The "Real DPS" Project

FF Logs
1

One of my major goals for FFLogs in the future is to add in a new mode of viewing that attributes abilities that buff damage and healing to the person who actually applied those buffs. This means that the extra damage people did during Balance or Foe Requiem, for example, would be attributed to the AST or the BRD.

The goal of this project is to add a new way of viewing DPS (complete with ranks and all stars) that allows you to truly compare your DPS without having to worry about comp. It would live side by side with the existing rankings, so that people can still have fun seeing how high they can push personal DPS with buff cheesing. :slight_smile:

With this goal in mind, I need the community’s help to make it happen. What I need to identify is

(1) All the abilities that provide any kind of boost TO OTHER PLAYERS, whether it’s magic, slashing damage, piercing, etc., and the name of the corresponding buff or debuff.
(2) Whether or not the buff/debuff stacks. If it’s exclusive with other buffs/debuffs besides itself, I need to know that too.
(3) How much of a DPS/HPS boost it is giving.

Another thing that I need to work out is what to do when you bring two of the same class. In that case one person’s debuff wins, so I need to work out how to treat that fairly. Obviously when multiple targets are up, two of the same class really can use their debuffs on separate targets, so it’s a matter of understanding when that is not possible and presumably fully crediting both members of that class for the extra damage? Not sure.

2 Likes
2

Is fflogs able to track the buffs accurately enough?
We have noticed fflogs reports about The Balance uptime are often wrong. I have seen really wrong durations, wrong start times (an AOE balance shown starting at the same time for all but one player) and such. If you are not aware of this I can provide examples next time I notice.

Are you aware of AST card mechanics?
The potency of cards like The Balance varies depending on prior cards that may be held. For example it can be +20-30% damage to one person or +10% to multiple. I am not sure the log is telling you enough to know which, so you might have to remember the AST’s prior card actions. Then there are also speed boost buffs like The Arrow (+5-15%) and SCH’s Fey Wind (3%) whose DPS increase is not realistically possible to quantify.

The idea of Real DPS sounds really hard to get right! :slight_smile:

If the goal is mainly to separate out faked ranks, which has a lot of value to the community, maybe it can be done more simply by some rules about party composition (no duplicate buff givers) and personal AST buffs given. It’s not perfect, but does a lot to discourage easy rank faking.

For example you see the people go in with 2 MCH 2 NIN 2 AST feeding personal balances to one player, then repeat. Even casual runs skew the ranks badly, as I found recently with my derpy alt getting personal card spam. These are easily recognized.

3

Here’s a list of DPS buffs I came up with during maintenance. From my previous experience and testing most buffs will overwrite each other if 2 people of the same job are applying them, so the latest person to apply it will be the one buffing at that point.

Name: Storm’s Eye
Effect: 10% Slashing Resist Down
Debuff Name: Storm’s Eye
Stacking: Cannot be stacked. Does not stack with Dancing Edge, lastest applied will overwrite

Name: Dragon Kick
Effect: 10% Blunt Resist Down
Debuff Name: Dragon Kick
Stacking: Cannot be stacked.

Name: Disembowel
Effect: 10% Piercing Resist Down
Debuff Name: Disembowel
Stacking: Cannot be stacked

Name: Battle Litany
Effect: 15% Critical Rate Up
Buff Name: Battle Litany
Stacking: Cannot be stacked

Name: Dancing Edge
Effect: 10% Slashing Resist Down
Debuff Name: Dancing Edge
Stacking: Cannot be stacked. Does not stack with Storm’s Eye, lastest applied will overwrite

Name: Trick Attack
Effect: 10% damage taken increase
Debuff Name: Vulnerability Up
Stacking: Cannot be stacked.

