Quote Originally Posted by Mansion View Post
I don't get that.
It's very obvious. In a PvE game, the object is to overcome the environment. One vector of balance must therefore be in the capability of overcoming said environment. If it's based purely on dps, but a job has inherent problems overcoming environments, there's a problem in balance that you cannot see looking at one single parse. If a job is supposed to take a hit to dps in exchange for having less problems overcoming environments, but it is not overcoming the environments more, there's a problem in balance that you cannot see looking at a single parse.

If you have balance in multiple vectors, and you don't look, you don't see balance issues. This shouldn't be a hard concept.

Prog is prog, meaning that it's likely that kits are not used at their most optimal potential.
Optimal. Potential. Is. Only. One. Vector. Of. Balance.

So one someone says 'Okay, look at that, but let's look at other things too, because those also matter regarding balance' what's the resistance or difficulty, if not laziness?

Specifically a RDM can see its DPS lowered by raising and MP challenges linked to that. And prog is finite
Prog is also the primary expression of difficulty in a PvE game. Again--when you look at balance in say, Dark Souls, do you look at speed runs, or do you look at how people struggle? There is FAR more data in the struggle than there is in mastery, in PvE.

, it's a matter of a few days / weeks. I agree that it is part of the overall balance and has to be considered, but it's always better to look mainly at optimal play on high end content because it simply trickles down to every use of said job. If a job performs well in Savage, there's no real reason for it to not perform in lower difficulty content. While a job that does well in dungeon does not necesseraly work well in savage (see 4.X WHM for instance)
Strawman. I'm not saying that we look at dungeons and shit, because the jobs, as you say, are not tested there.

What I'm saying is that, when looking at Savage, you look at more than one, single, solitary parse. Which is what you're doing when you look at 95th percentile--that's not a spread of parses, even at mastery level. It's literally just the one parse that happens to fall into some arbitrary mathematical criteria. That's the point: The answer to your concerns is not to eschew data for datum. Datum is useless. Data is useful. And one parse is -Datum.-