So does every hate new PLD now?

[Shurrikhan]

If two jobs have equal damage curves, then by definition, they have rDPS parity. The converse is not necessarily true. Yet you keep quoting it backwards.

Because

(A) you've more than implied the converse before whenever the differences between rDPS and non-buffers' total contribution have come up -- over which you've repeatedly dismissed any value a job may bring that is not included directly in rDPS, despite that being up to 14% of a tank's total contribution to a given party, and

(B) your statement otherwise has no bearing on the conversation nor in rebuttal to the points you started this whole back-and-forth off by contesting (that the changes were to make PLD's damage curve more similar to that of other tanks, reducing the degree to which it was an outlier that made exceptionally poor use of raid buffs, and therefore warranted by an underperformance unable to be accounted for in PLD's rDPS metric that would otherwise take overpowering them in light-party content to correct).

There's really no distinction between whether you run a group of buffers or non-buffers because - guess what - both types of jobs are balanced on the basis of rDPS, which already accounts for this.

So, does raw DPS, you realize? The party's total damage always will be the sum of its parts, regardless of whether you give the credit for synergy to exploiters / buff-usage (DPS) or buffers / buff-giving (rDPS). (aDPS is merely DPS made more usefully readable by removing the otherwise conflating gap between a given first and second place due to single-target buffs all being given just to that best user.)

That's not relevant, though, to which metric best account for a given job's typical total value averaged across whatever parties they may end up in. Which is, again, whichever one actually gives credit for what they contribute towards that team synergy. For anyone with more rDPS than aDPS, that's going to be rDPS. For anyone with more aDPS than rDPS, that's going to be aDPS.

There's really no distinction between whether you run a group of buffers or non-buffers because - guess what - both types of jobs are balanced on the basis of rDPS, which already accounts for this.

No. Again, rDPS alone does not account for job balance, and is painfully insufficient to account for the total value brought by non-buffers.

An aDPS-poor job could have higher rDPS (essentially, as a non-buffer, solo DPS) and, paired into the very same composition, provide that party with less DPS than would another job, because the rDPS lost to its buffers will exceed its rDPS advantage over another non-buffer that has higher aDPS.

Yes, the rDPS loss caused by the change in non-buffers is accounted for... but unlike with aDPS, rather than being within the scope of comparison, that difference is rDPS is only shown elsewhere, not on the stats for the jobs you're balancing against each other. Here, we are comparing tanks, who are purely non-buffers, and yet you insist on balancing those non-buffers specifically on the basis of a metric that would say "X is better" even while X provides less DPS to its party than its alternatives. Why the hell would choose to use that metric, then, as your sole point for comparison in this context?

Every buffer's rDPS [their metric for personal+synergies] depends on their buffs' usage. Every exploiter's DPS [their metric for personal+synergies] depends on their buffs received. You do not look at DPS alone for buffers. You do not look at rDPS alone for exploiters.

* And yes, when single-target buffs are involved, the single-target buffer's rDPS gets even more dependent on having a great exploiter, while any optimal exploiter's DPS can greatly widen its lead based on whether it has single-target buffers (to the point of hiding how large the gap between it and second place would normally be). That volatility is why we look at AST/DNC rDPS far more carefully, and why we tend to look instead to aDPS rather than just DPS.

Tl;dr: No, you do not balance tanks --nor any other job that has more aDPS than rDPS-- around their rDPS alone. Such would balance their throughput only for solo encounters. If you want to balance them for party play, you must look also at their measures of what they contribute to party play (instead of specifically trying to remove that element just to, say, make the case that two jobs are wholly balanced while one has nearly 4% more contribution than the other).

[Lyth]

?????

You have directly misquoted me in a way that is false. I have corrected you repeatedly. If you want to claim otherwise, please provide a direct citation or stop making that claim. Thank you.

nDPS and rDPS is identical on tanks. I'm not really sure where you're going with your 'aDPS is a slightly more useful nDPS' tangent. Also, you do realize that nDPS is composition independent, right? By definition you're excluding all external buffs provided by other players.

If you want to see the impact of burst on buffs, we can directly look at the damage taken under any given buff. Nobody has tabulated this data as percentiles yet, but the information exists. If you genuinely have an interest in evaluating this rather than trying to win internet arguments, then this is the quantity to be looking at and offering discussion around. We can directly look at the parameter of interest in this discussion. You don't need to offer a proxy.

[Shurrikhan]

If you want to see the impact of burst on buffs, we can directly look at the damage taken under any given buff. Nobody has tabulated this data as percentiles yet, but the information exists. If you genuinely have an interest in evaluating this rather than trying to win internet arguments, then this is the quantity to be looking at and offering discussion around. We can directly look at the parameter of interest in this discussion. You don't need to offer a proxy.

I'm aware. I'm the one who laid that out for you months ago.

But why would the burden of proof lie with the idea that jobs' throughput should be balanced around all that a job offers to an average party (or that the closest proxy for that metric should be the indicator for this shouldn't be the one specifically designed to ignore a significant portion of its contribution), as compared to the idea that looking at only part of what a job brings would somehow be preferable?

Regardless, that still wouldn't be worth anyone's time nearly so much (as mentioned last time) as using simple relative-potency spreadsheets, as those do not rely on matching all of the various contexts of a given fight, let alone the Crit/DHit variation.

Note: rDPS is no less a "proxy" for the performance of every buffer. Will you be holding every buffer, then, to the same skepticism that'd require careful tabulation by clear time, composition, and the percentiles of the receiver, buffer, and average across the party? Why is the one metric that accounts for team synergy safe despite being equally susceptible to variation, but the other not?