Name: Hypercharge (from Rook Autoturret)
Effect: 10% physical damage taken increase
Debuff Name: Physical Vulnerability Up
Stacking: Cannot be stacked

Name: Hypercharge (from Bishop Autoturret)
Effect: 10% magical damage taken increase
Debuff Name: Magical Vulnerability Up
Stacking: Cannot be stacked

Name: Foe Requiem
Effect: Reduces enemy magic resistance by 10%
Debuff Name: Foe Requiem
Stacking: Cannot be stacked

Name: Foe Requiem (while Battle Voice is active)
Effect: Reduces enemy magic resistance by 20%
Debuff Name: Foe Reqiuem
Stacking: Cannot be stacked

Name: Fey Wind (from Selene)
Effect: Increases attack speed by 3%
Buff Name: Fey Wind
Stacking: Cannot be stacked

Name: The Balance
Effect: Increases damage dealt by 20%
Buff Name: The Balance
Stacking: Cannot be stacked. Cannot be stacked with The Arrow, The Spear, The Bole, The Ewer, The Spire, the latest applied effect will overwrite the previous one.

Name: The Balance (buffed by Enhanced Royal Road)
Effect: Increases damage dealt by 30%
Buff Name: The Balance
Stacking: Cannot be stacked. Cannot be stacked with The Arrow, The Spear, The Bole, The Ewer, The Spire, the latest applied effect will overwrite the previous one.

Name: The Balance (buffed by Extended Royal Road)
Effect: Increases damage dealt by 20%
Buff Name: The Balance
Stacking: Cannot be stacked. Cannot be stacked with The Arrow, The Spear, The Bole, The Ewer, The Spire, the latest applied effect will overwrite the previous one.

Name: The Balance (buffed by Expanded Royal Road)
Effect: Increases damage dealt by 10%
Buff Name: The Balance
Stacking: Cannot be stacked. Cannot be stacked with The Arrow, The Spear, The Bole, The Ewer, The Spire, the latest applied effect will overwrite the previous one.

Name: The Arrow
Effect: Increases attack speed by 10%
Buff Name: The Arrow
Stacking: Cannot be stacked. Cannot be stacked with The Balance, The Spear, The Bole, The Ewer, The Spire, the latest applied effect will overwrite the previous one.

Name: The Arrow (buffed by Enhanced Royal Road)
Effect: Increases Attack Speed by 15%
Buff Name: The Arrow
Stacking: Cannot be stacked. Cannot be stacked with The Balance, The Spear, The Bole, The Ewer, The Spire, the latest applied effect will overwrite the previous one.

Name: The Arrow (buffed by Extended Royal Road)
Effect: Increases Attack Speed by 10%
Buff Name: The Arrow
Stacking: Cannot be stacked. Cannot be stacked with The Balance, The Spear, The Bole, The Ewer, The Spire, the latest applied effect will overwrite the previous one.

The Arrow (buffed by Expanded Royal Road)
Effect: Increases Attack Speed by 5%
Buff Name: The Arrow
Stacking: Cannot be stacked. Cannot be stacked with The Balance, The Spear, The Bole, The Ewer, The Spire, the latest applied effect will overwrite the previous one.

Hope this info helps you out!

1 Like
4

The spear can also cause a secondhand DPS increasing.
Name: The Spear
Effect: Reduce ability recast time of a party member by 20s
duration: 20s
Can be affected by Royal Road

And you may also be aware that there are 2 AST abilities that extend the buff time, would cause calculation problems maybe.
Name: Time Dilation
Effect: Extend the duration of beneficial effects you cast on a party member by 15 seconds.
Name: Celestial Opposition
Effect: Extend the duration of beneficial effects on self and party members by 10 seconds.

5

Name: Fey Illumination
Effect: 20% Healing increase (Same effect as divine seal for example)
Debuff Name: Fey Illumination
Stacking: Cannot be stacked, will overwrite. (But 2 scholars in a group is super rare anyway)

6

But couldn’t a Bard just go in with 3 casters and 2 healers and get all the bonus DPS from Foe Requiem and abuse the system in a similar way? Or a MCH with 3 MNKs for maximum Hypercharge inflation?

7

If this project is successful, it’d be amazing. It would really capture the essence of what everyone wants FFLogs to be, and help hundreds of players better themselves and have a more enjoyable raiding experience.

