Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Lyth]

I think the reason why the culture developed a bit differently over here is because of smaller raid sizes, ease with which you can swap jobs, and ease with which you can rerun the fights multiple times without having to clear trash packs. So you finish the tier, your WHM swaps to AST and takes turns padding everyone individually with Balance cards. I think it eventually reached a point where it was sufficiently prevalent that the numbers themselves lost their value and everyone started to find them a bit silly. The new parameters were necessary for them to stay relevant in this game.

Numbers are only useful if you know how to critically evaluate them, same as always.

[ForsakenRoe]

As I said, not much thought was put in (typed while waiting for respawn in PVP). But Speed doesnt exist as a raidbuff (only personal) since everyone complained about Arrow, and Crit Bonus doesn't exist, only Rate (which then becomes flat bonus damage if Rate hits 100%). And most buffs are just flat damage, to my knowledge only Litany and Chain are 'increase crit rate of team' buffs, well I suppose there's that one song on BRD too but that's super passive. Maybe tuning the raidbuffs so that it's incentivized to bring a good balance of 'crit buffers' and 'flat damage buffers' could be interesting? A Crit buffer, a Damage buffer, a Selfish DPS to take advantage, and idk a BRD to be the 'allrounder' buffing in a variety of ways, but not by as much, until 2min where they're Flat damage (Coda) and DHit buff (Battle Voice). Does anyone else buff DHit?

[Shurrikhan]

As I said, not much thought was put in (typed while waiting for respawn in PVP).

All good; of course. Just mentioning because it was briefly talked to death, coming from even those who had considerably more time to think it over.

But Speed doesnt exist as a raidbuff (only personal) since everyone complained about Arrow, and Crit Bonus doesn't exist, only Rate (which then becomes flat bonus damage if Rate hits 100%). And most buffs are just flat damage, to my knowledge only Litany and Chain are 'increase crit rate of team' buffs, well I suppose there's that one song on BRD too but that's super passive. Maybe tuning the raidbuffs so that it's incentivized to bring a good balance of 'crit buffers' and 'flat damage buffers' could be interesting? A Crit buffer, a Damage buffer, a Selfish DPS to take advantage, and idk a BRD to be the 'allrounder' buffing in a variety of ways, but not by as much, until 2min where they're Flat damage (Coda) and DHit buff (Battle Voice). Does anyone else buff DHit?

My thinking here is...

1. Sure, there aren't that many buff types now, largely because we've never been given a good way to handle tiers of Skill/Spell Speed, but... lack of diversity in the effects of raid buffs has been a soft but consistent complaint over the last few years. Given that, it's worth being a bit more future-proofing, no?

2. The spotlight placed on anti-synergies, especially where new and therefore far more put on display, tends to be outsized. While the difference between additive and multiplicative buffs would be utterly insignificant in practice (even if the varying forms were somehow accounted for), it might not be so insignificant [as in, is at least infinitesimally small] as to have comps say "We already have Embolden, so we don't want Monk or Bard," (since their damage buffs would stack additively while all else, including even Mug's Vulnerability Up, would still be multiplicative).

3. Finally, assuming we could make the rest scale appropriately (e.g., each buff after the first has its value multiplied by [A]/[A+B] where [A] is the sum of present direct or indirect damage multiplication and [B] is the new buff, such that a damage bonus of 5% atop a damage bonus of 5% would be multiplied by .9545, to a net product of 110% damage), that balance, too, would require not only additional computational load but also that each job benefit equally from DHit and Crit to not screw over Crit/DHit buffs when cast later (or jobs with poor Crit/DHit synergies if it's cast late). That... could be a skill ceiling component of interest, but given how immediately the damage will roll after the first drops, it'd likely seem more finnicky than complex. And again, outsized spotlighting on whoever loses out in that.

In short, it seems like a lot of work for no discernable effect. You stack raid buffs because all the oGCD attacks and such are going off at that time; that they happen to benefit from multiplicity is a drop in the ocean by comparison.

