Quote Originally Posted by Fortune_Cookie View Post
At the risk of quoting this unfairly out of context, to my mind the mention of "miracle comeback" hints at the real problem with determining the value of a card like Spear. It's just not possible, in any sensible way, to measure the statistical contribution to successful clears from Spear.

What tends to stick in our minds therefore are stand-out moments, near wipes and last-man-standing kills. We remember them because we're emotionally invested and we tend to attribute the success to our heroic actions simply because that's how humans work. You may readily recall that one time when it was just you and the tank and the boss hit the floor just as your mp ran out. And you attribute that to your judicious use of Spear earlier in the fight. How often does that really happen? Do you go and check the logs to work out whether the Spear really did result in extra casts that were instrumental in getting the kill?

In short, how do you avoid the confirmation & self-serving bias that these situations are naturally rife with? Do you keep track of all the runs when nothing special happens that Spear might help with?

In contrast Balance has a much more quantifiable effect. Because of that I'm not limited to my own biased feeling of what the success of a run was really down to - I can go on fflogs to get an objective sense of what dps buffs do based on tens of thousands of runs.

I can certainly appreciate that unusual situations (soloing etc) might place more emphasis on otherwise overshadowed abilities. But in most standard progression or farm scenarios the certain benefit of a damage buff ought to win. More damage is always good and always happens pretty often...
I can understand where that train of thought is coming from. It certainly is true that we often remember things better than they actually were. I've gone back and looked at videos of some of those "miracle comebacks" and they don't seem as amazing when I'm watching them and seeing all my mistakes. However, one thing I can tell you is that, in many of these situations, the Spear did make all the difference. Sometimes I do overuse it - especially when I'm rusty. For instance I just did a few runs of Royal Menagerie again after 4 days of not playing. I held Spears quite often but, especially with the discussions in this thread weighing on my mind, didn't feel it was all that effective. That being said, the parties were quite good and I only encountered one disaster, which I pulled through quickly enough that the Spear was helpful, but not necessary.

It hasn't been "that one time" where I had a miracle comeback and attributed it to the Spear though. Nor has it only been in that moment that I felt the Spear made the difference. I've gone back, looked at videos, and seen that if I had not been using the Spear, I would not have had a skill like Lightspeed up when I needed it, or that my MP would have been drained into oblivion if I had not reduced the cooldown of Lucid Dreaming. I will admit though that I don't do the sort of math that people have done for DPS. But then, the DPS math is based on a context of perfection, so it has its own bias there.

Balance also has bias in how people view it though. It may be a more quantifiable effect, but people tend to believe it has a greater effect than it really does. In reality, by my math at least, it should work out to an under 10% clear speed increase. If you're doing hundreds of runs, it starts to make a significant difference. But just 10-20 runs? It might save 10-20 minutes. Now, at the level of farm parties, I doubt there would be enough situations in which the Spear actually prevented a wipe to make the claim that Spear actually increases overall clear speed over time more than Balance, via allowing for clear consistency. However, as soon as you start looking at rough runs, those situations become more common. Eventually you get down to the point where the Spear regularly makes a difference. If you watched that video I posted awhile ago of the 4-man Royal Menagerie, you will have noticed that it is most definitely NOT a run done by an elite group of players. Just off the top of my head, I think the DRG dies twice, the RDM once, and the tank even dies once. When you're looking at runs where not only is the healer naturally strained in general by solo healing, but the members of the party are dying and getting hit by avoidable mechanics, you have to pop cooldowns very often. Sometimes Lightspeed will have to be used in place of Swiftcast to double-cast a heal just to keep the tank alive during Akh Morn (because in order to save a DPS who ate the Earth Breath DoT you had to divert focus from the tank, causing the tank's HP to be too low to survive Akh Morn without a double-cast Benefic II). At that point, Lightspeed is on cooldown, but the chance of Shinryu casting Aerial Blast (which often necessitates the use of Lightspeed to keep the tank/party alive through it due to the constant cast interruptions) before the cooldown is off is quite high. Reducing the cooldown doesn't guarantee that it will be off cooldown by the time Aerial Blast is next used, but it does increase the chances. Now consider that during the fight, the healer is forced to use cooldowns to prevent wipes like that more than once, and the chance of the Spear having saved the party from a wipe continues to go up. If it even saves a run once every 10 runs, and the cost of a wipe is 10 minutes, then suddenly it's on par with Balance. And eventually, if the healer's allies have little enough mechanical competence, it can reach a point at which so many cooldowns are necessary that Spear regularly prevents a wipe.

Anyways, I need to stop there since it's getting way too late. Hopefully that makes some sense, despite being written past my bedtime!