It’s easy for players to be disheartened when they see their server competitor with 70% single target balance uptime, or a caster to not even want to bother trying as they see their competitors with double bard while they’re stuck with a machinist. With an efficient “Real DPS” system, Players are disillusioned by how hard they’re carried by external boosts, and emboldened by the realization that their damage is their own. It would have a HUGE healthy meta-changing effect on this game.

That said, external DPS buffs are only half of the problem. There will always be ways to cheese to some extent, but if you’re to truly create a competitive nature for this “Real Dps” project there are other elements to be looked at.

  1. Make DPS on certain adds not count. Your patch for the first raid tier on Faust to not count add damage in the overall parse was a very helpful change. Groups had been intentionally killing the boss slower so more adds would spawn and a summoner or whoever could just sit here and AOE all day, padding nigh endlessly. After adds were made not to count however, groups focus more on speed clears (faster clears often means better dps) and team synergy, which is how it SHOULD be.

To enforce these changes unto other fights would be drastically helpful as well, as it is still a problem in many other fights.

For examples:

A5 - Groups slowing down dps drastically so one person can could dps on a bunch of low health Yorn Pigs that spawn near the end of the fight (that no good group ever sees without intentionally slowing down). It was VERY hard to legitimately beat “pig padders” on this fight until groups really started pushing faster speed clears, but even then the top records remained in the hands of the pig padders. Very unfun.

A6 - People hitting Plasma Beta orbs during intermission which does nothing to help the fight. Not anywhere near as bad as A5, but still an example of useless dps to pad meters at the cost of overall group efficiency.

A9 - Any add damage aside from the spawned Faust is strictly padding for most geared groups, as they can be easily cleaved down by people just targeting the boss. At the moment, there are numerous instances where groups intentionally avoid attacking the adds so one person can get more attacks/dot ticks than would normally be necessary or efficient. “Nobody attack the adds but so and so they can get three times as many doom spikes on 8+ targets for an extended periods of time for an op parse.” etc

A10 - There are some adds that spawn in the middle of the fight that DO need to be killed, but there’s no need to count them on a competitive ranking since they’d be easily exploitable again with the “save them for one person” strat.

A12 - The start of add phase where there are 9 adds that spawn. Again, we see the easily exploitable strategy of everyone else holding back so one person can get more potency ticks/attacks on multiple targets.

The Point - To make things competitive, scenarios in which groups deliberately play inefficiently for the sake of one person must be mitigated as much as possible. In A12 for example, a monk who saves Perfect Balance or a Summoner who saves Raging Strikes and all their DPS cooldowns for wasteful add padding while their group /afks should not be the untouchable kings of the leaderboards over those who can’t manipulate their groups to do the same.

A ranking board where only damage to Alexander Prime would be far more interesting, as it provides incentives for groups to kill the fight as quickly and efficiently as possible instead of slowing down for cheese and artificial inflation. There would be some hitches, like people who go in timegate get screwed (can’t hit boss), but I’m certain there is a system that can help that as well for those who aren’t satisfied with taking turns. To be fair though, nobody who goes in the timegate is going to be top of their class anyway.

I know you might think “Doesn’t this undermine the strengths of AOE classes in favor of a single target meta?”, and yes, you’re right to some extent. Still, the unfortunate truth is that there is no way to have a competitive AOE meta because it’s just so exploitative. Fortunately, unlike WoW, all DPS classes in FFXIV have good single target damage. Even Summoner, a class with the best AOE and arguably lowest single target damage, can still top meters in one target fights because of their strengths of mobility and range.

While this is a decent idea on paper, it still seems somewhat exploitable. For AST, the damage contribution from balance relies more on their group than themselves, so it really wouldn’t make their DPS about their own performance. A skilled Ast with high individual dps and a mediocre party will likely still be crushed by a mediocre AST who can spread balances on an OP party.

The BRD implementation is a larger example of this. A Bard giving Foes to a 2 caster party (which is a terrible comp, but would most certainly be ran for cheese) will always beat a BRD with 1 caster, and so on.

