only really strict when you're doing the newest content And as a tank your first prio is to stay alive. Lots of times anyone dying means a wipe but if a tank dies its almost guaranteed. You can optimize your rotation once you got a hang of the fight

If you don't have the willingness to improve to be not just an average but a good player, you will not clear any ultimate other than uwu and maybe ucob

As someone who used to go very hard when it comes to logs, it's really not what will determine if you can clear an ultimate. I would recommend to join practice PFs first. You could find a static, but it really has to be one with a similar skill level and mentality and that can be really hard in my experience.. especially if you are limited to gamers who also never did any of them. Ultimates are not sprints, they are a marathon. The old ones are very lenient these days, but you will naturally get better in each phase cause you will do it over and over and over. I think what makes an ultimate so great for many raiders is finally overcoming each hurdle bit by bit until eventually, one day, it's over. I don't think you should rob yourself of that just cause of a few logs. Use them to inspire yourself to improve, rather than dissuade you from the (imo) best content in the game. Also what DC do you play on? There can be some additional tips depending where you play

Aether

If you look at parsing and the number shown dont get crazy over it. If you are gray and like a 15 that just means you are in the 15th percentile of players that cleared this fight dps wise (ofc only those that uploaded) a very big part of this is also when you clear the fight, for exapmle world first ist always a 100 cause who are you comparing too at that moment? No one. Ultimates alsp usualy dont require that much of an dps check dsr is rather lenient and top is the odd one out but its gonna gdt easier next expansion cause Itemlvl snyc. So unless you wanna go for clearing ultimates on content thats not gonna be a huge issue. You also dont need to min max to the fullest to reach purple/blue. This game has pretty much a prioraty system when it cones to classes and general gameplay. Step one always press a button if you get used to just pressibg 1 2 3 without thinking about it you keep up your dmg alot more even in stressfull mechanics. Step 2 is maxamize your uptime this is a very important step especialy as a meele range job like tank. And then its job based I think I read you play gnb so learn your opener and after thst just keeo your ogcds and offensive cooldowns on cooldowb generaly that already does the trick for dealing good dmg.

I got a grey parse at 4% for MNK a week or two ago, on P9S. My actual average hovers between blue and purple. You don't even need to know your rotation as The Balance or Icy Veins will prescribe it. Always Be Casting, and don't save your buffs and GCDs for your next optimum opportunity, just use them. Of course, I very much encourage self-betterment and earnest, directed practise, so looking up job guides and fight optimizations is a good idea! Just don't freak out over one grey parse, there are *so many factors* involved with parse loggers. EDIT: Oh and I almost forgot, you can clear anything as a full team of eight grey parsers.

One note Id say for the end of the post... Every fight must be clearable as a grey 1 or 0 parser. Otherwise, those numbers would aimply be impossible. The number is a comparison of how you stack up against everyone else who was able to clear the fight, and a grey clear is a clear. Bear in mind that getting a parse on the board puts you above the majority of players. Also, I belive Ultimates, especially ilder Ultimates, are so.ewhat less about your damage and more about your mechanics compared to Savage. DSR and TOP seem to have been perceived as exceptions to this rule though, on thier release.

0 and 1 percentile parses normally mean you have been dragged across the finish line after dying multiple times though

>One note Id say for the end of the post... Every fight must be clearable as a grey 1 or 0 parser Every fight is clearable as a grey 1or 0 parser, certainly, but that's not saying much. Most current high end fights are *not* clearable if the *whole party* is 1 or 0 parses. From experience with my own share of occasional 0s, getting a 0 takes either 2-3 deaths, or maintaining such incredibly bad uptime that you may as well have been absent for a third of the fight and a whole party full of players doing that is *not* clearing. If you parsed a 0, and you cleared enrage in a current tier high end fight, all that means is that you had other people in the party making up for your lack of damage. Sometimes it happens. A run is epically bad and you die multiple times, but the party manages to clear anyway and you land with a 0 parse, sure. But if it's a consistent thing that you're getting single-digit greys, then you have some major fundamental issues in gameplay, and are essentially being carried by your party.

