Can we talk about how mnk, drg, and blm are blatantly overpowered right now?

[SaitoHikari]

...... what part of my post confuses you. During the time of pdps being shown onlogs "i like you because you buff my numbers" like how brd and mch would prefer to not raid with anyone but a drg... how is what you said different besides being like entering a building with the left door instead of the right?.

And that when it went to rdps, it became "now you just want me to pad your numbers"

To be fair, your second point literally means the same thing as the first (or is very poorly explained, as you're not really talking about how the padding in the second point is happening - unless you're talking about speedrun padding, which was always a thing), which is where the confusion is coming from. The only padding that's really possible now is based on how well other party members are taking advantage of any party buffs you may provide, rather than super buffing one party member to high heaven for the sake of a ranking on a website.

On that note, I see the switch from total DPS to raid DPS as something that's highly interesting in how it altered community mindset, and shows how much power FFLogs has on the raid community. Before the switch, people were calling Dancer being the new meta, and kept saying that Bards were going to be dead. So many people were making plans to include Dancer in their raid parties purely because they wanted said Dancer to pad their personal numbers on a website ranking. This incredible overreaction led to the site owner switching to raid DPS display where damage contribution from party buffs is no longer credited to the beneficiary of said buff, and added to the original caster instead. Almost immediately, Dancers got dropped overnight, especially when data started coming in, showing that Dancer's actual party contribution really did not make up for their low personal DPS. (Ninja too, but the Ninjas noticed what was happening long before the DPS display switch, since Trick Attack contribution isn't as obvious as a Dancer supporting a single party member.)

I'm of the mindset that the change to this raid DPS display is still one of the best things to happen to the community, because it shifted the community away from enforcing a more unnatural meta based around stacking party buffs to inflate one's personal ranking on a third party website, and instead exposed fundamental design/balance flaws inherent between the classes themselves. Had we kept with the old system, we'd have ended up with an underpowered support class (or two if you include Ninja), where a large portion of the community would have argued for them to remain as is because 'they get guaranteed raid slots due to being good at directly padding other people's numbers'. I noted a shift in behavior among Red Mages especially, as I don't really see them holding back Embolden during their openers for their own numbers anymore - which is a net positive on the teamwork scale. I'm also really of the mindset that if this change happened a whole expansion sooner, this support/piercing meta wouldn't have dominated the SB raid scene as much as it did, and Black Mages/Samurai would have been more readily accepted into parties. (Red Mages would have still been screwed though, and Ninja likely wouldn't have been considered a meta class.)

(And another positive is that this raid DPS display made it disgustingly clear that Monk and Dragoon especially are just straight overpowered, since they're not categorized as selfish DPS and yet have the damage output matching them + party buffs on top of that. It also shows that the gap between Black Mage and the other two casters is far wider than anything considered reasonable, and that the other two are being taxed far too much for possessing Raise. Staying on the old system would have likely muddled the waters a lot, because people would still be placing emphasis on data revolving around a smaller pool of classes in regards to party composition - even though the averages under the old system would eventually display a similar disparity between classes that the raid DPS shows, the numbers on the higher end of the data points would have exclusively revolved around specific party setups.)