It certainly WOULD be interesting to SEE this damage contribution, but to have it added to the individuals parse would likely be a step in the wrong direction.

That’s all I can think of for now, but I’m really thankful to you Kihra for taking the time to consider how to improve this glorious program. My raid team loves and hates it at times, but it keeps us playing through all the content draughts. This tier has been especially painful though with the balance card buff, as it makes it harder to enjoy FFLogs when our competitors have 70% uptime on a 30% damage external buff. We don’t like wasting time on stuff like that (it’s far better for raid dps and speed to spread the buff to the party instead of one person), and would rather just continue working on our speed clears.

If this “True DPS” ranking were to ever be implemented fully and correctly, we could do speed runs WHILE individually competing on DPS leaderboards, and that would just be the dream.

Much luck, sorry for the wall of text. Raiders are pretty passionate about this kind of stuff though.

8

The other idea would be to make the damage from buffs not count towards anyone’s parse. I’d need to think that through a bit.

9

I can’t speak for most competitive raiders, but I would very much think that the majority would like that.

Buff damage would still be a very interesting and beneficial stat to see though, finding out what comps contribute the most raid dps and how.

Either way, sounds like a lot of work. Wish I could help. :confused:

10

Seems like The Arrow, The Spear, Fey Wind, and then AST “buff extension” are the most problematic ones to deal with.

11

This is a great idea. A problem you will run into is that no matter what you do there will always be some sort of cheesing. Though, the buff to AST balance this patch made it far more of an issue than in the past.

While it makes sense to attribute buff damage to the buff provider, as mentioned above BRDs could cheese by using foes in a party full with casters. Or a WAR could cheese by applying the slashing buff for 4 NINs.

I think in the case of buffs that only affect certain classes it would be best to completely negate the benefits provided. To buffs that can apply to all classes, I.e. Trick attack, balance, hyper charge, etc. I think giving that damage to the user would make sense. That being said, having the slashing or piercing buffs active for classes that can self-apply (because it is part of their rotation) should still count for their own dps, but not for the classes that cannot, like BRD/MCH, PLD/DRK.

TLDR Recommendation:
All direct dps buffs that can apply to all classes = dps added to buff user
Buffs that only apply to certain classes = dps not counted (can’t think of any other than foes)
Piercing, slashing, blunt buffs = keep the same as now but do not factor into dps of classes that cant self-apply

Haste/crit buffs just keep the same unless you can figure out a way to calculate what they add.

EDIT: on second thought, if the goal of this is to present a more accurate representation of individual player skill then it would be probably be best if you negated all dps provided thru buffs to other players

13

Just the most obvious. If you were intent to be thorough you would want to account for indirect buffs like…

A Warrior keeping their slashing debuff up (Storm’s Eye) increases a Ninja’s DPS significantly by allowing them to use higher potency moves instead of applying their own slashing debuff (Dancing Edge) which wouldn’t stack. Or having two ninjas. A second Monk can buff Monk similar by keeping the blunt debuff up for them. Hard to measure the actual DPS increase from rotation changes.

Bard has a skill that prevents a Warrior from being pacified, which a Japanese player has shown to be a DPS increase roughly the same as having Hypercharge on average, but also difficult to quantify in a log.

Dragoon’s Battle Litany increases critical hit chance for everybody in range by 15% for 20 seconds. I think it worked out to be ~8-9% DPS increase on average (I’m not sure everybody realizes how great litany is), but again is difficult to quantify in a log.

Maybe you’ll ignore such indirect buffs … but then is it “real dps”?
Starts to be a little unfair to different jobs which you subtract out and which you don’t.

A lot of people would be happy if you only delt with The Balance in rankings. :stuck_out_tongue:
It’s easily abusable and silly for card luck to influence ranks so much anyway.

