Please decorrelate party support from party damage

[Valence]

I'm sorry to say but you're forcing open doors as far as I'm concerned, but maybe it never hurts as a reminder.

You people seem to think I advocate for looking at rDPS and only rDPS and nothing else. Again, You're latching onto strawmen, not on what I actually advocated for. I just strongly, vehemently disagree with the way you seem to put every metric on an equal basis in terms of weight, but maybe I'm also reading too much into what you wrote?

I also need remind you that the original OP was about decorellating non damage support from damage support (raid buffs) into job balancing, so we've been going off on a very, very different tangent here. If anything, the only remotely related thing I had in mind was the ranged tax (which includes RDM/SMN), not minute balance details between metrics.

[Shurrikhan]

You people seem to think I advocate for looking at rDPS and only rDPS and nothing else. Again, You're latching onto strawmen, not on what I actually advocated for.

By all means, tell me what other way would arrive at your "give all jobs the same rDPS"? Balancing specifically for rDPS... means disregarding all that is not (accounted for in) rDPS.

You can't simultaneously balance rDPS and balance real/total contribution, for the simple fact that real contribution isn't just rDPS. You have exploitation (the difference between nDPS and aDPS) and buffing (the difference between nDPS and rDPS). Both.

I strongly disagree with anybody saying that rDPS shouldn't be equal across all DPS jobs, period.

If rDPS were equal across all jobs, that both means that jobs' actual total contribution must be unequal and the amount of effort required for a given amount of throughput would be wildly imbalanced. (Again, why would anyone take the likes of MNK or BLM if SMN and MCH had the same rDPS despite being damn near foolproof by comparison, and bringing rez atop that.)

This is a slippery slope at best, because the heaviest buffers in the game right now still get 80-90% of their total damage contribution from their own personal damage, which essentially puts them closer to fully selfish jobs than any 'rdps totem'.

No one has said otherwise. Literally no one. You asked why, say, aDPS would tell the full picture of a tank's contribution while rDPS would not. There's your answer. aDPS accounts for the whole of their contribution, while rDPS purposely leaves out ~6-14% of that contribution.

This in essence is what makes rDPS have immensely more weight when getting an overview/snapshot in the general trends of job balance. An aDPS chart on the other hand, will tell you very little on its own. Obviously, you can then use it to get into finer details once you're done with the former.

No one --literally no one-- is asking for aDPS to be the sole metric of use for all jobs.

You do not need to either metric to be the be all and end all of job balance at a glance. You can average the two and get a good picture, since now the buffer and exploiter each get half the contribution, but we should not be satisfied with just looking at rDPS alone and then saying we can maybe balance out the unaccounted for synergies (which have been up to a sixth of a job's value) "when we're done... if we want to get into the finer details."

In what world would an unintended disparity of over 5% be okay just because it doesn't show up on your preferred metric / in your oversimplified slice of the larger picture?