Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

the logic of "you'll never be able to perform as well as someone else unless you quit the job you enjoy because the devs arbitrarily decided your job should have fewer buttons and therefore made your damage significantly lower on purpose" is just completely asinine. if you want a subjective measure of difficulty to be determinant on how much damage someone is able to deal, then make all jobs equally as difficult and the players choose whether or not they want to press all their buttons and deal all that damage.

a DRK who thinks their rotation is too hard is free to never press shadowbringer, salted earth and carve and split
a WAR who wants to deal more damage has literally no option other than "play another job"

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

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People always seem to get emotionally worked-up when you challenge the established dogma. But you have to think critically for yourself rather than just relying on what you are told.

There are a number of issues with the popular interpretation of aDPS as a 'measure of buff alignment' that should show you that it is incorrect. You should actually take a look at what you're measuring in the first place. It's not buff alignment. It's just raw dps with single target padding permanently discarded (and remember, the presence of a BRD in any run will skew those numbers because of how their buffs work). There are plenty of other ways that you can pad those numbers with raidwide buffs, so it's entirely composition dependent. It's pretty much worthless unless you're comparing two different runs with the same composition.

It's not hard to determine a significantly more useful parameter. All you need to do is publish the 'damage taken' under a given buff by percentile and compare like percentiles for different jobs. Then you can say a NIN benefits by X rDPS by virtue of having a GNB present instead of a PLD, or a NIN benefits Y rDPS by virtue of having a SAM present instead of a DRG. It's a much more effective method of analysis rather than looking at a parameter that is completely meaningless without knowing the composition in which it was generated in.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

There are a number of issues with the popular interpretation of aDPS as a 'measure of buff alignment' that should show you that it is incorrect. You should actually take a look at what you're measuring in the first place. It's not buff alignment. It's just raw dps with single target padding permanently discarded (and remember, the presence of a BRD in any run will skew those numbers because of how their buffs work). There are plenty of other ways that you can pad those numbers with raidwide buffs, so it's entirely composition dependent. It's pretty much worthless unless you're comparing two different runs with the same composition.

It's not hard to determine a significantly more useful parameter. All you need to do is publish the 'damage taken' under a given buff by percentile and compare like percentiles for different jobs. Then you can say a NIN benefits by X rDPS by virtue of having a GNB present instead of a PLD, or a NIN benefits Y rDPS by virtue of having a SAM present instead of a DRG. It's a much more effective method of analysis rather than looking at a parameter that is completely meaningless without knowing the composition in which it was generated in.

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a SAM using their cooldowns with multiple raidbuffs active will deal more dmg than a SAM using their cooldowns with no raid buffs active, and that difference in damage comes from the bonuses they get from said buffs. so yeah, aDPS does measure buff alignment (and the same applies to every job out there)

DRK does 12% more dmg than WAR and PLD, despite their rDPS being very close to each other, because they can put more potency inside buff windows

and correct me if i'm wrong, but can't you see the party composition when you look at someone's log?

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Originally Posted by Melethron123

and correct me if i'm wrong, but can't you see the party composition when you look at someone's log?

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You can, yes. Every individual log is part of a larger party-wide log, and records exactly dps how much they (and every other party member) received from each buff.

When aDPS is looked at from the standpoint of 'percentiles', there is no consideration given to what group compositions were used to attain said percentiles. The result is completely meaningless. The number has no value whatsoever unless you're making a comparison of two runs with the same group.

Unless you're looking at percentile data in the context of the damage generated under individual raid buffs organized by percentile data (Mug, Arcane Circle, and so on), you cannot comment on a job doing 'X' more damage due to contributed DPS.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

It's not that the dev team particularly care about speedrunning. It's the impact that it has on the community's perceptions. The questions that everyone asks when starting a new MMO is: Which job should I pick? What's good? Players scrutinize what is happening at the top. Oh, my job is 50 dps behind the others at the 99th percentile and isn't being commonly used in the speedruns that I've looked at. It must be broken. And then they proceed to lose thousands of potency on lost uptime or basic rotational mistakes. It's not the job holding you back. It's you.

I think there's eventually going to be a point where you have to evaluate whether you want this to be a team game or not. We took away boss movement and positioning from tanks because we can't trust them to not spin the boss. We took away add spawns because we can't trust the tanks to pick them up. We gave everyone self-heals, mitigation, and raises because we can't trust the healers. We made hitboxes span the arena and removed positionals because we can't trust melee to press TN. We made all the casters into ranged dps because we can't trust them to know how to slidecast. And we never trusted the ranged dps to begin with. It's really okay to fail because someone else messed up. You'll do it yourself. Just dust yourself off and go again.

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I agree. I don't think the game can afford to loose even more team play. The vocal minority is so afraid to be hindered by someone else and the perceived solution seems to be to take even more interplay away. With that mentality why do people even play an MMO in the first place? How about people play a single player game instead and let the rest of us have job synergy and identity.

And on top of that we already lost like I don't know how many RPG mechanics. Stats are bland, gearing is boring, only raw DPS matters, elements are only for looks, TP management is gone, the MP bar might as well go etc.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

I agree. I don't think the game can afford to loose even more team play. The vocal minority is so afraid to be hindered by someone else and the perceived solution seems to be to take even more interplay away. With that mentality why do people even play an MMO in the first place? How about people play a single player game instead and let the rest of us have job synergy and identity.