Suppose that Battle Voice (+20%) and Balance (+20%) are both up. The damage stacks multiplicatively so you get an extra 4% damage from them combined. I wonder who gets credit for that? :slight_smile:

It would be fun to see a breakdown by buff source though, even if it’s just for the direct buffs and not entirely accurate.

14

There is already an option for this. It’s on the top left of the rankings table, “Damage to Bosses”.
People can fluff the other way though by ignoring adds to stay on the boss in certain fights though.
I’m not sure it’s worth getting too petty over either way.

15

In Group Based content it’ll be almost impossible to make a completely fair system. Even if Real DPS works absolutely perfect, there’s still methods of abuse, as someone pointed out, take a MCH with 3 MNK, take a BRD with 3 Caster. We already have a perfectly working group comparison ranking - Guild Speed, any time you waste boosting someone’s DPS is lost Guild Speed time, any time you lose by feeding someone solo Balances rather than getting the AOE ones out, is lost Guild Speed time. If you want a proper group by group comparison, just switch to Guild Speed already.

Damage to Bosses only (which we already have also) is again, exploitable and meaningless, and your examples are bad, whether or not you like they count to DPS, they have to count for DPS as it’s part of the fight and they need to die. If you start ignoring them, the top "FFlog"ers start ignoring adds and just stick to the bosses instead and let someone else deal with them, regardless if there job is good at AOE or not.

IMO - I’ve said it before, Ranking should default to Guild Speed, and have a personal DPS Ranking working off of Real DPS as an alternative ranking, kinda like the Dungeon Ranking do.

16

A system seeming difficult to implement fairly is a poor reason to not bother at all. Though I agree the suggested system of buffs being attributed to the caster is flawed in itself, as many have suggested even a system that just ignores balance would go a long way towards helping people feel competitive. The only DPS buff that comes even close in “cheese” or “exploitative” nature to single Balance is Foes for caster.

Not to ignore Astro cards, in particular Arrow, which are decent dps buffs in themselves. If Balance parses were to removed, they would surely be replaced with Arrow ones if there’s no way to mitigate their effects on logs as well. It would suck a little, and be far from a perfect system, but Arrows effect on DPS isn’t even half that of Balance for most classes. It would be at least a decent step in the right direction.

I agree that Guild speed is pretty awesome. It teaches us what group comps are strongest and encourages us to experiment and honestly adds months of replayability to the tiers. My raid group loves fighting for top 10 guild speed records, and usually end up with a couple top 5’s by the end of the tier. It’s a great system that’s very hard to exploit as it’s all about efficiency, so yes, we should be thankful for it. But GS and personal parses are apples and oranges.

Why does having one working ranking mean we should give up on another? Not only that, but the fact of the matter is that MOST people don’t even look at Guild Speed because Individual parses are just more fun and interesting to those without world class groups capable of fighting for top ten (likely 99% of FFlog users, feel free to make your own estimate but it’s obviously the mass majority). If we end up with one perfect system and one almost perfect system at the end of the day to hold us over between raid tier draughts, that would be far better than just leaving things as ridiculous as they are now.

It seems as if you don’t have much experience with this raid tier. Yes, the adds have to die, but they’re so easy to kill in most fights that they simply die to cleave in geared groups (aka competitive fflogers). I’ll repeat my point again and give you an example:

“To make things competitive, scenarios in which groups deliberately play inefficiently for the sake of one person must be mitigated as much as possible. In A12 for example, a monk who saves Perfect Balance or a Summoner who saves Raging Strikes and all their DPS cooldowns for wasteful add padding while their group /afks should not be the untouchable kings of the leaderboards over those who can’t manipulate their groups to do the same.”

Here’s the current top DPS record for A9: FF Logs - Combat Analysis for FF

If you look at the damage done to targets, you can see literally every other raid member besides the summoner completely ignored adds so the summoner could get maximum dot tick and AOE cleave uptime on 9+ targets. Almost HALF of the summoner’s total damage is to adds. Looking at boss damage, the SMN is just barely not last.

