Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Melethron123]

There are a number of issues with the popular interpretation of aDPS as a 'measure of buff alignment' that should show you that it is incorrect. You should actually take a look at what you're measuring in the first place. It's not buff alignment. It's just raw dps with single target padding permanently discarded (and remember, the presence of a BRD in any run will skew those numbers because of how their buffs work). There are plenty of other ways that you can pad those numbers with raidwide buffs, so it's entirely composition dependent. It's pretty much worthless unless you're comparing two different runs with the same composition.

It's not hard to determine a significantly more useful parameter. All you need to do is publish the 'damage taken' under a given buff by percentile and compare like percentiles for different jobs. Then you can say a NIN benefits by X rDPS by virtue of having a GNB present instead of a PLD, or a NIN benefits Y rDPS by virtue of having a SAM present instead of a DRG. It's a much more effective method of analysis rather than looking at a parameter that is completely meaningless without knowing the composition in which it was generated in.

a SAM using their cooldowns with multiple raidbuffs active will deal more dmg than a SAM using their cooldowns with no raid buffs active, and that difference in damage comes from the bonuses they get from said buffs. so yeah, aDPS does measure buff alignment (and the same applies to every job out there)

DRK does 12% more dmg than WAR and PLD, despite their rDPS being very close to each other, because they can put more potency inside buff windows

and correct me if i'm wrong, but can't you see the party composition when you look at someone's log?

[Shurrikhan]

and correct me if i'm wrong, but can't you see the party composition when you look at someone's log?

You can, yes. Every individual log is part of a larger party-wide log, and records exactly dps how much they (and every other party member) received from each buff.

[ForteNightshade]

...

Once again, you are arguing against the literal description from FFlogs.

aDPS removes single target padding, but still rewards you for playing to AOE buffs. It also doesn't include your buff contributions, so this metric allows you to evaluate how well players are aligning their damage bursts with external AOE buffs.

Furthermore, neither metric is immune to padding. They both can be abused with the right comp under the right circumstances. Hence why both are valuable metrics depending on the job as some benefit more from aDPS and others from rDPS. Dismissing it as "worthless" because of two different comps is ignoring rDPS can also be manipulated. aDPS is meant to calculate job bursts within raid buffs while not contributing their own whereas rDPS is a better metric for jobs with buffs that benefit from said bursts. Which is why tanks tend to favor the former.

However, let's put all that aside for a moment and return to the speed kill examples I've provided. Both of which you've ignored. If rDPS is the superior statistic for tanks, and thus, accurate, why is Dark Knight over twenty times more dominate in P5S than Paladin when the latter actually performs better in rDPS? Out of the top 50 ranked speed logs, only one group isn't running a Dark Knight. Twelve of those groups (24%) have two Dark Knights. That is more than Paladin and Warrior's representation combined.

Now when we glance at rDPS, this extremely lopsided result simply doesn't make sense when the entire purpose of speed killing is to bring the most efficient jobs. At 99% Paladin is ahead of Dark Knight and roughly tied with Gunbreaker. At max%, it's actually ahead of all tanks. Meanwhile, when we look at aDPS under those same parameters, we see Dark Knight pulling away by 600 at 95% and a staggering 900 at 99%. In other words, the overrepresentation makes sense. So... what is this? Is the speed kill community just emotional and completely ignoring raw DPS because of established dogma as you put it or is your dismissal of aDPS completely unfounded and the statistics reflect that?

[Melethron123]

Now when we glance at rDPS, this extremely lopsided result simply doesn't make sense when the entire purpose of speed killing is to bring the most efficient jobs. At 99% Paladin is ahead of Dark Knight and roughly tied with Gunbreaker. At max%, it's actually ahead of all tanks. Meanwhile, when we look at aDPS under those same parameters, we see Dark Knight pulling away by 600 at 95% and a staggering 900 at 99%. In other words, the overrepresentation makes sense. So... what is this? Is the speed kill community just emotional and completely ignoring raw DPS because of established dogma as you put it or is your dismissal of aDPS completely unfounded and the statistics reflect that?

i'd bet a whole cookie that whoever is in charge of tank balance is tuning the numbers around rDPS instead of aDPS

[Lyth]

...

This seems to be an analysis issue on your part. Yes, that quote says that it 'allows you to evaluate how well players are aligning their damage buffs with external raidwide buffs.' That's true, when you're comparing yourself with yourself. What it doesn't tell you is how well two different jobs matched with different raid comps intrinsically align with two-minute raidbuffs. You'll note that gains from BRD's rotational raidwide buffs are included, which have nothing to do with your burst alignment. You'll also note that there are no pretenses made here about this illustrating tank damage balance, or in how much additional damage is actually contributed to buff providers. These are just false inferences that you have made because you haven't bothered to take the time to read what it actually says on the tin.

I don't really think that you can say that rDPS is subject to padding on anywhere near the same scale as aDPS is, simply because setting aside single target buff jobs, the only way that other players influence your rDPS contribution is in what they do under your 16% uptime two minute buffs (i.e. individually, what's going to amount to 0.5-0.8% of your total rDPS). That's the same quantity that you're quibbling over, on the second lowest damage role in the game. What's going to influence it more than raid composition is being paired with players who keep dying during buff windows or can't maintain proper uptime. But that's a bit like saying that clearing a fight faster with a group of better players boosts DPS metrics at all levels.