And on top of that we already lost like I don't know how many RPG mechanics. Stats are bland, gearing is boring, only raw DPS matters, elements are only for looks, TP management is gone, the MP bar might as well go etc.

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Job synergy and identity was already being dialed back in ShB and it's even more pronounced in EW. "Synergy" is just another way of saying "every raid has the same expected group buffs through homogenization" and "identity" is verboten in a game where DPS is literally the only metric that's worth a damn, and therefore everyone must do identical DPS within a point or two of each other.

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Originally Posted by Gserpent

Job synergy and identity was already being dialed back in ShB and it's even more pronounced in EW. "Synergy" is just another way of saying "every raid has the same expected group buffs through homogenization" and "identity" is verboten in a game where DPS is literally the only metric that's worth a damn, and therefore everyone must do identical DPS within a point or two of each other.

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No, it just shows how some people can't see past a calculator. Personally, a job/composition could be bad but me and my friends would still play like that when it's fun. It is that simple. The only ones who say such and such isn't allowed are the ones who this game should not be designed after.

I'm part of a raid group and we look at numbers yet our mantra is everyone plays with what they are comfortable. Balance is important so every comp is viable. But it shouldn't be so important as to exclude literally everything else.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

No, it just shows how some people can't see past a calculator. Personally, a job/composition could be bad but me and my friends would still play like that when it's fun. It is that simple. The only ones who say such and such isn't allowed are the ones who this game should not be designed after.

I'm part of a raid group and we look at numbers yet our mantra is everyone plays with what they are comfortable. Balance is important so every comp is viable. But it shouldn't be so important as to exclude literally everything else.

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It's not "people," it's the fucking development team. It's a self-sustaining cycle of "we have to focus on DPS, we need to make sure DPS is tight or players will complain and we don't like seeing players complain," with the players on the other end (correctly) castigating Square-Enix if there's more than a 2-3% variance in DPS metrics between two classes of the same role. Because when DPS is literally the only thing in raids that you can actually control or influence, the fuck else is there to care about?

This is all *PURELY* due to the fact that fights are rigidly scripted with no real variance - they don't usually do HP gating (so you can't try to adjust your group's DPS timings to try and push a boss to the next phase to skip a mechanic you don't like, etc), they don't usually do adds in a meaningful way, mitigation is completely passive and has no real interactivity, and the same with healing...

When everything is so tightly locked down, literally the only thing that remains within player control is DPS. So *of course* players are going to fixate on it. And because players are fixating on it, *you* have to fixate on it.

They could absolutely break out of this mold by not being goddamn fucking cowards. But they are fucking cowards. They're so scared of angry players that they won't even share tentative patch notes a couple weeks ahead of patch date (which, by that point, all changes are COMPLETELY locked in, you're probably just tweaking potency values and you could just not put potency values in the notes or put them in with the explicit statement that they're just placeholders and they may change between now and patch day), because they did it once or twice and got yelled at.

If the various WoW dev teams are on one end of the scale, where they throw the baby out with the bathwater every goddamn expansion (or, at minimum, every time the dev team leadership shifts) because "old stuff is boring, we need new and Exciting(tm) things to put on the expansion box!", then XIV is firmly on the opposite end, where they'll ride the fucking ship beneath the waves before daring to do anything out of what they've been doing for the past several years.

I think that the XIV team needs to go back and review WoW's history, especially the period of time stretching from Wrath of the Lich King, to Cataclysm, and then to Mists of Pandaria. Cataclysm was a weird attempt to try and salvage the old talents/class systems without dramatically changing things, and while it was functional... it wasn't *great*? But with Mists, they said to hell with caring what grognards think, we're going to try something completely different that gives us room to design things differently and address problems that have been riding the game since 2004. Incidentally, Mists was also the first expansion to really swap around how tanking worked. Prior to Mists, tanks typically built and spent resources on dealing damage/increasing threat. With Mists, they started down the path of "active mitigation." Instead of spending your Warrior's rage on hitting things a little harder, you were instead primarily spending rage on taking less damage. You still had *some* skills that spent rage on damage, but these were primarily used in low-tier content or soloing, while when you were doing more challenging content, a majority of your rage spent was on defending yourself.

XIV could absolutely do the same, and might even benefit from it. PLD is kind of there with Oath Gauge being purely for defensive spells, rather than attacks? But it's like, imagine if Rampart was removed, your 30% cooldown was the only real "passive" and/or free mitigation you get (all WoW tanks in Mists did indeed have at least one big defensive button they could use that didn't cost anything and had a roughly 2-3 minute cooldown), and instead you're spending gauge to activate your defensive skills, and your oGCDs like Expiciaon, Upheaval, etc *generate* gauge instead of costing/having no interaction with it. Maybe you add a proc trait to one of the classes that's like Mage's Ballad for BRD, where maybe there's a 30% chance to knock 5 sec off the cooldown of your button after some event happens (successful autoswing, for example.)

I think there's a fucking *reason* that even in a game as volatile and mutable as WoW, active mitigation has remained the way of the land for ten fucking years now. Because it *works*, and it's way more engaging and interesting than the previous system. Maybe XIV needs to dust off those Gamer History books and reconsider their current course - after all, they had to copy WoW's homework to salvage 1.0, didn't they?

But we both know they won't. Because they're fucking cowards.

Just wanna say right now, lol to paladin mains. I just know SE is about gut everything and make it a single bar tank with extra space for LB, mount, and a greeting macro.