Do you honestly think we should have a competitive ranking based on whomevers raid group can ignore adds while they pad the hardest? Should a person have to ask their party to afk during adds so they can get a good parse? A9 and A12 top records are a joke right now because of parses with one person saving all their cds and blowing up all over the adds while their group ignores them or in the case of A12, literally stand there and do nothing.

The top A12 parse is the same as A9, same guy too funnily enough:

https://www.fflogs.com/reports/K8NHLv3jY9WZFMVq#fight=3&type=damage-done

I can’t think of any fight this tier where someone could get a ridiculous untouchable parse because of hitting the boss and ignoring adds. How could only counting Boss damage be exploitative compared to this?

Faust was about as stupid as things are now for A9 and A12 because groups would just sit there and let Faust hit them while adds spawned so SMN could keep padding and padding. However, once add fluff stopped being counted, DPS that weren’t Summoners (best aoe padders) were allowed to compete. It was a great change.

Fast forward to now, we can see SMN quickly seizing complete control over A9 and A12 through the same methods. Why allow it?

Anywho, in closing, while all the little “Real Dps” adjustments like not counting Hypercharge, TA, Littany, etc damage boosts would be amazing (though it seems just too difficult to be possible), what’s really ruining the ranking boards right now are two things.

Add cheese and Balance. Fixing these things first would go a long long way towards getting people competitive again. A Lala can dream.

17

This sounds to me like the absolute worst solution possible. Rather than FFLogs being a tool for learning, you start to encourage players to quite literally play less efficiently in order to boost “muh fflogs”, causing the very thing Real DPS should be trying to fix.

[quote=“GTUmaru, post:16, topic:1730”]
MOST people don’t even look at Guild Speed because Individual parses are just more fun and interesting to those without world class groups capable of fighting for top ten (likely 99% of FFlog users, feel free to make your own estimate but it’s obviously the mass majority). [/quote]

99% of FFLogs users aren’t even here for any form of ranking in the first place, they’re here to see where they can do better. Mention “FFLogs All Star” points to anyone in-game and the vast majority will have no idea what you’re talking about even if they use FFLogs or have someone in their group using it.

Your “solution” doesn’t solve anything. This is what happens the day it changes, people figure out what is and is not counting as damage on fflogs and they have the player who wants to grow his FFLogs peen to ignore those adds. You just reverse the problem and don’t solve it. I would be all for a system which solves the problem but again, this isn’t a solution, it’s just the same problem.

If anything, in A12S for example, you cause more problems in that people who have to go through portals get there DPS fucked over since they’re literally unable to attack the boss for a good 50 seconds? Or do we then allow those adds to count towards DPS? But then all of those adds are the same in name as the previous add phase ones, fortunately FFLogs can differentiate them, so do we start to count those adds or not? But then again, even just going in is a DPS loss for the players going in thanks to the disconnect, the loading screen, and the little cutscene that plays inside once all adds are dead. The Faust comparison is bad and you know it’s bad and why its bad. Faust adds counting as DPS was absolutely pointless as the fight is designed so the adds aren’t supposed to die.

Like I said at the end of my original post, ranking should be defaulted to Guild Speed rather than personal DPS, then you absolutely would see more people care about it if that was the first ranking FFLogs shows to them.

18

This wouldn’t replace the normal DPS ranking. It would exist side by side. People who want to continue to enjoy seeing how much boosted DPS they can do will be able to do so. In other words, I don’t necessarily expect an alternative ranking system to change behavior. The goal would more be about trying to help raiders figure out how they really are stacking up with cheese effects removed (whether that means discounting adds during a certain phase, discounting buffs, etc.).

I think you’re ascribing too much power to the default view. Players will still strive for personal excellence (including getting boosts from other players as needed to achieve that).

19

I don’t disagree it sucks. Obviously, I’d love a system where Arrows didn’t count either, but you have to acknowledge the technological limitations. I can’t speak for Kihra though it seems he/she has yet to know how to approach it as well, but I have no idea how you would calibrate the overall parse number effects of a card that effects your attack speed.

