Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Gserpent]

That's the thing though, Square-Enix very clearly gives a shit *only* about raid performance and design. For all the people that caterwaul about WoW being end-game focused, XIV is so focused on savage and ultimate raiding that the game is honestly kind of shit everywhere else.

[Shurrikhan]

That's the thing though, Square-Enix very clearly gives a shit *only* about raid performance and design. For all the people that caterwaul about WoW being end-game focused, XIV is so focused on savage and ultimate raiding that the game is honestly kind of shit everywhere else.

Sure, but until perhaps these lastest changes to Paladin to better align with 2-minute burst windows, that hasn't come from an over-fixation on balance.

There are other concerns --like the devs' apparent disbelief in the average player having more than a dozen (->handful of -> few, as expansion go on) braincells that might be invested towards tracking rotational concerns or in our ability to leverage any meaningful utility beyond percentile damage or mitigation bonuses-- with consequences both so much more potent and so much nearer to what I suspect you're pointing out there that there simply being a decent amount of QA time spent on tuning has been historically irrelevant to those problems.

[Lyth]

The focus on rDPS is entirely a reflection of player demands on this forum. I wouldn't be surprised if you could draw a direct correlation between job iterations that were considered 'badly designed' and 'weak' and the existence of an rDPS deficit. Players are more likely to forgive a 60 second recast difference on a defensive than they are to forgive a 60 rDPS difference. PLD hasn't really changed its playstyle, it's just moved to the lower end of the rDPS scale for tanks. DRK sat in the exact same spot (with an even bigger deficit) for two expansions in a row. It played out the exact same way.

I think feedback from these forums would be much more effective if people here simply dropped the farce and acknowledged that everyone and their chocobo wants more rDPS. Just give everyone in the role rDPS parity, unilaterally reject any 'difficulty'-based claims for advantages, and let the discussion shift to variations in playstyle and utility. Those discussions are much less clear cut, and you can actually have some unique trade-offs. Mobility cooldowns are an excellent example of this.

[Gserpent]

I think feedback would be even more effective if Square-Enix stopped caring about things that are explicitly disallowed by the TOS to begin with. What's DPS? What's rDPS? Oh, something that relies on a third-party program and suite of websites that you're not supposed to be fucking talking about so we can pretend you don't use them?

Fixation on perfect balance in raid fucks over literally everything else in this game and they need to just give it a rest. The people who genuinely, truly care about minute DPS differences are an incredibly small portion of players, likely on the order of less than 5% of any given region's playerbase. They could tell those people to get bent, redesign the game in such a way that non-raid content *isn't* boring as fuck, and probably make up the difference in more "casual" players bringing their friends in.

They can't win the fight against "muh parses!" So they should just nip the whole damn thing in the bud.

[Shurrikhan]

The focus on rDPS is entirely a reflection of player demands on this forum. I wouldn't be surprised if you could draw a direct correlation between job iterations that were considered 'badly designed' and 'weak' and the existence of an rDPS deficit. Players are more likely to forgive a 60 second recast difference on a defensive than they are to forgive a 60 rDPS difference. PLD hasn't really changed its playstyle, it's just moved to the lower end of the rDPS scale for tanks. DRK sat in the exact same spot (with an even bigger deficit) for two expansions in a row. It played out the exact same way.

I think feedback from these forums would be much more effective if people here simply dropped the farce and acknowledged that everyone and their chocobo wants more rDPS. Just give everyone in the role rDPS parity, unilaterally reject any 'difficulty'-based claims for advantages, and let the discussion shift to variations in playstyle and utility. Those discussions are much less clear cut, and you can actually have some unique trade-offs. Mobility cooldowns are an excellent example of this.

...If you ignore the claims about job A being more difficult to leverage or job B having infinite mobility, how the heck would "mobility cooldowns" be a productive point of discussion?

Moreover, having parity atop a precise rDPS parity would assume that every job must have equally valuable utility (or at least that each role must have identical[ly useful] utility], which in turn means that they each need to be as utility-centric as another (and more than likely that their utility has to have consistent value, such as by being reduced just to percentile damage or mitigation bonuses). There'd be no "supportive" option vs. "spearhead" option, etc., because they'd have to have the very same degrees of rDPS and utility, both.

[Lyth]

Damage is an intrinsic part of the game's formulas. Regardless of whether you have no understanding of where dps totals come from yourself or whether you've painstakingly hand tabulated dps totals after every pull with an abacus and chalkboard, players will always ask around and find out which jobs are doing the most damage and which ones are doing the least. And regardless of whether you're doing world prog or running an Ex trial farm, this sense that 'certain jobs carry an rDPS advantage over others' is going to always factor in the back of your mind. Even the most casual of players have the perception that certain jobs are 'intrinsically' disadvantaged because they have marginally smaller numbers. The easiest solution is to completely remove that from discussion by placing everyone on a level playing field. Just stamp out any discussion that privileges one job over the others in terms of rDPS.

The reason why I bring up mobility cooldowns is because you can't do a purely numerical comparison and see what comes on top, and there's much more room for personal preference. Movement is also where a lot of the skill expression comes out in more mechanically challenging game genres, and is probably the biggest area where this game could stand to grow for tanks. It's not a trade-off between mobility and not-mobility, it's a trade-off between different approaches to problem-solving. Utility in general is such a vague term that it's useless, and the only reason it comes up in discussions is when people want to use the term to leverage more rDPS for their preferred job.

