Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Shurrikhan]

(Initial reply obsolete; near simultaneous posting.)

You've completely missed the point.

No, you just seem to clearly not be reading fully reading it.

First, there are parses enough that we have reliable sample across compositions, effectively normalizing it the matter to again give a range with its various quartiles just as we would if we went through these various logs and created a spreadsheet accordingly.

Second, you can see this for yourself on any individual parse, or history of parses through a single static, right on fflogs, just by mousing over the rDPS cell; it provides a complete breakdown.

Take, for instance, the highest PLD parse in the game for Agdistis. That PLD would seem to have blown his 98th percentile DRK co-tank out of the water, dealing 4.3% more raw DPS and 6.1% more rDPS than the DRK.

Now, we cannot draw a fair comparison as to overall performance possible between jobs from that single log --due to confounding variables in gear and skill-- but we can look at their difference in rDPS granted to others relative to their own. The PLD granted 199.4 rDPS to his party through raid buff exploitation. The DRK, despite falling 2 percentiles lower, granted 318.0 rDPS.

In short, despite the lower percentile the DRK also brought to the table 118.6 more rDPS to his party through buff exploitation than did the PLD, all of which was not shown whatsoever in his individual parse despite increasing the party's total DPS. If we were to plug that back in, their rDPS would, be only 4.4% apart, not 6.1%.

Again, those who better exploit their raid buffs bring additional value to the party not accounted for under individual rDPS. Here is one of those cases where "rDPS parity" actually wouldn't be enough for real parity, so long as one job provides less rDPS to its buffers than another would.

Let's step back and look at the reason for this discussion in the first place. The tanks are currently balanced when you look at rDPS. But the underlying claim here is that certain tanks ought to do more rDPS than others to offset the fact that less of their damage contribution occurs under buffs, which then impacts the rDPS of the buff providers. In order to evaluate that claim, you need to be able to quantify exactly what that rDPS offset should be, right? Otherwise this is all just feelycraft.

Precisely that. As for an appropriate rDPS offset, there are a few factors worth considering:

1. Would the community be able not to go apeshit the moment one job has an rDPS lead after being promised parity, since it wouldn't perfectly match with their current at-a-glance, single-chart-only view of balance as seen through individual rDPS?
   (Else, we'll need to have some degree of imbalance still just because the still-balanced choices will be considered underpowered, and across the larger playerbase... the purpose of balance is more on the perception of one's ability to play whatever they like -- within the obvious limits of affinity/differences in specific gear, etc.)
   
   
2. How much should we accept/allow that chasing 100th percentile parses will require meta comps?
   
   
3. Let's pretend we could come up with some sort of rDPS-other hybrid that fairly tracks buff exploitation? How much credit would that metric give its exploiter?¹

¹ In the end, being able to view the real contribution a particular job gives to a party with a single metric is ideal; it's just that current rDPS metrics aren't able to meet that purpose. If we could design something that would, improving on rDPS's intent, provide a real at-a-glance indicator of how much a job brings to a party, perfect. If not, though, we're going to have to accept that figuring out that contribution won't be one-and-done.

At a rough guess, that metric might have players retain half the effect of raid buffs received, effectively just averaging their current rDPS and nDPS. I don't know. I can't promise you a perfect solution off the cuff; if I could, it'd probably already be in use.