Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Lyth]

aDPS was invented as a kneejerk response to resolving Heavensward and early Stormblood's number padding at a time when players were looking at raw DPS. The idea was to remove targeted buffs (Balance cards) from the equation so that you wouldn't just take turns artificially boosting your friends' raw DPS. It's just the old raw damage numbers that we looked at with Left Eye, Cards, and Dancer buffs removed. It's a bit dated, though. Ideally, you shouldn't permanently lose data in constructing a parameter, which is what you get for discarding certain buffs. This is not a parameter you use to understand raid dps or clear times. It's just built for the purposes of the numbers minigame that people love to play and obsess over so that they can brag to their friends.

You can make the argument that it helps you get a rough sense of your own personal alignment with two minute raid buffs between two encounters with the same group without actually quantifying what the difference in impact is in terms of total raid DPS. The problem is that, just like raw DPS, we know nothing about the buffs that were actually present in obtaining that result. It's subject to all the same padding business as before, except we've just discarded specific targeted buffs. And then there are BRD's rotational buffs to contend with, which are still included but don't relate to 'alignment'.

You're better off at looking at buffs on an individual level. Take Mug for example. You could measure the 'damage taken' generated by individual jobs under Mug across all runs with a NIN present and convert that to percentile data. If I was a NIN main that would be interesting to me, because I would know how much it actually benefitted me to be paired with a GNB vs. say a WAR. You could do that for every buff providing job and we'd be able to make our own judgement calls about what ideal raid group composition we want to be paired with. That would actually add a bit of transparency to all this, but I suspect the raw differences are going to be a lot less significant than people think when arranged by percentiles. At least not worth the extra wait of being picky in PF.

As for why players lock out jobs - it's based on emotion, not logic. If word gets out that a job is weak, players start feeling like they're held back when they hit those sub 1% wipes, especially on launch. So they just lock those jobs out. It doesn't matter whether that's the actual limiting factor or not. PF gets fairly ruthless in the first week or so before everyone loosens up. Again, it's a case of why perception is so important, and why this community tends to be self-destructive with its dps bartering. If the expectation is set that we're all going to be on a level playing field and you make the rDPS totals roughly similar, then that's all you really need. And then just tell the players who come in trying to demand rDPS advantages over others 'because reasons' to spend their time getting good at the game instead. The problem is this community, and the dev team's inability to put their foot down on this.

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Everything does devolve into 'my job first' politicking, though. There will always be a job that you level first. There will always be a job that you prog on. No matter how versatile of a player you are, there is always going to be a job that you're most comfortable on, because you've spent the most amount of time on it. That's also going to be the job whose depth you understand the best. There will always be that bias, unfortunately.

I think that the 'difficulty' conversation is so subjective. If you had an infinite amount of time to spend mastering the ins and outs of every job, then perhaps you could answer this question in a fair way. But often times 'easy' ends up being the same as 'unwanted'. The community tells you that a job is bad because it has a rDPS disadvantage. Players stop playing it and become out of touch with how it is optimized. Then it gets dismissed as easy. It's actually an awful place to be in, because you're investing effort into a job that is both unwanted and viewed as low skill. Has nothing to do with the actual gameplay of the job.

That's one of the reasons why I want to hear the dev team take back their comment about 'balancing jobs based on difficulty'. No, they've never actually done that. The most broken jobs have historically been very accessible, straightforward, and popular. These are not niche jobs where 1% of the playerbase retreats into a cave for ten years to emerge a master capable of playing it. The dev team only made that claim because that's what the forums have been shouting from the rooftops, and they hate standing up to the playerbase on anything. The dev team balance primarily by mollifying player complaints. Job advantages have historically been proportional to the number of players crying over them. I want to see them balance with an iron fist. Set an clear and transparent standard of fairness and refuse to waver from it. That will win significantly more respect.

Same reason why I want to see them actually talk about game and job direction. Show me what your vision for this game is. Don't just react to complaints.