I'm just a filthy casual dirty sprout, but what do people use for parses?
I am staunchly against any kind of mods. For me the limit is: Do you need to launch FF14 with a different .exe file? If yes, it's cheating. If no, it's all right.
ACT is the log program and is a stand alone program, it doesn't interact with FF14 at all other than to read the data stream to get damage numbers.
I used to use it when I wanted to log myself to improve. I don't use it anymore, just rely on people around me to log for me. Not because I think it's bad, but because I'm lazy.
To read the logs, the website for hosting ACT logs is
FFlogs.
You need ACT regardless since FF logs uses the logs from ACT, unless you just want to check overall stats. ACT is an EQ2 parser but there's a FFXIV plugin and a bunch of other plugins that works with that, like overlay plugins to display damage meters ingame better than the baseline one and stuff that give you alerts and stuff although mods do the same thing pretty much nowadays.
Also wouldn't put much weight into normal raid parses, there's so many shitters doing them since they're basically casual content that hitting purple is pretty easy. I just checked my char and I managed a purple and I have like 99 AF in most of my slots(I haven't done either of the EX and I didn't even farm the tome set, just a few accs to get the ilvl to do the raid) and far from playing well since I only did the fights twice(been lucky on my rolls). The bar is just that low for normal raids. EX parses at least are a little better but really unless it's savage or harder where people actually put some effort and the content naturally weeds out ppl who can't even press their 123 properly it just doesn't mean that much.
I mostly agree with this. Normal logs? Useless. Dungeon logs? Useless.
Extreme logs? Kinda useful, but people who log in extreme are pretty low. I've done 50 kills of Ex #2 for example with only 15 logs or so.
Savage logs? Very useful, not only for seeing how you compare but for seeing how your rotation is doing by plugging it into
Xivanalysis which will tell you how you are doing. It's a bit buggy atm adapting to Dawntrail but it's incredibly useful for turning your logs into meaningful improvements you can make.
The best though? Unreal logs. Most Unreals are logged, and Unreal equalizes gear so the number you get there is a pure reflection of your skill (and crit luck if you are playing a class that relies on it.) Good Unreal logs are usually an indicator of a good player.
Haven't done any Ultimate myself yet, cannot speak to that.
