Quote Originally Posted by Mavrias View Post
I disagree. I believe rdps is the better metric for both. aDPS includes all sorts of buffs which skew numbers. rDPS as a tank would be the raw metric of your damage contribution without those buffs.
Whether your job can better take advantage of certain buffs (i.e. Trick Attack) has zero impact on the job's own rDPS, even though it does affect the party. Tank rDPS being equal, a party that has a tank that can better exploit others' damage utility will have higher dps than a party with a tank that does a poorer job of that exploitation. That is a measurable contribution, and yet it's not measured in the tank's rDPS. However, it does at least appear in aDPS, although it's only worth precise comparison in the fantastic scenario that one uses the same composition performing the same fight via the same strategy and with the same performance between all the otherwise same members.

Neither measure is perfect. But, if rDPS is generally equal, yet the others' aDPS is higher across a broad spread of parses (and thereby probably compositions), the higher aDPS tank is contributing more (just, via the DRG/NIN/AST/SCH/MNK/RDM's rDPS parses, rather than its own).