This whole Meta Party thing is hurting me. x_x

[Bourne_Endeavor]

You're missing my point. Is the average player going to sync up their raid buffs in coordination with another player's buffs so that they stack consistently in a pug group? Probably not.

They don't have to be. A Dragoon can pop Battle Litany willy-nilly and it will still have a significant impact on Bard's overall damage, albeit less of one than if paired with a competent Dragoon. Regardless, it's unfair to compare unskilled meta job players with skilled non-meta ones. All things need to be relatively equal to calculate any worthwhile data. A bad Dragoon will still provide more to the raid than a bad Samurai unless the former is flat out not pushing buttons. Statics that want meta jobs aren't going to settle for a forty percentile Dragoon over a eighty percentile Samurai. They'll hold out for a better Dragoon.

Of course I am aware that ACT calculates from the battle log. Yet that is still not a complete picture of the numbers. Internal testing, raw mathematics (formulas, interactions) on the coding level, those are all things that we do not have. And I'm sorry, but I will believe the creators of the game far more easily than any player. It's nothing personal, but no player knows the game nearly as well as the developers do.

As for the others who quoted me: if you truly, truly believe that the developers are wrong with an objective analysis of data subsets, there is no convincing you. But the meta is a fiction. The sooner we let go of it, the better.

You're essentially claiming the battle log lies to us. Assuming all players are of equal skill, a composition of PLD/WAR/AST/SCH/DRG/NIN/BRD/MCH will outperform one consisting of PLD/DRK/AST/WHM/SAM/NIN/BRD/RDM

There is no internal formula that abruptly balances out the latter group. The Bard alone will suffer a significant damage loss due to how much of its DPS revolves around Crit (Battle Litany; Chain Strategem) and Disembowel. DRK lags behind WAR in overall damage output and has nowhere near the utility.

Yoshida isn't even denying the meta exists. He's merely insisting all jobs are viable, which they are. That does not mean they are all equal. In an interview with MrHappy last year, he outright asked Happy to tell his audience healer DPS doesn't matter and they don't expect it when calculating enrage timers unless people are undergeared. By your logic, people should accept non-DPS healers since Yoshida defended them. You'll be hard pressed to find any worthwhile static allowing their healers to literally do nothing in between healing.