Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Shurrikhan]

i'm not basing my arguments on striking dummies, i'm basing them on actual raid dmg numbers and the statements from people who have been raiding at a high level for years (some of them since 2.0)

what are you basing your arguments on, if you don't mind me asking?

You were arguing just earlier against jobs like BLM having even a theoretical rDPS lead, regardless of how much greater a portion of their damage they would lose to complexity or the constraints of specific fights. How else am I supposed to interpret that outside of asking for parity on-paper instead of parity in-practice (within the contexts of actual fights)?

So long as you're asking for parity in practice, then sure, I'm all for that. Buff non-BLM Casters and physical ranged slightly, so in a typical fight (within such a span of content as any of this would matter, such as no easier than Extreme) with a typical player (but one typically open to learning) they're neck-and-neck.

But you're going to have a degree of imbalance regardless so long as the jobs themselves are imbalanced in terms of complexity and contextual loss (from movement, range, spans of uptime, raid synergy, or whatever else); if the likes of MCH were perfectly balanced against BLM even in BLM's few ideal scenarios, then MCH would necessarily be outperforming it everywhere else, which ultimately means that BLM stops being a competitive option and instead becomes "griefing" or "an ego-pick", with more reliable jobs like MCH being pushed over them.

A typical BLM should likely slightly underperform a typical MCH in fights especially bad for the likes of BLM, but the inverse should also be true; in fights decent/good for BLM, they should slightly outperform MCH. That fight-specific gap shouldn't be so great that you end up with "barred" jobs and/or "must pick" jobs, but so long as the two operate so differently, so should their outcomes differ -- with, yes, BLM coming out ahead at least as often as not.

If we want the likes of MCH to be competitive across a larger gamut of content than that, though, it also needs a larger gamut of gameplay behind it between its floor and ceiling commensurate to that balance.

[Melethron123]

You were arguing just earlier against jobs like BLM having even a theoretical rDPS lead, regardless of how much greater a portion of their damage they would lose to complexity or the constraints of specific fights. How else am I supposed to interpret that outside of asking for parity on-paper instead of parity in-practice (within the contexts of actual fights)?

So long as you're asking for parity in practice, then sure, I'm all for that. Buff non-BLM Casters and physical ranged slightly, so in a typical fight (within such a span of content as any of this would matter, such as no easier than Extreme) with a typical player (but one typically open to learning) they're neck-and-neck.

But you're going to have a degree of imbalance regardless so long as the jobs themselves are imbalanced in terms of complexity and contextual loss (from movement, range, spans of uptime, raid synergy, or whatever else); if the likes of MCH were perfectly balanced against BLM even in BLM's few ideal scenarios, then MCH would necessarily be outperforming it everywhere else, which ultimately means that BLM stops being a competitive option and instead becomes "griefing" or "an ego-pick", with more reliable jobs like MCH being pushed over them.

it's not "theoretical" mate... they're the numbers people are actually doing in actual raids

[Absurdity]

it's not "theoretical" mate... they're the numbers people are actually doing in actual raids

No it's absolutely theoretical, you're talking about how much dps these jobs deal on paper.
Let me give you an example. Dark Knight deals significantly more dps than Warrior, but if all I did was look at the Dark Knights I've had in pugs I'd think they need to buff that job. Now why is that? Because these people aren't playing Dark Knight as optimally as it could be played, so they get outdps'd by a warrior which is about as hard to play as remembering to put on pants.

Dark Knight does significantly more damage than warrior when played by a top 1% player, not when played by your average joe in savage pugs.

If we did what you want and make all jobs equal on paper then the jobs that actually require a degree of mastery would almost always severely underperform, because the people playing them aren't all top 100 players.

[Melethron123]

No it's absolutely theoretical, you're talking about how much dps these jobs deal on paper.
Let me give you an example. Dark Knight deals significantly more dps than Warrior, but if all I did was look at the Dark Knights I've had in pugs I'd think they need to buff that job. Now why is that? Because these people aren't playing Dark Knight as optimally as it could be played, so they get outdps'd by a warrior which is about as hard to play as remembering to put on pants.

Dark Knight does significantly more damage than warrior when played by a top 1% player, not when played by your average joe in savage pugs.