[Lyth]

Yeah, I can understand why the dev team isn't interested in officially publishing numbers, even if it would provide an avenue for interested players to critique their own performance and grow stronger with it.

If you think that burst windows are a 'restriction' now, they still were back then. There is always an optimum time to place that burst window. What has changed is:

• It's more obvious when that burst window is supposed to occur (what's the LCM of our recasts again?)
• It tends to get set up without any real coordination or pre-planning
• It's longer, allowing you to be less precise with your button inputs
• It's less powerful than it used to be

In short, they took something that occurred typically at slightly higher levels of play in coordinated groups and made it accessible and forgiving so that anyone can do it on the fly. Just because the average PF player who used to freestyle burst is actually conscious about it doesn't mean that anything has changed.

If they wanted to really throw a wrench into it, we'd just have an assortment of different prime number recasts to deliberately mess with the alignment. But then you might as well stick with personal buffs and make this feel more like a single-player game. That will be next, the way the complaints are going.

[Shurrikhan]

One day, FFlogs should just hide the percentile and median stats on everyone's page as an april fools joke. Leave it that way for a week or two, so it doesn't just get dismissed right away as 'eh its just april fools' and people start thinking it'll stick.

I'd actually really like to see that. Given the high chance people just go back to business as normal thereafter, though, I guess I'd just like to see context made a bit more visible? For instance, it would be interesting if we could see how many attempts have gone into a given fight that haven't yet cleared (noting also that most people don't log non-clears), or how the number of clears compare to previous tiers or luckybancho estimates on the number of active level-capped players. It'd be cool to see what the enrage time is for the given fight, and to be able to quickly check how a party fell far above or below making that mark, or even to do "what if" substitutions.

If they wanted to really throw a wrench into it, we'd just have an assortment of different prime number recasts to deliberately mess with the alignment. But then you might as well stick with personal buffs and make this feel more like a single-player game. That will be next, the way the complaints are going.

I hope it doesn't come to that, but that does sadly seem the fairest bet, given the history of adjustments thus far.

[Gserpent]

I think "solo buffs" is pretty much exactly how it should go. I can't speak for modern WoW, but in older editions of WoW that's pretty much how it worked - you maybe had Bloodlust as a once per fight raidwide buff but otherwise everyone was on their own. When you triggered your class's big damage buttons was in large part reliant on when it was safe and effective for *you* to do so.

I also liked how planning on how to integrate your personal rotation into the raid's buffs and rotation worked in Shadowbringers, although we were already well on our way to the 2 minute meta there. I think there's a lot more space to improve skill ceilings in an "everyone is on their own" setup than a rigid 2 minute hierarchy. Add this to making boss hitboxes a bit smaller so that melee and tanks have room for greeding mechanics (damage down is a good solution to lmao healers adjust, it should remain as is), and I think you're in a much better place going into Expansion Number Next.

[Shurrikhan]

I think "solo buffs" is pretty much exactly how it should go. I can't speak for modern WoW, but in older editions of WoW that's pretty much how it worked - you maybe had Bloodlust as a once per fight raidwide buff but otherwise everyone was on their own. When you triggered your class's big damage buttons was in large part reliant on when it was safe and effective for *you* to do so.

...Original WoW had, just off the top of my head... Battle Shout, Commanding Shout, Power Word: Fortitude, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Might, Blessing of Sanctuary, Devotion Aura, Crusader Aura, Trueshot Aura, Earthskin Totem, Strength of Earth Totem, Flametongue Totem, Windfury Totem, Arcane Intellect, Mark of the Wild, Divine Spirit, Fel Intelligence, so there wasn't a lack of raid buffs per se. (And I was actually happier when that buff bloat was less prominent, or consolidated into auras instead of filler flavor buttons, prior to Shadowlands' returning them to full mass.)

But yeah, you didn't really try to align anything to raid buffs' damage windows. That said, you still basically don't. It's pretty much still just Power Surge (single target Haste buff) and Bloodlust/Heroism.

[Gserpent]

Yeah, but outside of vanilla, those are all fire and forget buffs. The lowest of them had durations of like 3 minutes and no cooldown so you just tapped it once at the start and again periodically to keep it rolling. Most had durations of 60 minutes or more. It made sense in a game like WoW, where you had a lot of classes/specs and a much larger raid size, but in XIV it would be pointless to have buffs like that... hence the 5% stat boost benefit, I imagine. DPS classes would usually have a personal buff with a length 2-5 minute cooldown like Death Wish for Fury and Recklessness (variously like a fucking *hour* cooldown, to I think 5 minutes in Wrath) and while you'd *usually* want to use them during Bloodlust, you didn't always.

I dunno. I think raiding was just better, overall, in Shadowbringers. Especially since I don't give a single tin shit about parsing or parsing culture, and I don't think Square-Enix ought to either. I can understand there being problems with "everyone's different" for speedrunning etc, but I'm perfectly telling an incredibly tiny group of players who frankly are irrelevant in the grand scheme to find something else to focus their efforts on, if it means the gameplay for the majority of players is better.