Please decorrelate party support from party damage

[Valence]

So, by "rDPS" you didn't mean rDPS, but simply 'synergetic value (+ personal value)'..., of whatever form that may take?

:: Which would be aDPS (in excess of nDPS) and rDPS on buffers and aDPS (both again in excess of nDPS) on pure exploiters? (Or, for simplicity's sake, the average of both on each job, though that still fails to account for utility like rez, mitigation, etc..)

...That explains a lot then, yep.

In that case, so long as we bring up skill ceilings to nearly the same point and have a consistent accounting of/for non-rDPS utility, agreed.

Sorry for the point of confusion over terms. I haven't heard anyone use rDPS to mean something broader than that actual metric since... early HW, maybe? Especially since it's been the literal name of the metric on fflogs since xivhero / Stormblood fflogs.

Sorry for the original misuse of the term, I do really know what lies behind those metrics and I'm not exactly new to that table, so that's something I could really have taken more care not to do in the OG posts. The real issue is that we don't really have any way to properly designate an all encompassing balance metric besides perhaps "job contribution AND synergy", on top of that I do still believe that rDPS has the biggest weight to already draw approaching pictures and general patterns for job balance at a glance. It becomes insufficient when for example comparing melees between each other, but it's way enough to talk about other things like the ranged tax for example since the rDPS gap is way too big for anything else to make up for it on the sheer scales of differences, or.. the original point of that thread that was about constantly having to account for inconsistent balance when one starts adding non damage contributions on top of the pile.

To get to the crux of this thread, the numerical 'value' of support functions is incredibly difficult to determine in relation to dps. You cannot say that a 'Raise' is equivalent to 'X' dps. You cannot say that a raidwide mitigation action is equivalent to 'Y' dps. This is one reason why support actions on Physical Ranged have become progressively more vestigial since ARR. It's more exciting to be doing the damage yourself rather than being a second-class 'support' DPS. Balance support actions with support actions. Balance DPS with DPS.

Yes

The last issue comes down to 'job difficulty'. It's important for all jobs to have some form of skill expression, as subjective as it is. Players should feel good that they have figured out a fight specific trick that lets them maintain uptime and do more damage. At the same time, that cannot be used as a reason to privilege one job over the others. If you do this, you create a major balance problem. Why play a job that is not only weaker than the others, but generally viewed as low skill as well? This is why DPS parity is essential. There's enough 'my job takes more skill to play than yours' put out there without having it receive an official rubber stamp from the dev team.

All jobs should be on a level DPS playing field. Because rDPS is the parameter that most influences player behavior, this needs to be balanced relatively tightly across all skill levels. All jobs should have room for skill expression, but this should never be used as an excuse to give special privileges to one job over the others. Support actions and DPS output should be evaluated independently of each other. If Raise is a problem, increase its availability and limit its use. If mitigation is a problem, spread out equivalent solutions to jobs that share the same raid slots. Don't balance apples against oranges.

And more than anything else, don't balance jobs based off of who is shouting the loudest. Good players aren't looking for handouts. They're too busy finding ways to challenge themselves.

That's how I've felt playing rPhys for ages. Even in HW and SB they were already ranged taxed (the chunk of total DPS came from our DRG buddies, not ourselves), but at least we could take consolation in that we had a true use besides it, which was party resource support, especially as MP batteries, even though they started to notice that people in HW MP supported less and less since it was a DPS loss, but they still had to past a point. So we ended in SB with no more DPS loss for it and a synergy and party mechanic being already dumbed down as a result. It was only the beginning of the fall really.

Those days I play BRD because frankly, MCH is just mindless carpal tunnel and as tedious to play as GNB for similar reasons, and the little optimization there is for the job (double queen in bursts or heat management before bursts) is negligible on the grandest scheme of things and extremely unpleasant/frustrating to deal with in the first place as it feels like the rotation is badly designed and doesn't loop well (unlike SB MCH). And DNC is just a snooze fiesta. At least with BRD there is still a lot of very finicky things you can master and optimize within the rotation, at least during burst and minuet. Other songs are not really interesting actually, Ballad being carpal tunnel BL spamm and Army is resident sleepers.

I'm overall annoyed that I'm in a party just for my 1% bonus. My party wide mitigation tools are appreciated, but not necessary. What matters in the current meta is the damage contribution I bring. I'm literally out DPSed by tanks during openers and the only thing that puts me above them from a decent margin are the massive raid buffs I give, but that's still not enough to make me contribute in the same way any melee DPS does, or a BLM. Unlike a SMN or a RDM that tend to fare similar to me, I don't bring additional raises to the party to save the day or prog further. I'm just there to inflate the parses of others with that 1% bonus, because otherwise we would be close to see triple melee comps + a BLM.