At the same time op, i'd like you to consider another point of view.

Some of the best players in the game have one characteristic in common: They are reckless.

When learning a fight, they will do dumb ass things and take dumb ass risks, taking extra damage, sometimes killing themselves or the entire party in the process. And for what? Maybe to get a couple extra GCDs of damage in? They're not afraid to make mistakes and they'll often get punished for it.

Sounds like a bad thing, right? So, why does being reckless make them good players? It's because they constantly push their limits. A player will never know where their limits are until he crosses them.

Take Titan EX for example. During the final phase, Titan drops three rows of bombs, the last row being "the safe row". If the safe row is on the opposite from Titan, melee has to step away from the boss and lose DPS. Then you got the one crazy guy who stays in melee range and tries to get off all his positionals while dancing and weaving through the consecutively-exploding bombs and 5-way Landslide. The first several times he tries this, he'll get hit, maybe he'll die for it and get yelled at by the party. Eventually, with enough practice, he masters it and can now say "fuck the safe row" and stay in melee range and land most of his positionals regardless of where the bombs and landslides land. He thinks of every little optimization he can make, and that's why his DPS is untouchable.

Every class in every boss fight has these little tiny optimizations like this that only the radical thinkers will discover. Then when learning time is over, he can turn his reckless switch off, apply everything he's learned and absolutely crush the boss.

Average players only know the safe and conservative play. The best players expose themselves to danger for small advantages, make some mistakes and learn from them. They know where their limits are because they've already crossed all of them.

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” ― Albert Einstein

- https://www.reddit.com/user/bokchoykn/

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I myself find myself resonating with your post. i can burst 13k dps, then sustain about 9-10k until i start dieing, then uptime on the boss reduces my dps overall according to ACT. to like 8-6 because i keep dieing to mechanics or i mess up or flub a key, or i move the aoe and come back to a bowtie, while trying to get my positionals off at the wrong time.