Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Lyth]

Players are always going to be dissatisfied with the numbers. It doesn't matter if the difference is 50 dps or 500, players are affected psychologically by the knowledge that they're at a 'disadvantage', however slight. That's why having the developers explain their rationale for balance is always important. I think claims like 'jobs are balanced based on difficulty' or 'jobs are balanced based off of access to utility actions like Raise' is going to cause more rancor in the long run, because you know that you'll perpetually be at a disadvantage no matter what you do simply because you picked the wrong job. But if they come out and say hey, jobs in a given role (tank/healer/dps) will be balanced based off of damage adjusted for raid buffs (read: rDPS) and we'll find a way to make you feel good about the utility part of your toolkits whatever it is, most people will be content about that. Perception of fairness is the most important thing, and you do that by setting expectations.

If you want to create a higher-order model of rDPS that accounts for the benefit gained on average by lining up better with burst on a per buff basis (or other currently not-quantified benefits), go for it. rDPS itself was created because we realized that analyzing raw DPS was inadequate. If you can do it and explain your methods, players will get behind it. But designing the metric itself is the challenging part.

[Shurrikhan]

Players are always going to be dissatisfied with the numbers. It doesn't matter if the difference is 50 dps or 500, players are affected psychologically by the knowledge that they're at a 'disadvantage', however slight.

...So what? Are we supposed to just not bother with balance because of unhealthily obsessive small portion of the playerbase? A number as small as 50 dps out of the likes of 5-digit numbers wouldn't even hold consistent ranking in practice; it'd be bouncing about week to week, percentile to percentile.

More importantly, though, we can qualify a difference as significant or not on a basis more consistent than personal bias or unhealthy obsession. Not everything has to devolve into "my job first" politicking, especially in a game where most people simultaneously enjoy a majority of them.

I think claims like 'jobs are balanced based on difficulty' or 'jobs are balanced based off of access to utility actions like Raise' is going to cause more rancor in the long run, because you know that you'll perpetually be at a disadvantage no matter what you do simply because you picked the wrong job.

Except, if they were actually balanced based on difficulty, you'd see less difficult jobs performing better than higher performing jobs for a roughly equal portion of the playerbase (e.g., under the "50th percentile") across the content considered the balancing point (such as either Extremes or Savage Raids) while that content is still in progression. That would be a buff to the likes of SMN, MCH, and especially DNC, BRD, and RDM.

That balancing philosophy wouldn't necessarily be a problem. It's just that, if it's even been attempted, it's never quite come through. The game hasn't yet balanced around difficulty; it just takes it as something of a factor -- one among apparently multiple, if the process is even so deliberate. If the philosophy, though, were applied with visible consistency, though, we have no way if MCH being neck-and-neck with BLM at the 75th percentiles initially and falling back gradually to a tight balance around the 60th or so... would even be frowned upon so long as each felt like they were able to play whatever they want when the fights were still relevant. (We do not need to placate post-game competition like speedrun records at the expense of the larger community.)

(or other currently not-quantified benefits)

They're literally right there. Mouse over the rDPS cell in the party's fflogs spreadsheet and it has a breakdown of every buff's contribution towards (exploitation by) each receiving player. They're just what rDPS specifically removes in order, specifically, to make comparisons between players/runs of the same job across differing compositions (while very obviously failing to account for the contribution of each to a given party).

:: Note also that all buffers have the same cross-party comparison problems with rDPS that a SAM, BLM, and the like have with nDPS; if a DNC doesn't have a good exploiter in a given party, their rDPS is screwed.