Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
You do realize that your party composition is a fairly significant confounding factor in any aDPS comparison, right? It's not just influenced by buff alignment, but also the number of buffs you have access to (minus very specific buffs that can be used for artificial single target padding). That's why it's specifically intended for self-comparison. This is why we switched to looking at rDPS in the first place.
Yes, which is why, for general balance, averages are used. Also, party composition plays a role in rDPS calculations as well, so....

Also, rDPS was never the main measure for DPS until Dancer was made available and even then it is only because so much of Dancer's damage is based on how much it provides to someone else, a constant 5% damage buff is significant after all.

Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
No, neither nDPS or aDPS is appropriate for job balancing, and they were never intended to compare performances across different jobs in different compositions in the first place. If you wanted to do this sort of a comparison, you would need to specifically determine the amount of additional damage a player is doing under raid buffs, and then normalize it relative to the number of two minute buffs active. If you can determine the actual per buff damage contribution and equate it to rDPS, then you can say how significant this effect is.
In this case, we can compare between different groups if we take an average, as that reduces the impact of specific party compositions. You can then use that data to compare. So, since we have data for rDPS and aDPS for all tanks, and since no tanks have a raid buff, we can take the aDPS of each tank and take away their rDPS to get an average of how much each job gains from raid buffs:

DRK: 7374.70 - 6915.93 = 458.77
GNB: 7343.68 - 6966.77 = 376.91
WAR: 7214.75 - 6870.19 = 344.56
PLD: 7153.74 - 6890.23 = 263.51

Ordered for your convenience. This is how much each tank gains from raid buffs, based on the upper quartile. PLD just does not utilise raid buffs very well. This is shown when comparing aDPS but is not shown when comparing rDPS as PLD's raid contribution there is split between the rest of the party.

Again, rDPS is not the end all be all of damage as it only tells part of a picture. Just in the same way aDPS/nDPS only tells part of the picture or even just the raw damage numbers only tell part of the picture. Unfortunately, since people don't care about the underlying maths or what the data actually shows, and just want a single number to compare, rDPS has come out as the king of damage (thanks to Dancer) when it only tells part of a story.