If we did what you want and make all jobs equal on paper then the jobs that actually require a degree of mastery would almost always severely underperform, because the people playing them aren't all top 100 players.

you never heard of logs, have you?

[Shurrikhan]

you never heard of logs, have you?

They are referring to the logs.

Until over the 90th percentile, unless a fight specifically aligns well with DRK's uniquely short-on demand or has especially heavy magic damage, the 0.56% difference (that's taken straight from the median performances of DRK vs. WAR) isn't possibly going to offset the increased self-sustain of the Warrior. Trading an extra 6k+ (and for DRK to get that close, it needs to drop Edges from within its raid window, tightening the DPS gap even further) potency of healing per minute for an extra 37 dps isn't anywhere close to worthwhile, especially when you account for how one hard need even preempt incoming damage, but instead merely react to it afterwards. Until both are playing at/among the top ~5%, specifically in content that (A) has no use for WAR cheese and (B) has an enrage timer that the group is falling barely short of, the more challenging is already at a disadvantage.

That's why when you ask for balance, people will rightly ask you "Where? For whom?"

[Melethron123]

They are referring to the logs.

That's why when you ask for balance, people will rightly ask you "Where? For whom?"

how are logs "theoretical striking dummy damage"?

balance in raid content for all levels of play. a DRK that spams unmend and nothing else will deal less dmg than a warrior that uses the path combo and nothing else, sure. but if the best warrior in the world is doing significantly less dmg than the best DRK in the world - especially if that difference is high as 11% - anyone with a functioning brain can see the job balance is terrible

[Shurrikhan]

how are logs "theoretical striking dummy damage"?

Your claim: That all jobs should have the same performance.

Others: Note that

• the variance between jobs, even of the same player skill level, vary based on that shared skill level and on the particulars of a given fight (even if far less now than was the case in older expansions),
  
  
• that it is therefore impossible to balance all jobs for all fights for all players, and
  
  
• that it would take little adjustment for the benefit of lower performing jobs' place among the 75th+ percentiles to then simply push out beneath that point other jobs that are harder to learn and therefore would be disproportionately more affected by those relative nerfs.

Your claim: That shouldn't matter; the jobs should be balanced even for the top. If someone wants to do more for the same reward, their love of the job should be sufficient. No exceptions, no caveats, no matter the imbalances elsewhere.

Others: Then you're effectively balancing for striking dummies, not content.

Does that explain how that reasoning ensued? You appear to have been the first to conflate practical balancing with results only relevant to balancing done on-paper or for the top 1% alone. That's why the two ends of responses are mixing.

especially if that difference is high as 11%

The gap between the Warrior and Dark Knight, your examples, are at most 1.8%. At the median, just 0.56%.

And that doesn't even account for what the Warrior is bringing extra to the table: a raid miti that is better in any situation in which players would not have otherwise died twice over from specifically magic damage, and some 25% more combined mitigation and effective self-healing.


Your "11%" gap doesn't appear the 99th percentile and Maximum, wherein no one chasing a generally decent parse (e.g., competing with more than just their own job) is going to be playing an underperforming job anyways. You would be, I'd assume, among that "anyone with a functioning brain," so why are you knowing using a sample biased by a negative feedback loop?

Look instead to, say, the 90th percentile, wherein the greatest extremes are 7.8% apart, and the next rung in, a mere 5.5%.

Note also that the lowest performing job above that percentile isn't even always the lowest performing below; a better indicator of the general health imbalance is instead simply whether their are different "tiers" of jobs (visible from any clefts/cliffs in their bars as you move up or down the percentiles) and whether the lowest performing jobs at the top end can shuffle into higher positions at the lower end.

At present, there is a cleft and the lowest performers (barring a couple outlying extremely skilled Bards) never escape that general position, only jostling among their own (just as the higher tier does). That, especially as complemented by viewing what else each job brings to the table, is a much better framework by which to identify the problem than blanket diagnostics like "all should have the same DPS," when they do not have the same complexity, vulnerabilities, nor degree of utility.

Tl;dr: Yes, the lowest performers should be buffed slightly, but for pragmatic reasons -- the ability of a typical player to play what they want. Because different jobs bring different degrees of utility and reliability, their likely performance would have to be similarly varied for tuning to maximize player choice, rather than simply worsening balance for the vast majority of players.