Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Lyth]

Players are always going to be dissatisfied with the numbers. It doesn't matter if the difference is 50 dps or 500, players are affected psychologically by the knowledge that they're at a 'disadvantage', however slight. That's why having the developers explain their rationale for balance is always important. I think claims like 'jobs are balanced based on difficulty' or 'jobs are balanced based off of access to utility actions like Raise' is going to cause more rancor in the long run, because you know that you'll perpetually be at a disadvantage no matter what you do simply because you picked the wrong job. But if they come out and say hey, jobs in a given role (tank/healer/dps) will be balanced based off of damage adjusted for raid buffs (read: rDPS) and we'll find a way to make you feel good about the utility part of your toolkits whatever it is, most people will be content about that. Perception of fairness is the most important thing, and you do that by setting expectations.

If you want to create a higher-order model of rDPS that accounts for the benefit gained on average by lining up better with burst on a per buff basis (or other currently not-quantified benefits), go for it. rDPS itself was created because we realized that analyzing raw DPS was inadequate. If you can do it and explain your methods, players will get behind it. But designing the metric itself is the challenging part.