Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Shurrikhan]

But balancing tanks around rDPS is stupid. It's why DRK is in a state wherein it bursts so hard it takes card priority away from *actual DPS classes* during its window.

It's dumb only if that goal hurts goals (e.g., for diversity and/or depth in toolkits across jobs) that are more desirable for players of the given job/role/game.

Looking at rDPS alone just happens to be dumb when rDPS isn't all that's on offer. And the more we obsess over it, the more it will have to be the only thing on offer as its balance tightens and pulls all other element in, too, in turn.

As long as those tendencies are kept in check, though, tight balance is always* a good thing.

* Actually, small caveats may apply even then, but only in disrupting outsized community perceptions following a long-time imbalance.

[Gserpent]

Tight balance is stupid and they should tell the parsebrains to get bent. Fun is far more important than balance.

[Shurrikhan]

Tight balance is stupid and they should tell the parsebrains to get bent. Fun is far more important than balance.

Fun, when dependent on how well a given class/job/spec clicks for a given person, will be dependent in part on balance.

Balance is currently more than close enough for that for most forms of content, but where getting it closer would come without cost elsewhere, we might as well.

(It just shouldn't be a balance tightly woven around only a single and non-comprehensive dimension of otherwise varied jobs, nor designed only for the top end.)

[Gserpent]

That's the thing though, Square-Enix very clearly gives a shit *only* about raid performance and design. For all the people that caterwaul about WoW being end-game focused, XIV is so focused on savage and ultimate raiding that the game is honestly kind of shit everywhere else.

[Shurrikhan]

That's the thing though, Square-Enix very clearly gives a shit *only* about raid performance and design. For all the people that caterwaul about WoW being end-game focused, XIV is so focused on savage and ultimate raiding that the game is honestly kind of shit everywhere else.

Sure, but until perhaps these lastest changes to Paladin to better align with 2-minute burst windows, that hasn't come from an over-fixation on balance.

There are other concerns --like the devs' apparent disbelief in the average player having more than a dozen (->handful of -> few, as expansion go on) braincells that might be invested towards tracking rotational concerns or in our ability to leverage any meaningful utility beyond percentile damage or mitigation bonuses-- with consequences both so much more potent and so much nearer to what I suspect you're pointing out there that there simply being a decent amount of QA time spent on tuning has been historically irrelevant to those problems.

[Lyth]

The focus on rDPS is entirely a reflection of player demands on this forum. I wouldn't be surprised if you could draw a direct correlation between job iterations that were considered 'badly designed' and 'weak' and the existence of an rDPS deficit. Players are more likely to forgive a 60 second recast difference on a defensive than they are to forgive a 60 rDPS difference. PLD hasn't really changed its playstyle, it's just moved to the lower end of the rDPS scale for tanks. DRK sat in the exact same spot (with an even bigger deficit) for two expansions in a row. It played out the exact same way.

I think feedback from these forums would be much more effective if people here simply dropped the farce and acknowledged that everyone and their chocobo wants more rDPS. Just give everyone in the role rDPS parity, unilaterally reject any 'difficulty'-based claims for advantages, and let the discussion shift to variations in playstyle and utility. Those discussions are much less clear cut, and you can actually have some unique trade-offs. Mobility cooldowns are an excellent example of this.

[Shurrikhan]

The focus on rDPS is entirely a reflection of player demands on this forum. I wouldn't be surprised if you could draw a direct correlation between job iterations that were considered 'badly designed' and 'weak' and the existence of an rDPS deficit. Players are more likely to forgive a 60 second recast difference on a defensive than they are to forgive a 60 rDPS difference. PLD hasn't really changed its playstyle, it's just moved to the lower end of the rDPS scale for tanks. DRK sat in the exact same spot (with an even bigger deficit) for two expansions in a row. It played out the exact same way.

I think feedback from these forums would be much more effective if people here simply dropped the farce and acknowledged that everyone and their chocobo wants more rDPS. Just give everyone in the role rDPS parity, unilaterally reject any 'difficulty'-based claims for advantages, and let the discussion shift to variations in playstyle and utility. Those discussions are much less clear cut, and you can actually have some unique trade-offs. Mobility cooldowns are an excellent example of this.