[Melethron123]

the logic of "you'll never be able to perform as well as someone else unless you quit the job you enjoy because the devs arbitrarily decided your job should have fewer buttons and therefore made your damage significantly lower on purpose" is just completely asinine. if you want a subjective measure of difficulty to be determinant on how much damage someone is able to deal, then make all jobs equally as difficult and the players choose whether or not they want to press all their buttons and deal all that damage.

a DRK who thinks their rotation is too hard is free to never press shadowbringer, salted earth and carve and split
a WAR who wants to deal more damage has literally no option other than "play another job"

[Lyth]

When aDPS is looked at from the standpoint of 'percentiles', there is no consideration given to what group compositions were used to attain said percentiles. The result is completely meaningless. The number has no value whatsoever unless you're making a comparison of two runs with the same group.

Unless you're looking at percentile data in the context of the damage generated under individual raid buffs organized by percentile data (Mug, Arcane Circle, and so on), you cannot comment on a job doing 'X' more damage due to contributed DPS.

[Shurrikhan]

rDPS provides a poor comparison between exploiters, always, because it literally leaves their essential teamplay component out of the equation. aDPS provides a poor comparison of buffers, because it leaves their essential teamplay component out of their equation.

If two jobs who always have more aDPS than rDPS have the same rDPS (others are more dependent on them than they are on others for rDPS -- so, an exploiter), probe further at their aDPS; you're not done yet.

Then you can say a NIN benefits by X rDPS by virtue of having a GNB present instead of a PLD, or a NIN benefits Y rDPS by virtue of having a SAM present instead of a DRG. It's a much more effective method of analysis rather than looking at a parameter that is completely meaningless without knowing the composition in which it was generated in.

The same result, from the opposite direction, is doable already, so long as one is cool with plugging numbers for a while. But both your suggested approach and that would require multiple steps until you find a way to fairly balance who gets credit for exploiting a buff; only then could you form a single metric.

In your case, though, by your logic, you'd need each buffers' run to have exploiters of equal or near-equal percentile for a fair test of exploitation; if you can't compare aDPS against (smaller / less impactful) deviations in compositions even when averaged over some 30,000 parses, why would you want data on ability exploitation that'd potential compare a 99th percentile GNB's exploitation of Chain Strategem among 5 other raid buffs to that of 9th percentile DRK's with only two other raid buffs?

Or, heck, if we're comparing theoretical bests anyways, just look at potency maps, where there is no deviation to be had at all.

When aDPS is looked at from the standpoint of 'percentiles', there is no consideration given to what group compositions were used to attain said percentiles. The result is completely meaningless.

When any form of DPS metric, even rDPS, is looked at from the standpoint of 'percentiles', there is no consideration of party mistakes (which badly punish buffers' rDPS), buff synergy, crit rates, etc. Why would the result not likewise be meaningless then?

If a dominant composition trends across a percentile, consider the rest outliers, and compare what you can within in. Then drop to the next percentile in which the pool of jobs expands and compare there. Repeat.

Regardless, you're going to find the same very easy means of comparisons: you can take the party logs (such that the composition is obviously identical) where the jobs you want to compare of similar percentile, and look at the difference between rDPS and aDPS of those jobs.

That is their degree of exploitation, and it shows a significant difference between DRK's and others' (especially PLD/WAR) contribution to the party's total (r)DPS. Whether that's worth doing anything about is a different story. I'm okay with DRK being the damage-focused mad-lad, so long as the other tanks offered something of reasonable equal value. I don't particularly care that PLD is not desirable for post-content speedruns. If that's to be the case, though, I want it to be at least as desirable as DRK (up to a small advantage over the likes of DRK, assuming the party doesn't specifically need its damage carried) in progression.

Now, that may require bringing additional depth to encounters. But there's been anything mutually exclusive between that, kit depth, kit parity, or anything else.