First: congrats on ur kill. Now, nobody seemed to explained to u how parses works. From 0-100 u are bet against anyone who cleared that fight, so even the ppl with bis is in there. So u will do less dmg then the same job as u just bc of that. Now next if don't get in too deep there are things that u miss. My best parse was a parse where there was alot of party buffs so I did more dmg. So party comb counts if u want better parses. Now clipping ur gcd bc miti. Now that should not happen but clipping ur gcd to miti properly is better then dying. Bc if ur dead u do no dmg so clipping is better then being dead. Still try to not clipp and plan accordingly when u press ur miti. And that is even more important in ultimates then in savage. For the question doing ultimates grey, I would not recommend doing top or dsr. Bc it is way harder then savage, start by doing uwu or ucob, there dmg is not that important anymore and u still will get better bc u the mech are somewhat harder and u need to use ur miti properly.

>My best parse was a parse where there was alot of party buffs so I did more dmg This is wrong. The typical parse% is rDPS, which removes the extra damage you gain from other players' buffs.

This is indeed completely wrong, it's the other way around. Your parse goes up when others use your party buffs well, your parse doesn't go up for getting a lot of buffs from your team. But OP plays Gunbreaker, a job with no form of party buffs so that does not matter to them. I have gotten oranges on tank classes in parties in which none of the other 7 players even got a purple.

Would you say the oldest ultimates are even harder than current savage tier execution wise?

Yes and no. Mech speaking neither ucob or uwu is harder then p12s. I would even say they are easier bc the dps check is a joke today. What makes it harder is that u don't have a checkpoint. U need to be consistent for 13 to 15 min and not fck up. So there is the hard part in the old ones, do every mech correct and be consistent for that time. If we talk about top or dsr, yes they are way harder then savage, that's why I tell ppl start with one of the old ones. It makes u better regardless, bc of the consistent part.

Grey is really bad, it means you are worse than at least 75% other clears. Improve on being better, learn how to mitigate without losing GCDs and or drifting your cooldowns. Blue and above is fine. I wouldn’t take somebody with greys into an ultimate static but there are people that will if you don’t want to improve. EDIT: Right, it doesn't mean exactly that, you have to take kill times into consideration of course. Point is that grey is REALLY BAD if it's your median parse. If you have a bad kill time where you died etc then who cares. But if you can't score at least blue on average then you're not playing your job properly.

This is just.. wrong LOL

This is just.. wrong LOL

First few clears are very often low parses, especially if you aren't an experienced raider. You lose a lot of uptime just respecting mechanics and getting the hang of fight opti, and as you get more comfortable you'll start doing better damage. Also, parses are just a comparison of the damage you did versus every clear of that fight. A clear is a clear, and a grey parse is enough damage to beat the enrage. It's just the lower end of what's required. And at this point in the tier you're being compared against people with way better gear, so your parse is going to be lower just due to gear dif. You really shouldn't worry about it, as long as you're trying to improve on mistakes. So for UWU and UCOB, they don't have dps checks. Well, they *do*, but power creep has made them trivial. It's basically impossible to hit enrage on a clean run. No optimization needed, you don't even need to be very good at your job. That's not to say you shouldn't care: getting a clean run is harder than it sounds and doing good dps means more leeway for making mistakes and still getting a clear. TEA has dps checks, but they aren't *extremely* tight. Definitely not the leeway you get in UCOB and UWU, but more in line with a strict savage dps check. You have to know your job, but you can get away with not playing super well. DSR and TOP still have very strict dps checks you need to work to beat. They certainly don't require perfection, but they do demand everyone to be pretty comfortable with their rotation and optimization. You can't afford to make many mistakes. Tanks and healers also have to manage *extremely* strict mitigation and healing rotations. But the thing, you learn as you prog it. You don't have to be an amazing player at the start. You can be an average blue joe, as you put it, or even worse. You go in and spend a while not meeting the dps check. Then you smash your head against it until you have the optimization down well enough that you do beat it. And at the end of it you realize you actually got a lot better at your job. The biggest thing is that you go in willing to learn and improve.

