Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Lyth]

Again, total raid DPS is the only DPS parameter that matters. Saying that 'rDPS is useless for tanks' is akin to saying that actual raw DPS values are useless for tanks. aDPS is a fictional parameter that was invented to help you compare two of your own performances. There's no point in balancing jobs based off of arbitrary fictional parameters that cannot be directly used to calculate total raid DPS.

[Shurrikhan]

Except, as you just noted yourself, to know the total rDPS a job contributes, since exploitation of raid buffs appears only on someone else's rDPS, requires looking also at the variance in a job's rDPS and likely raw damage. Else you can only rightly compare compositions against each other, not jobs. A job that supplies greater rDPS to its buffers, and therefore greater total rDPS, can still have the same individual rDPS.

That's what was being referred to: that job rDPS slime does not tell the whole story, not that tank damage or rDPS is useless or that they should be balanced solely around aDPS either.

[Jonah_Greymont]

To be fair, it is the CURRENT single outlier; monk was in the same boat pre-EW. Despite the 2-min window being their core philosophy they still managed to design PLD outside of it with the expansion, even as they “fixed” monk to fit inside that box.

I am personally a fan of having at least one class that operates outside of burst damage, and current PLD does it in a way that is interesting to me personally with the longer rotation. It doesn’t even bother me that it generally performs behind the other tanks in terms of damage. I think if they went back to focusing on damage vs utility and found a way to fit more utility (by redesigning the current kit; looking at you, Cover) onto PLD, that would alleviate the pains that exist on it currently.

I also realize that all of that is a pipe dream and they have pretty well settled on what this rework will be. The 3 main things I hope they retain are these:

1) The long, unique rotation. 1-2-3, or 1-2-4-1-2-3 is a big reason why seasoned players don’t like playing tanks. Keep this interesting for PLD.

2) The “party utility” status. Hell, add in a party damage buff even (highly unlikely), but don’t strip PLD down to the generic tank abilities.

3) The caster-tank role. Even if this is relegated to the “burst phase,” keep some form of this alive.

[Mikey_R]

Again, total raid DPS is the only DPS parameter that matters. Saying that 'rDPS is useless for tanks' is akin to saying that actual raw DPS values are useless for tanks. aDPS is a fictional parameter that was invented to help you compare two of your own performances. There's no point in balancing jobs based off of arbitrary fictional parameters that cannot be directly used to calculate total raid DPS.

Again, that doesn't tell you the full story for tanks.

Take PLD. If you attack a striking dummy, it is more damage to use 3 Atonements each and every time. However, stick this into an actual party, and it is more beneficial to drop 1 unbuffed Atonement to keep everything lined up as much as possible in the raid buffs. Going by just rDPS, it would be a better parse for PLD to always use 3 Atonements, however, if you were to rank them based on aDPS, then PLD would get more damage by using 2 atonements, just because things line up better.

Now, yes, rDPS is what kills things, but so does the unaltered DPS numbers. The raw data ACT parses. The total damage done by the raw data and after FFlogs has got ahold of it will be the same, so, by that logic, raw damage also kills the boss? Same data, different results. That SAM who was at the top in the raw data is now below the DRG (or any other melee) based on rDPS. The fight was killed either way, but which set of data properly shows how much the SAM contributed? The only reason DRG shot up is because it effectively piggy backed off of the damage from the other 7 members, including the SAM. So, the better the SAM does, the better the DRG seems? Do you see the rabbit hole we are falling into? rDPS is not a measure of how good you as a job are doing. It is a partial factor, but it also takes other people's skill into it, so you cannot get an accurate gauge on the skill of that DRG.

So, again, comparing rDPS for tanks does not work. You need the raw damage to compare them as it shows how well they can contribute inside the raid buffs.

[Lyth]

You do realize that your party composition is a fairly significant confounding factor in any aDPS comparison, right? It's not just influenced by buff alignment, but also the number of buffs you have access to (minus very specific buffs that can be used for artificial single target padding). That's why it's specifically intended for self-comparison. This is why we switched to looking at rDPS in the first place.

