Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
You've completely missed the point.

When you look at rDPS, you're looking at your own damage plus the additional benefit that your teammates happen to generate under your 16% uptime buff. That second part is really the only variable present. When you look at aDPS, your damage is influenced by the number of those 16% uptime buffs present. That's a major confounding variable. In order to eliminate it, you have to normalize your damage contribution such that you're looking at a 'per buff' gain. Again, aDPS isn't telling you what you think it's telling you, and really only has meaning in the context of two runs with the same group.

The parameter of interest is 'raid clear time', which is directly correlated to 'total raid dps'. The only individual parameter that we can currently analyze in this manner for balance purposes is rDPS, because it shows you individual contributions. If you want to refine that model further, you need to actually quantify what the dps benefit is for having that additional burst under buffs. Which has to be done on a per buff basis. No parameter that we have currently does that.
This isn't about total raid damage, this is about how well PLD takes advantage of raid buffs.

This has been said already, but I will say it again. If you were to judge PLD solely on their rDPS, then, in order to maximise it, the PLD would have to do a 'sub optimal' rotation. If we were instead to look at a PLD's aDPS, by doing the optimal thing they will increase it and because they are connected, it will increase the rDPS of the party as a whole, however, the PLD's personal rDPS will show it to be lower.

This is the whole point. rDPS is NOT the whole picture. You have to use the other metrics to dig deeper to see what is actually going on.