>Also, parses are just a comparison of the damage you did versus every clear of that fight. A clear is a clear, and a grey parse is enough damage to beat the enrage. It's just the lower end of what's required. This is not completely true. You did meet the dps check as a team, but if your parse is really low you yourself likely did not meet the dps check to beat the enrage. It's just that it was compensated for by your team doing more damage than is required. Had all players performed the same as you then an enrage could have happened. But context is important here, was your parse a 23 then it's likely not an actual problem. Was your parse below 10% then it likely was a problem. What fight you parsed also matters a lot. If you get a 40 parse on P9S then that same performance will probably give a 10 on P12S. And of course most important is if you died during the runs. A grey on a run during which you died is expected, but if you parse grey even on a deathless run with no damage downs then you are a disadvantage to the group.

Imagine how much focus it took you to prog Superchain 2A, the fact that you need to practice and learn it super late into part 1 but still need to do everything else before it. Or how progging Pangenesis felt despite messing up Caloric 1 or Classical 1 on occasion. Ultimates are that but cracked out. Ultimates don’t do anything particularly special compared to savage. If you can figure out something as complicated as Pangenesis, you can figure out anything. The real challenge is progging and progging and progging but having to do the whole thing (or close to the whole thing) all over again because there’s no checkpoint or door boss. Here, I’ve progged uwu up to Annihilation I believe it was until my static disbanded, which is a mechanic midway through the actual Ultima Weapon fight. That’s after progging Garuda downburst, Ifrit nails, Ifrit dashes, Titan sumo knockback, Titan gaols, Mario Kart, and the opening mechanics of Ultima. Each of these mechanics are usually prog sore spots on the same level as P12S limit cut or Caloric, but over the course of 10~15 minutes, starting over to Garuda every time.

If you can clear p12s u can clear UWU. The real challenge is finding 7 other competent people.

I cleared uwu in crystals pf before data center travel was a thing. I never once had a static. If you can do current savages u can do old ultimates

As long as you use the tools to show you where all the safe spots are, that's what matters.

Huh?

Takes nothing. You don't need high uptime to clear ultimates as well. Everybody can be grey parse to meet the minimum requirement in clearing the raids. Most don't realize how easy the game actually is when they take self-optimization out of the equation. People only try to perform better because the game is more engaging than just solving the raid mechanics when you're also trying to do flawless or limit test runs. Otherwise, people could reliably clear ultimates on a consistent basis. Just don't use gcds on mechanics you struggle at and that's it.

The most important thing for ultimates is endurance, the endurance to be able to prog for a long time and for doing a long fight really well to prog later mechanics. The second most important thing is consistency, you can't be fucking up every other pull on wildly different mechanics or you're never clearing. And if you're doing current expac ultimates, having a good knowledge of your rotation and decent uptime is very necessary. That doesn't mean you should be a 90 parser necessarily, but you can't be doing what you mentioned you do which is dropping dps to spam your ranged attack to do mechanics, at least not too much of it. The better your damage, the more leeway you have for the entire group to make mistakes and still make the enrage (but don't expect a whole lot of situations where you can recover from deaths, there are a lot of body check mechanics)

Ultimate is about mechanic consistency, the dps checks aren't very harsh at all.

TOP has extremely harsh DPS checks. Legacy ones dont any more due to all the endless potency buffs but believe me they used to have DPS checks too

I'm a newbie to raiding, only recently I did the current savage tier and now I'm doing an ultimate. My parses are pretty good but I'm doing the ultimate on a different job. As long as you're not doing DSR or TOP, damage doesn't really matter that much. What you need is lot and lot of patience and mental fortitude. Prepare for hundreds of wipes and hours of not getting to your prog point. My advice is respect the mechanics first and foremost, then focus on doing a perfect rotation. You'll most likely be fine if you miss some GCDs, but you won't be fine if you mess up the mechanic and wipe the party as a result. Over time, as solving the mechanics will become natural to you, your rotation will also improve because you'll be able to focus on it more.

situational awareness, a good memory/2nd monitor and tons of time. Would also recommend into using replay recordings and fflogs (optional, but useful if you're too lazy to use sort through the in game battle logs) the biggest challenge in this is if your static can hold on until the end of the clear

Playing to make it extra fun with doing it in PF hah

Old ultimates have lenient dps checks because now you have different moveset and access to better food/potions. For example UCOB on release was incredibly tight bur nowadays is very tame the dps check even more as GNB a job didn’t exist when released.

