So does every hate new PLD now?

[Shurrikhan]

The reason why you don't rebalance numbers immediately after a rework is because there's a learning curve associated with making changes.

Right.

There isn't a hard binary between 'being good with raid buffs' or not.

Also right, but no one had made that claim anyways, only that Paladin was by far and away the job that made the worst use of raid buffs. Which it objectively was.

If two non-buff providers have the same damage over time profile, by definition they have both rDPS parity and identical contributions under raid buffs. People just need to stop equating the latter with aDPS, because that's not what it measures.

This, on the other hand, makes little to no sense.

rDPS parity is not the same as "identical contributions under raid buffs." rDPS is simply a metric that moves 100% of the value created by synergies from the exploiters to that of the buffers. If you are comparing exploiters, it is the worst metric you could look at for measuring parity.

When looking at the most a buffer can bring to an average (if increasingly meta) composition, you look at rDPS, because that's the only metric that accounts for their synergetic value. When looking at the most an exploiter can bring to an average (if increasingly meta) composition, you look at aDPS, because that's the only metric that accounts for their synergetic value.

If two tanks have the same rDPS but one has more aDPS, that means the latter is giving that much more rDPS to his team (even if that job doesn't get credit for that excess itself by that measure); their buffers are getting that much more rDPS.

Or, to put even more simply, between two choices with equal rDPS, every buffer is nerfed slightly (deals less rDPS, which is the metric that rewards buffers for team synergy) when taking the job with lesser aDPS (which is the metric that rewards exploiters for team synergy).

In comparisons between jobs that are purely exploiters, aDPS parity across sufficiently large sample sizes is precisely the closest measure we can get for identical contributions under raid buffs. People should equate "aDPS parity" and "identical contribution under raid buffs", because that aDPS is literally a measure of performance under party-wide raid buffs.

(nDPS, on the other hand, will be made useless for any broad comparison simply due to winner-gets-all skew of single-target buffs. One can't see how large the difference is between the job perceived to be the best target and its runner-up, because only categorical first place gets anything.)