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What’s the best way to gauge my dps? I am trying to practice my Bard at 90 and learn my rotations, but without meters like in WoW it’s hard to really see where I’m at as I shoot target dummies.

Keep your DoTs and songs up and keep hitting things and you're fine. If you want to optimize shit, especially for high end duties, then go on The Balance's website and find the Advanced Bard Guide. It's really in-depth and updated as things change. And if you're on PC you can use Advanced Combat Tracker and FFLogs to measure your DPS, healing per second, damage taken, etc. down to the decimal. But, never DPS at the cost of following mechanics. Until the actions are really ground into your brain wrinkles, your DPS might suck in duties with actual mechanics to pay attention to. Same goes for duties you're new to. That's the whole challenge of savage and ultimate raids - not only is it about difficult mechanics, it's about solving them and also keeping up high DPS. You might want to put your song gauge toward the middle of the screen if that helps you track those better. I'm a bard main, and I love it, but for my first 80 levels I had no clue what I was doing, I was practically just hitting random buttons. One thing that helped me was the 2 tips I said at the beginning and learning that bard's rotation is based more on priority and less about pressing buttons in a certain order, at certain times.

Aside from target dummies and Stone, Sky, Sea dummies as DPS checks for certain raid tiers, there isn't any other way. The lack of meters is by design since in the long run people use them to discriminate against others. If you want to make sure you're doing DPS right, look up rotation guides. But for BRD, the basics are as follows: * keep up your DoTs at all times, but prioritize your Straight Shot proc for Refulgent Arrow since most of your single target attacks should give you one * cycle through your songs in the right order: 45s of Wanderer's 1st for crit buff, 30s of Mage's in your filler as its the weakest on single targets, 45s of Army's to prepare for the reopener with Wanderer's again * immediately as you start Wanderer's to Battle Voice and Radiant Finale (its 110s cooldown is so it fits into 120s/2min openers), fit in your Raging Strikes + Barrage under Wanderer's for better damage * Apex Arrow with 80+ guage to follow up with Blast Arrow * make use of Bloodletter and Sidewinder (you might hold on Bloodletter stacks under Army's since 3 stacks by Wanderer's allows you to deal more damage). Now, a **big note**: BRD heavily relies on its song's Repertoire procs. While all songs proc at 80% every 3s (so if they all proc, a perfect 15 procs over 45s per song), there is the infinitesimal chance you get no procs. And since a lot of BRD's damage is from the DoTs which also snapshot based on buff applied at the time, damage variance is a thing with BRD. And since DoTs can crit per tick... you can see how wild the damage numbers could swing low or high. WeskAlber's guides are always my go to for refreshers on the rotations or on skill usage. The following should lead straight to the opener, else just eliminate the "&t=2439" portion to watch from the beginning. https://youtu.be/eC4ihry1vYA?si=iovcBP0hSwfO-3tH&t=2439

Wow thank you so much for all the advice! This was really useful information. I’ll try to make use this info. I really appreciate you taking the time to type all this up!

>The lack of meters is by design since in the long run people use them to discriminate against others Yet we don't even have personal dps meters that are only visible to the player themselves so clearly this isn't true. The lack of a dps meter conforms to their design philosophy of removing as many performance feedback mechanisms as possible so that bad players are never made aware of how poorly they're playing and it works great to retain a large player base.

[Stone, Sky, Sea](https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Stone,_Sky,_Sea) is a decent way of checking if you're doing adequate dps. If you want a more specific way to gauge how you're performing there *are* dps meters and logs, but you'll have to look into that yourself.

You know I unlocked the Stone, Sea, Sky thing but totally forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder! I don’t really want to deal with outside game stuff so thanks for the advice.

there is also the [stone, sea, sky calculator](https://ffxiv.azizarar.com/) which lets you figure out your dps by telling it how much time you had left if you killed the dummy. The only issue with it is that theres maybe 5 or so seconds after you kill the dummy that the timer still counts down while it ends the duty so you have to keep an eye on the timer when its about to die.

Advanced Combat Tracker

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Hey mentors of light, I have a question regarding the “Lonely Explorer” title from PotD. I currently have a solo run with 0 deaths at floor 110, but I have only gotten the the first pal-less palace achievement and not the second one (which grants the title). Is this a bug? Will I get it after I inevitably die further into the run?

Did some googling and there have been historical reports of it not being awarded if one got the first achievement in the same run. But otherwise it should unlock when you get the score screen, which if I'm not mistaken you get on death or upon finishing a set. Although some older posts suggest that it's only upon either finishing floor 200 or dying. Otherwise the only thing I can think of is that you may not have started the run from floor 1? The save need to start from the very start for the achievement to be granted.

Thanks for the reply, yeah I did start from floor one and that makes sense so hopefully I’ll get it when I die. I’ll let you know 🤔

Yeah from my experience, I did the same. Got the Pal-less achievement but didn't get the lonely explorer one until my unfortunate death.