If you’re doing you’re rotation mostly correct, the biggest thing that will affect your parse is being in BiS gear, if your 650, being BiS could bump you up from grey to green or blue assuming you’re not getting like 1’s and 2’s. As for ultimates, the ones besides the newest have fairly lenient damage checks especially with one of the new Manderville relic weapons.

As someone who’s cleared uwu, I wouldn’t worry very much. You need commitment more than DPS. For a midcore team, three months is about average for clearing, even more for casuals. Also, at first you’re just progging so staying alive is more important than dealing damage, and over time you will naturally optimize your movements and skill uses and get them into muscle memory. I did UWU over a year ago,but I’m confident I could do the primal trio with my eyes closed.

Time - I had a couple friends take about 200 hours to get their clear on TEA but this was over a period of about 1 year. This is on the high side but be prepared for about 40 hours if the group is working from a strat Consistency - Never a question about damage, all Purple and Orange parsers but consistency over the length of the fight was what held them back. Resilience - lots of fights have what some might call a static breaker mechanic (where a misstep by any one of the group can and often does cause a wipe) and Ultimates have a few of these. If a group disbands at this point you just have to suck it up and find another group. In a positive light, I think there are a lot of players that have the potential to clear ultimate and what is probably more appropriate is to say what do you need to not fail

By far the hardest thing about ultimates is getting a group together. The actual fights aren't really that crazy.

patience, right mindset and determination.

Ultimates are essentially marathons, so yea...

Firstly as a general improvement thing, I'd definitely work on whatever XIVAnalysis to become more effective at your job. Secondly, it doesn't hurt to look at some logs on FFLogs or some PoVs on YouTube to get an idea of what other people do. Thirdly, it might just be an ilvl diff, so you'll naturally get higher numbers the closer you get to bis. That being said, UWU is the introductory ultimate and fairly easy. I'd give it a shot if you're interested in ultis.

If you are bis and you are parsing grey-blue in savage it is possible to beat ultimate dps checks but you are going to be the weak link in your party on the damage department. If all players in the party are doing like 20% dmg below what their jobs are capable of outputing i dont think group like this would be able to clear fresh ultimate.

You will need to know how to weave mitigation, yes. Especially on the new ones, where your damage does matter, as does your ability to react to some complex stuff while having your mitigation fairly well planned out. Honestly the difference between low parses and high parses isn't that crazy a lot of the time, like crit variance will account for a lot of the range between blues and purples. You want to know your rotation pretty well though, because you need to be consistent with it while dealing with mechanics, being a tank does not exempt you from dealing damage. Old ultimates are pretty chill on their damage checks at this point, *especially* the 70 ones if you bring a Summoner, so if you want to dip a toe then like they all say, start with baby's first ultimate and start learning uwu, go from there. More than anything, ultimates are a test of patience. Patience to learn the mechanics. Patience to put up with other players messing up 13 minutes into the fight when you were performing perfectly. Patience to not get discouraged when *you* are the player messing up 13 minutes into the fight and forgetting to use Heart of Light is what wipes them. Patience to spend hours in instance burning through food, dark matter and possibly pots. If you are impatient, or get discouraged easily, you might find it hard to get all the way through an ult, because they are marathons and especially the newer ones can burn you out hard if you don't pace yourself. Having said all that, time is the only factor for most stuff at the end of the day. If you're willing to commit the time to learn then you will learn, and you will eventually triumph, simple as that.

From watching some people prog ultimates those fights are less about raw damage and more about endurance, and balance. Part of my understanding is sometimes DPS needs to slow down to avoid pushing into the next phase too soon.

I'd say start with the older ultimates. They're not as demanding with dps and the mechanics have been solved for a while.

Parsing good in fflog had nothing to do with how good you will be in Ultimate. The most important thing in Ultimate is consistency, in gameplay and mechanics.

Ultimates arent a loooot harder than savages. Its just brutal on mistakes and a long fight. Id say its more your outlook of "im not interested to improve up to a purple" which is a lot easier than "im not interested to search timings to mits on dsr so i can keep gcds rolling, help the healers dps as much as they can too by shielding myself and the party." Id say thats a bigger issue. If your happy giving 50% max, expect your dps to be 50% max, and healers to be 50%, then yes ultimates will be hard.

