Interview with xenosys-vex

[Crater]

Balance dictates what, exactly? If war has lower utility than pld their dps should be higher because of balance, as well. That they get there through "burst" windows is just a coincidence of design. At the end of the encounter is what matters, not necessarily how they got there.

No, burst windows are inherently more valuable.

- High burst lets you push phases and skip mechanics, which not only makes fights easier from a mechanical standpoint, but has a tendency to cascade into increased party damage, as your healers no longer have to heal the mechanic you skipped, DPS don't need to accrue downtime to dodge the mechanic, etc.
- High burst is inherently easy to optimize. If a fight has 15 seconds of unavoidable downtime per minute, a tank with high burst is only going to suffer a small penalty to damage as long as they put their burst window outside of those 15 seconds - a tank that deals consistently high damage is going to lose a much higher percentage of their damage to the downtime, and there's nothing they can do about it, because every single second is equally important to them.
- High burst synergizes better with raid buffs: If your burst is 30% better than a competitor class's burst, then Trick Attack, Chain Strategem, Battle Litany, Balance, Hypercharge, etc, are all 30% stronger for you than they are for the other classes.

Balancing damage versus damage, higher burst should always be weighted more heavily than total DPS at the end of a fight. If you and I both do exactly 4,000 DPS at the end of a fight, but I did 4,000 DPS in every single second of that fight, and you did 8,000 DPS every minute in a 20 second window and 2,000 DPS in the remaining 40 seconds, your contribution was more valuable, because you had the ability to heavily contribute to phase skips, add burns, etc, and I did not.


The idea that Warrior has significantly lower utility than PLD is also pretty spurious as well, if that's the basis of an argument that Warrior should be better in both burst damage and total DPS. Divine Veil is far and away PLD's biggest contributor to party utility, and Shake it Off is just as powerful. Past that, Passage of Arms is PLD's second most powerful bit of utility, and considering the DPS loss for using it, it's only situationally helpful (and those situations are pretty much limited to "Unending Coil, and low-iLevel Neo Exdeath"). Warrior's second most powerful bit of utility is being able to generate huge amounts of enmity on a pull while losing almost zero DPS, by using Tomahawk and Equilibrium before immediately dropping into Deliverance. This is useful in every fight in the game.

Once you get past those two big examples of utility for the two respective classes, you're left comparing marginal, fringe benefits, like Intervention (only really useful for shared tankbusters), Cover (which is only ever "utility" in situations like the Neo Exdeath Delta aggro reset, and is otherwise just a mediocre defensive cooldown for PLD), and Tempered Will versus Warrior getting their own personal Slashing debuff for add pickups or party splits, using Defiance for a free 20% buff to a Deployed Adloquium, or using Onslaught's mobility to keep Alte Roite centered during Thin Ice, dealing with numerous knockbacks in Exdeath and Neo Exdeath, etc.

You'd probably have to give the nod to PLD over WAR in the 'practical utility' race, but only by a hair. And considering the relative importance of damage versus utility in the first place, that advantage is peanuts compared to what WAR brings to the table offensively.