[Absurdity]

The focus on rDPS is entirely a reflection of player demands on this forum. I wouldn't be surprised if you could draw a direct correlation between job iterations that were considered 'badly designed' and 'weak' and the existence of an rDPS deficit. Players are more likely to forgive a 60 second recast difference on a defensive than they are to forgive a 60 rDPS difference. PLD hasn't really changed its playstyle, it's just moved to the lower end of the rDPS scale for tanks. DRK sat in the exact same spot (with an even bigger deficit) for two expansions in a row. It played out the exact same way.

Funny thing about that, if you look at rDPS paladin is currently not even doing badly, it wouldn't even need a rework to it's offensive kit. With the exception of P8S phase 2 (probably due to it's long stretches of downtime) it is either very close to Dark Knight and Gunbreaker or even overtakes Dark Knight in some fights, sitting in 2nd place. The problem is when you look at aDPS and this is also where the problem with the 2 minute meta shows, suddenly paladin is dead last because it can't, by it's very design, capitalize on raid buffs as well as the other tanks can.

rDPS is all fine and dandy when you want to look at tank performance in a vacuum, but good rDPS doesn't help you when you wipe on enrage.

But instead of looking at the underlying problem they themselves created SE likes to go for the nuclear option and simply hammer all jobs into a mold that fits the meta of blowing all your highest potency into a 15 second window every 2 minutes, which is but one of the reasons why we currently have the most uninteresting pve gameplay in 6 years.

[ForsakenRoe]

and the only reason it comes up in discussions is when people want to use the term to leverage more rDPS for their preferred job.

Big true, Big real. I've never heard someone say 'oh isnt it great we had Warden's Paean there' or 'Hey that Nature's Minne is really doing work eh', but you always hear about Battle Voice and Radiant Coda, and the effect they're having on people's numbers. 'Utility' is a complete farce, and we shouldn't use the term, because what people mean is 'raid DPS increasing buff'. Actual utility doesn't matter, because the devs don't design around the existence of the utilities, rather, they design around the non-existence, so that every comp can (mechanically) complete any content. It's why we don't see stuff as prominent as Alphascape's Cover Cheese being possible now, or Expedient being a 'you really really need this'.

Contrast this to a 'certain other game', where there's movement speed increases, damage redirects, raidwide damage mit effects (even on dps specs), threat redirection skills, incidental off-healing caused by doing your rotation, on top of damage increasing raidbuffs like 'ok you have this class, so all your magic damage is increased by 5%', and you realize that actually, no, FFXIV's 'utility' is definitely not 'utility'. Chain, Litany, Mug, BattleVoice, TechStep, are not 'utilities', they're damage. Call it what it is.

[Lyth]

The only parameter that matters for job DPS balance at the end of the day is total raid DPS, because that determines

• Whether you clear the dps check in the first place
• Your group's clear time

The reason why rDPS is used for job balance is because your group's total raid DPS is equal to the sum of everyone's individual rDPS contributions. Although it's still a 'fictional' parameter in a manner of speaking, it just reallocates dps done under buffs to the person providing them. That's all.

The problem with aDPS (and nDPS) is that these values permanently discard certain types of buffed damage from the total. So if I gave you a list of a group's aDPS totals, you cannot rederive the group's total raid dps from them, because you have lost data in deriving these terms. The reason why these parameters exist is so that you can compare your own performance over time, and lets you troubleshoot issues in your own gameplay with buff timing/alignment. But they're entirely fictional parameters that have lost their original connection to your group's performance.

The rDPS totals we see come from all varieties of group compositions, with players of all types of performance. Even setting aDPS aside, if I put the same player in two different groups, one with more skilled players and one with less skilled ones, your DPS will be higher in the group with the shorter clear time. But when you look at a large number of players paired with many different group skill levels (and compositions), those variations disappear in the overall average. So it's not something that you needed to control for in the first place.

The only time that you actually need to homogenize actions is when players can draw a clear numerical comparison between them. The classic example was Shadow Wall in Stormblood, where it was 30% on a 180s recast against Sentinel's 40%/180s and Vengence's 30%/120s/thorns. Anyone with common sense can see that there is a worst option. This is where homogenization becomes necessary. But how do you compare Ingress/Egress vs. Thunderclap? That's a slightly more difficult question. When you start comparing non-numerical benefits, then you'll see a bit of personal preference enter the picture. I think this was one of the interesting points of Cover before it entered the gauge system, in that there really wasn't any other ability in the game that you could compare it to.

Again, I think just balancing rDPS and shifting the focus and conversation away from this will allow for more of these types of subjective discussions about which ability 'feels' better to use rather than which one has obvious numerical superiority.

[Mikey_R]

The problem with comparing tanks rDPS is that it is essentially useless for them. Any benefits that a tank gets under a raid buff is given to another job. However, this causes issues as you cannot see how much a tank contributes in the 2 minute buff window. Get the tank on a striking dummy and it will do the same DPS as when you compare rDPS in a group. So really, you need to measure tanks on how well they can put their bursts in the 2 minute window, which is where aDPS comes into it.

This discrepancy can be seen on FFlogs where the ranking for rDPS is GNB > DRK > PLD > WAR, however aDPS is DRK > GNB > WAR > PLD. This differences comes about because different tanks can utilise the buff window differently. DRK can save up Edge of Shadow and increase their aDPS, whereas if you were to just look at rDPS, this factor is not considered for the DRK as that contribution is split between several other party members.

To give you an idea on this, based on the upper quartile of players, this is the % of damage the lowest job is doing compared to the highest. In the case of rDPS, GNB is top and WAR is doing 98.6% of the GNB damage. Compare this to aDPS where PLD is doing 97.0% the damage of DRK (this is based on the whole of Abyssos over the last 2 weeks).

rDPS should not be the only thing you look at when trying to balance jobs, because using the wrong data in the wrong context is going to lead you down the wrong path.