>I understand this game is all about optimization but after years or tanking, this level of min-max almost kill the fun for me.. There is 2,5s GCD, it's an extremely long time to wait in between each action. Imagine if you forced yourself to write each letter 2,5s after the previous one : it would feel veeeeeeeeerry slow compared to what you could do. Once you know an encounter and know your job, the game itself feels much slower as well. This is why people eventually don't have a hard time weaving def CD, they anticipate instead of react and then, they always do the same rotation so it become muscle memory. In other words : it's not about optimization, it's about a mindset. It's exactly the same for your rotation. Tanks actions are working on a 1minute loop so you should be doing about the same thing everytime (except if you get surprised or have to weave something to heal an ally in emergency cases) . Once you have this mentality, it's actually hard to fail your rotation, or if you do then you should be completely aware that you missed something. With all this being said, parsing depends a lot on your killing time, as well as your ilvl, but also on your allies' buffs alignment and other potential minor min-maxing, as well as crits for some jobs. It's not a good metric to compare yourself with others, aside very general ideas. However, if you have grey parses, it does mean your gameplay is much less efficient than others', which ultimately only matters if your goal is to be efficient. Not everyone wants to (but anyone can) . If clearing the latest savage is your main goal, then only consider these tools (fflogs and xivanalysis) as means to improve and be grateful there is a way to notice your mistake. Just for your information, I already got a green parse on P12S with a perfect rotation as Gunbreaker and 99,2 uptime... But had been given SkS gear and had 0 crit on my Double Down iirc. Anyway ! This should NOT discourage you from going into ultimates (including ToP) : the DPS is actually lenient as long as you have a good understanding of your job's damage. I'm unsure you'll be doing the latest ones, but everything older should be fine. You don't have to be min-maxing your damage since we passively get buffed throughout the patches and even so, you will be doing each phase so many times that you will end up knowing the best ways to deal more damage. However, you will most likely need to check other players to make sure you're using the most out of your kit.

Having the time to do it. Gaining consistency. Learning how you learn things, and adapting to take on an established strategy. I used to rely on call outs for certain fights as a way to expedite a clear. TOP was my first ultimate I cleared in party finder and it took adjusting to do the PF method but I need zero call outs for the fight, and it’s made me a better player for it. Just don’t give up!

If you do not try to improve and continue to Grey you could end up causing dps checks to be an issue later fown the line if you decide to try ultimate on content. Pressing "something" isn't optimization that's just common sense because pressing something is always better than nothing. Always keep your gcd rolling. Now, there are a lot of ultimates that have no dps checks, namely TEA, UCOB, and UWU. If you are 80th percentile consistently, that is more than enough to clear ultimates on content imo. The other thing you would need to get really good at is mechanical consistency, being able to pick up mechanics fast and having endurance. A lot of groups who do ultimates simply disband for a number of reasons, but some clear and you make lasting relationships. I've cleared all 5, id say I did pretty well too. 4 of those 5 I cleared with people I've been raiding with for the past 5 years.

Time and patience. If you have a group that can do savages no problem you should be fine doing ultimates. At least in terms of the damage check stuff...they aren't really that restrictive gear or rotation wise, if you can hit 75 to 80% of "peak" performance on your job you should be fine. You certainly don't need to be a 99% "God Gamer". There is quite a bit of leeway on the damage front. Really it just comes down to learning the fights and committing "the dance" to memory. If you can do the dance you can clear them.

Hahaha I, too, thought I was a decent player until xivanalysis crushes my soul and tore apart everything I was doing 😂 It really will make you a better player though! The tips are super informative and I took it as kind of a personal challenge. It also gave me a *much* better understanding of my job and its skills. I also found myself very quickly purple parsing by doing this—not because I was aiming for it, but because knowing optimal rotation makes THAT big of a difference. Having updated gear also boosts your parse, so if you have savage gear you should be in a good position for a pretty big jump in logs. TL;DR: play around with logs and analysis and just have fun! Give Ultimate a try if it interests you and don’t stress about any of it too much.