[Shurrikhan]

You do realize that your party composition is a fairly significant confounding factor in any aDPS comparison, right? It's not just influenced by buff alignment, but also the number of buffs you have access to (minus very specific buffs that can be used for artificial single target padding). That's why it's specifically intended for self-comparison. This is why we switched to looking at rDPS in the first place.

Yes, which is why I mentioned the comparison of one's rDPS to their raw damage for a given composition.

nDPS specifically precludes looking at buffs received. rDPS specifically precludes looking at their exploitation. Neither is a complete picture until looking at the whole party.

That's why a PLD can have plentiful rDPS in itself while still putting the party behind.

It's not so significant that I'd, personally, reshape the job over it instead of just increasing its rDPS to perhaps even just barely above DRK or GNB (with its contribution to total rDPS falling neck-and-neck), especially as there is no mainstay challenging light party content anyways in which for PLD to be thereby overpowered, but an individual's rDPS alone does not tell the whole story.

[Lyth]

No, neither nDPS or aDPS is appropriate for job balancing, and they were never intended to compare performances across different jobs in different compositions in the first place. If you wanted to do this sort of a comparison, you would need to specifically determine the amount of additional damage a player is doing under raid buffs, and then normalize it relative to the number of two minute buffs active. If you can determine the actual per buff damage contribution and equate it to rDPS, then you can say how significant this effect is.

[Mikey_R]

You do realize that your party composition is a fairly significant confounding factor in any aDPS comparison, right? It's not just influenced by buff alignment, but also the number of buffs you have access to (minus very specific buffs that can be used for artificial single target padding). That's why it's specifically intended for self-comparison. This is why we switched to looking at rDPS in the first place.

Yes, which is why, for general balance, averages are used. Also, party composition plays a role in rDPS calculations as well, so....

Also, rDPS was never the main measure for DPS until Dancer was made available and even then it is only because so much of Dancer's damage is based on how much it provides to someone else, a constant 5% damage buff is significant after all.

No, neither nDPS or aDPS is appropriate for job balancing, and they were never intended to compare performances across different jobs in different compositions in the first place. If you wanted to do this sort of a comparison, you would need to specifically determine the amount of additional damage a player is doing under raid buffs, and then normalize it relative to the number of two minute buffs active. If you can determine the actual per buff damage contribution and equate it to rDPS, then you can say how significant this effect is.

In this case, we can compare between different groups if we take an average, as that reduces the impact of specific party compositions. You can then use that data to compare. So, since we have data for rDPS and aDPS for all tanks, and since no tanks have a raid buff, we can take the aDPS of each tank and take away their rDPS to get an average of how much each job gains from raid buffs:

DRK: 7374.70 - 6915.93 = 458.77
GNB: 7343.68 - 6966.77 = 376.91
WAR: 7214.75 - 6870.19 = 344.56
PLD: 7153.74 - 6890.23 = 263.51

Ordered for your convenience. This is how much each tank gains from raid buffs, based on the upper quartile. PLD just does not utilise raid buffs very well. This is shown when comparing aDPS but is not shown when comparing rDPS as PLD's raid contribution there is split between the rest of the party.

Again, rDPS is not the end all be all of damage as it only tells part of a picture. Just in the same way aDPS/nDPS only tells part of the picture or even just the raw damage numbers only tell part of the picture. Unfortunately, since people don't care about the underlying maths or what the data actually shows, and just want a single number to compare, rDPS has come out as the king of damage (thanks to Dancer) when it only tells part of a story.

[Shurrikhan]

No, neither nDPS or aDPS is appropriate for job balancing

Nor is any single job's rDPS in isolation. Else you end up with things like CD drift or freestyle Samurai being considered "optimal" just because their own rDPS is slightly higher that way (nevermind the greater negative impact on the rest of the party's rDPS).

There is, for instance, up to ~200 rDPS a DRK brings to a party over a PLD that is not accounted for in the DRK's own rDPS. The gap in total (party-wide) rDPS produced by taking a DRK over a PLD is therefore larger than it would first appear. We can compensate PLD for that, but we'd then have to actually expect that people are capable of doing more than just looking at a single, non-comprehensive chart and going "higher, better, done."

[Lyth]

...

The aDPS values are not normalized relative to the number of two-minute buffs in each individual run. You'd need to go back and look at it in a per run basis from scratch.