...If you ignore the claims about job A being more difficult to leverage or job B having infinite mobility, how the heck would "mobility cooldowns" be a productive point of discussion?

Moreover, having parity atop a precise rDPS parity would assume that every job must have equally valuable utility (or at least that each role must have identical[ly useful] utility], which in turn means that they each need to be as utility-centric as another (and more than likely that their utility has to have consistent value, such as by being reduced just to percentile damage or mitigation bonuses). There'd be no "supportive" option vs. "spearhead" option, etc., because they'd have to have the very same degrees of rDPS and utility, both.

[Absurdity]

The focus on rDPS is entirely a reflection of player demands on this forum. I wouldn't be surprised if you could draw a direct correlation between job iterations that were considered 'badly designed' and 'weak' and the existence of an rDPS deficit. Players are more likely to forgive a 60 second recast difference on a defensive than they are to forgive a 60 rDPS difference. PLD hasn't really changed its playstyle, it's just moved to the lower end of the rDPS scale for tanks. DRK sat in the exact same spot (with an even bigger deficit) for two expansions in a row. It played out the exact same way.

Funny thing about that, if you look at rDPS paladin is currently not even doing badly, it wouldn't even need a rework to it's offensive kit. With the exception of P8S phase 2 (probably due to it's long stretches of downtime) it is either very close to Dark Knight and Gunbreaker or even overtakes Dark Knight in some fights, sitting in 2nd place. The problem is when you look at aDPS and this is also where the problem with the 2 minute meta shows, suddenly paladin is dead last because it can't, by it's very design, capitalize on raid buffs as well as the other tanks can.

rDPS is all fine and dandy when you want to look at tank performance in a vacuum, but good rDPS doesn't help you when you wipe on enrage.

But instead of looking at the underlying problem they themselves created SE likes to go for the nuclear option and simply hammer all jobs into a mold that fits the meta of blowing all your highest potency into a 15 second window every 2 minutes, which is but one of the reasons why we currently have the most uninteresting pve gameplay in 6 years.

[Gserpent]

I think feedback would be even more effective if Square-Enix stopped caring about things that are explicitly disallowed by the TOS to begin with. What's DPS? What's rDPS? Oh, something that relies on a third-party program and suite of websites that you're not supposed to be fucking talking about so we can pretend you don't use them?

Fixation on perfect balance in raid fucks over literally everything else in this game and they need to just give it a rest. The people who genuinely, truly care about minute DPS differences are an incredibly small portion of players, likely on the order of less than 5% of any given region's playerbase. They could tell those people to get bent, redesign the game in such a way that non-raid content *isn't* boring as fuck, and probably make up the difference in more "casual" players bringing their friends in.

They can't win the fight against "muh parses!" So they should just nip the whole damn thing in the bud.

[Lyth]

Damage is an intrinsic part of the game's formulas. Regardless of whether you have no understanding of where dps totals come from yourself or whether you've painstakingly hand tabulated dps totals after every pull with an abacus and chalkboard, players will always ask around and find out which jobs are doing the most damage and which ones are doing the least. And regardless of whether you're doing world prog or running an Ex trial farm, this sense that 'certain jobs carry an rDPS advantage over others' is going to always factor in the back of your mind. Even the most casual of players have the perception that certain jobs are 'intrinsically' disadvantaged because they have marginally smaller numbers. The easiest solution is to completely remove that from discussion by placing everyone on a level playing field. Just stamp out any discussion that privileges one job over the others in terms of rDPS.

The reason why I bring up mobility cooldowns is because you can't do a purely numerical comparison and see what comes on top, and there's much more room for personal preference. Movement is also where a lot of the skill expression comes out in more mechanically challenging game genres, and is probably the biggest area where this game could stand to grow for tanks. It's not a trade-off between mobility and not-mobility, it's a trade-off between different approaches to problem-solving. Utility in general is such a vague term that it's useless, and the only reason it comes up in discussions is when people want to use the term to leverage more rDPS for their preferred job.