Adps vs Rdps. Which one to go by?

[WiccaP]

I made this post because in a lot of the forums Ive been on, its a constant argument on whether you should go by adps or rdps. My point wasnt to say that you should only use 1 over the other or that rdps/adps should be the only factors and I'll admit that I probably misinterpreted them. What I was meaning, is that Adps seems to be a better measurement of personal dps while Rdps seems to be a better measurement of your dps in a group or party setting. In my opinion, Adps would a good metric to use as a baseline and then look at rdps and other factors to see how a job is doing when in a group. If there are massive changes in job rankings like in fflogs or dps numbers, it could indicate that a job is over or under performing in a group setting. I will also admit that to me rdps would seem like a more valid measurement for balancing jobs because when talking about balance its usually in a group or party setting.

I could be completely off the mark. But since we dont know exactly how SE balances jobs, places like fflogs are going to be the best resources we have to make comparisons and base our opinions off of. It shouldn't be used as a finite definite answer, because like its been pointed out there are a multitude of variables to consider. However, its been shown in the past that if there is a problem with a job's performance it will usually show on places like fflogs. I made an inference that because Mch seems to be the only job that has major jumps between where they rank on fflogs and given community feedback Ive seen that there is an issue with the job.

I guess my point was that just because a job is doing well by Adps, doesnt mean its performing well in a party and to look at rdps to get a better understanding. Like you've said you cant go by just one or the other for a definitive answer. But by looking at these we can base personal conclusions on a jobs effectiveness and then be able to have a discussion on them.

[Valence]

Saying "another job has higher aDPS means it will burst higher!" is a total fallacy that fails to account way too many variables when it comes to burst, one of the bigger ones being that a higher aDPS job tends not to provide any raid buff in counterpart, and is generally tuned on its raw base damage potency higher than the others (namely SAM, BLM to name the obvious suspects). It is true that one has higher aDPS than the other since it has higher burst potential, but saying that it does bigger burst because it has higher aDPS is a total non sequitur. Only one implies the other, else you'd get DRK having higher aDPS than anybody and yet, that's not true, but it's still the biggest burst job in the game with NIN. They do not, however, have higher aDPS for the simple reason that their base potential power is lower than SAM for instance, because they do provide raid buffs (and DRK is a tank anyway).

aDPS is a metric that only accounts for how well a team plays into their own raid buffs, and is also unique to a single team composition (a different composition will play with different raid buffs, and the metric will change a little at equal performance level). On a minor note there, rDPS also has a flaw, which is that it also tends to skew in favor of raid buffers (like DNC) that are playing in selfish heavy compositions, which naturally inflates their rDPS charts. This is due to the fact that both metrics are a complement to each other in that they try to funnel a rating on an individual when in reality the performance is at a team level. To make it simple, if you account for aDPS, you do not account for how well your team mates played into your buffs. If you account for rDPS, you do not account for how well you play under your team buffs (because that value is redistributed to them).

In short, even though as I said above you can definitely find small flaws:

- rDPS is great to compare what each job provide to a team on a GENERIC fashion.
- aDPS (the successor to raw personal dps, aka the same with the solo buffs like cards removed to prevent padding) is an old and flawed metric that has way too many variables not accounted for. It CANNOT be used to compare burst potentials, even though it is definitely affected by them. It's just good to know how you played into your team raid buffs for a specific run only.
- nDPS is the metric you're looking for if you want to know the base raw, unmodified, unbuffed power a job has on its own. It is the best tool at your disposal if you want to know how well you're faring compared to other people playing the SAME job on a rotational basis only (still affected by the native rng nature of each hit but that's another story).

If you want to account for a job pure burst potential, you'd need to take a nDPS chart and extract the 20ish seconds that cover each burst every 2 minutes.

Burst is important enough to take into account because it is often reflected in charts and if you check them on a regular basis (every couple of weeks) you'll see some jobs moving up or down slightly on rDPS for example, because people are adjusting to the fights themselves, and the way jobs can play around downtime or especially kill times (that will allow or not another burst before the kill) means that nothing is completely fixed into stone. As people gear up and progress, some jobs suddenly crop up a little because they fare better with certain kill times, a little more than others.


Edit: I do believe fflogs is focused on the wrong part of the play, which is personal performance, which also comes from wowlogs I believe (?), and more generally how as a society we value things. Or maybe that's because fflogs favors this that everybody follows, hard to say what came before between the egg and the chicken. Either way, both feed into each other and we end up with a maximized individuality, with individually focused metrics instead of having a bigger focus on party total dps and kill times, which always seemed the more natural way to go about things, to me at least. Don't get me wrong, there is still value in individual metrics, but it's pretty telling that percentiles on individual pages are centered exclusively on individual metrics rather than party wide.