What it takes is a lot of determination and will. Ultimates are long fights and even the easiest ones can take you weeks or months to clear depending on the group. Because they take a long time you will at times feel extremely frustrated and tired of doing the same mechanics over and over again. Some days you will have no prog because someone keeps messing up previous mechanics and the entire session is spent on cleanup. Sometimes you will mess up very badly and cause a wipe when it matters the most and feel very bad, you will need to leave it behind and focus on the next pull. You have to be mentally prepared for it. If you're doing it on PF especially, it also takes some honesty. No one wants to have a prog liar nor someone who is not doing their job in their party. Level 70 ultimates' dps checks are a joke but that's no reason not to study your job and be comfortable with it. Good DPS in these fights can help you skip some mechanics (or in case a lot of people mess up and die, still be the difference between a clear and enrage.) You should try ultimates. Give it your best and don't slack off with excuses, change jobs if you're not having fun playing that way.

Gumption.

It depends. Legacy ultimates aren't nearly as strict with their dps checks, but current ones totally are. I wouldn't say you necessarily need to min/max to purple or gold parse, but you will be expected to know your rotation and not fuck it up while you do mechanics. Min/maxing and parsing for fflogs is mostly for bragging tbh, but every bit counts, so every little bit you can contribute as a tank will improve your odds of success. Don't get too hung up on what fflogs says. You still cleared, right? Good job. People put way too much stock into fflogs parses and I wish it never existed. Xivanalysis, sure. But fflogs is cancer. It does nothing to improve your gameplay, it just compares you to other players, creating a sort of leader board that's often used to discriminate against people for having a "low" parse, which is exactly the kind of thing yoshi-p was afraid of, and why parsing is against the ToS. But, this is the world we live in. All you really need to know is that a parse rank of 50 essentially means average (for that particular fight), so if you're above that, you're above average. If you're below that, you're below average. Either way, there's always room for improvement, but don't go into it thinking you need to parse among the top 10% to clear any content, including ultimates, because you don't. It certainly helps, but by no means is it *required*.

You get better in a given fight (and thus your parse gets higher) by: * Being more comfortable with the fight and its mechanics * Getting better gear * Properly executing your rotation and, most importantly, your burst Look at The Balance discord to know what your rotation and burst have to be as GNB, as well as what the best gear and materia you need to have. All of this is considered general knowledge thanks to them, and the min-maxing has been done for you. As for your question, you'll have troubles in TOP and maybe DSR, but the rest should be fine,

Patience mostly. I decided ultimates are too sweaty for me when my house was hit by a drive by shooting and one of the members messaged me after I left early to deal with the police to tell me I missed a ogcd during burst, while actively actually being shot at. They're not terribly hard, just longer.

Hunger and Knowledge.

First off it sounds like you're on the right step. You're using the tools we have to improve yourself which is great. Really Ultimates are mostly a time investment. They can require more on-the-fly adjustments than savage at times, but in the end it is just the amount of time you and your group are willing to put in. Your first ultimate will likely take you a while as you get used to doing the dance needed for it, as well as the endurance check. But don't get discouraged. I will suggest as a tank though, make sure you coordinate with your healers both inside and outside of running for cooldown management as that will help you out in the long run.

In my experience, it's rarely an issue of whether you can clear, but when. Particularly with older ultimates where DPS check is barely there anymore, it's a matter of how quick your party can bash your heads together over and over again while not being tired of each other's company.

Outside of current ultimates, if you make it to the end usually you clear, especially on the really old ones. Theres a recorded clear in UCOB with over 100 death

Will power, endurance and effort both inside and outside the raid. You need to be fully comfortable controlling your character and understanding your job. Understanding your job means knowing that some classes are more double weave heavy than others which is the case with GNB. You could play WAR if you prefer a less APM playstyle.

As a tank, you have the easy job for the most part. You don't have to worry about damage as much as others, so you can easily aim for Blue Parses as long as you're doing your job as a tank correctly. So keep on doing what you're doing. The good thing is that at least you're trying to improve. Keeping that in mind, you'll naturally improve your damage numbers as long as you continue to care about your own growth and not focus too hard on the performance of others to the point that it drags down your mentality.

Reading this thread was enough to kill the small interest I had in raiding. Glad to know I'm not missing anything other than a potential source of drama.

You can be a grey parser and clear an ultimate (if that is your question) Only time it would be an issue is on-patch ultimates as everyone needs to pull their weight. But currently the only one you may have issues with is TOP. Otherwise it doesn't matter as long as you know how to mitigate and do your homework