Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[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.