[Payadopa]

It's not that the dev team particularly care about speedrunning. It's the impact that it has on the community's perceptions. The questions that everyone asks when starting a new MMO is: Which job should I pick? What's good? Players scrutinize what is happening at the top. Oh, my job is 50 dps behind the others at the 99th percentile and isn't being commonly used in the speedruns that I've looked at. It must be broken. And then they proceed to lose thousands of potency on lost uptime or basic rotational mistakes. It's not the job holding you back. It's you.

I think there's eventually going to be a point where you have to evaluate whether you want this to be a team game or not. We took away boss movement and positioning from tanks because we can't trust them to not spin the boss. We took away add spawns because we can't trust the tanks to pick them up. We gave everyone self-heals, mitigation, and raises because we can't trust the healers. We made hitboxes span the arena and removed positionals because we can't trust melee to press TN. We made all the casters into ranged dps because we can't trust them to know how to slidecast. And we never trusted the ranged dps to begin with. It's really okay to fail because someone else messed up. You'll do it yourself. Just dust yourself off and go again.

I agree. I don't think the game can afford to loose even more team play. The vocal minority is so afraid to be hindered by someone else and the perceived solution seems to be to take even more interplay away. With that mentality why do people even play an MMO in the first place? How about people play a single player game instead and let the rest of us have job synergy and identity.

And on top of that we already lost like I don't know how many RPG mechanics. Stats are bland, gearing is boring, only raw DPS matters, elements are only for looks, TP management is gone, the MP bar might as well go etc.

[Gserpent]

I agree. I don't think the game can afford to loose even more team play. The vocal minority is so afraid to be hindered by someone else and the perceived solution seems to be to take even more interplay away. With that mentality why do people even play an MMO in the first place? How about people play a single player game instead and let the rest of us have job synergy and identity.

And on top of that we already lost like I don't know how many RPG mechanics. Stats are bland, gearing is boring, only raw DPS matters, elements are only for looks, TP management is gone, the MP bar might as well go etc.

Job synergy and identity was already being dialed back in ShB and it's even more pronounced in EW. "Synergy" is just another way of saying "every raid has the same expected group buffs through homogenization" and "identity" is verboten in a game where DPS is literally the only metric that's worth a damn, and therefore everyone must do identical DPS within a point or two of each other.

[Melethron123]

I agree. I don't think the game can afford to loose even more team play. The vocal minority is so afraid to be hindered by someone else and the perceived solution seems to be to take even more interplay away. With that mentality why do people even play an MMO in the first place? How about people play a single player game instead and let the rest of us have job synergy and identity.

And on top of that we already lost like I don't know how many RPG mechanics. Stats are bland, gearing is boring, only raw DPS matters, elements are only for looks, TP management is gone, the MP bar might as well go etc.

with that mentality why do you play an mmo instead of a moba? job identity and individually is much more than "what buttons you press". DRK identity is being an edgy emolord, warrior identity is being a raging berserker, samurai identity is doing anime poses, etc

didn't the devs themselves say this is a "ff game first and mmo second" (i heard it from someone but i'm not sure if it's true)

[Gserpent]

with that mentality why do you play an mmo instead of a moba? job identity and individually is much more than "what buttons you press". DRK identity is being an edgy emolord, warrior identity is being a raging berserker, samurai identity is doing anime poses, etc

didn't the devs themselves say this is a "ff game first and mmo second" (i heard it from someone but i'm not sure if it's true)

If they said that, it must've been several years ago. I think you could argue that was true in ARR and HW, but I think after Gordias they got so scared of repeating that disaster that they swapped it to "MMO first, FF after."

That, or they're assuming that MSQ is literally the only thing that matters. But idk if I'd even call it an "FF game" from that standpoint, either... most FF's aren't just glorified visual novels. You know? They were never the hardest or most nuanced games, absent self-imposed challenge runs, but the MSQ is now so safe and steamrolled that it really is basically just a visual novel with extra steps.