Balance, however, seems to be straight potency addition that may be possible to detect. It’s also the biggest problem. This shouldn’t be approached in all or nothing terms, because even if we can’t get rid of all the evils, beating the biggest one is still a big victory in keeping rankings interesting.

Again, I don’t think we’re disagreeing here. However, because of the effects of our current cheese logged system, the populace comes in and looks at numbers and gets a terrible flawed view of “what’s good”. For example, one might look at the top A9 Summoner records and a SMN might think “wow I can’t get even close to 4k dps, I’m garbage” or “so I should save all my CDs for adds to do the most dmg” under the illusion that’s the best way to do the fight.

FFLogs becomes significantly less effective for people trying to learn when they see their class “role models” using ridiculously unorthodox methods to exploit an easily exploitable system. Fixing the biggest competitive flaws goes a long way to helping the casual player too.

I see your point, but your scaling is skewed. Picture a scale, with a completely fair system being level —. Where we are now with Add cheesers would be like putting a 40 pound weight on their side to the left. The scale is immovably titled in that direction, with those who hit the boss having no chance.

Now, if we were to try a boss damage system, the left weight would be gone and replaced with a 5 pound weight on the right (being very generous here). Yes, the scale is still tilted and no longer level. But it’s CLOSER to fairness.

Let me try a visual aid.

Add damage cheese -------------------- Totally Fair -----------------------------Boss only Cheese

XX…O…XX…

^ We are here …^ We could be here.
Swimming in cheese

The problem DOES go in the other direction, but much much less so. In a boss damage only system for A9, ignoring adds in favor of a single target rotation will not give you that much of a DPS boost for most classes. At worst, if your team comp doesn’t have the gear or cleave strong members, healers or one or two people might have to put in a little extra dps effort on them.

Viewing things in terms of all or nothing is very rarely the best option. I see what you’re saying, I really do, but what we differ on is that you insist on this idea of “if we can’t make it perfect right away, we shouldn’t change anything”, which I fundamentally disagree with. Very few systems in the world work like that. The only path to happy compromise is to make things as close as you can to fair, and go from there while accepting the limitations of yourself and the system.

Let me say first that in any given fight there is usually someone that has to bite the bullet for the sake of those aiming for a higher parse because of the fights inherent mechanics (not cheese mechanics). Handling bombs, hitting buttons, grabbing tethers, dropping meteors, you name it. In the current system, all timegate players know that they will never be top of their class while going in there, and they’re aware of the sacrifice.

I will also agree that an ignore add entirely system would indeed screw these people even harder. This could be a topic of discussion in itself, but there are a few things you aren’t considering.

For example, the adds DON’T have the same name. The first 9+ adds that people cheese on are called “Arrhidaeus’s Lanner”, and no other adds in the fight have that name. Removing damage on those adds alone would probably knock off half of the top 10 who are getting there by holding CDs from boss to use on adds while their group afks.

I agree timegate people shouldn’t be screwed over harder. If it’s possible, which it likely is, to not count Lanner’s while timegate adds can still count towards the overall parse, then that would be something that would make nearly everyone happy. Who would disagree? The people getting the dumb inflated parses? Is that the right crowd to cater to?

In the interest of having a competitive parse ranking, is there a difference between hitting adds that don’t have to die and centering your damage around adds that are dying anyway to your groups collective cleave? They both follow the same principle of superfluous damage for the sake of having a distinct advantage over those that are doing the fight sincerely.

We may have to differ in opinion here though. If you think the log examples I provided of the current top A9 and A12 parses (having a group cater to one person by doing nothing to adds while one person wails on them) is what the competitive spirit of FFLogs should be, then there’s nothing more to say. I don’t think it’s healthy, in fact, it’s down right toxic for the meta. I believe it’s easily remedied with a solution that has far more positive effects than negative.

20

I was going to make a new thread suggesting exactly this.

Balance should be subtracted from rankings.
The potency is too high and puts all ranks at the mercy of the AST’s luck and single-target faking.

Assuming Kihra can accurately subtract out Balance, the benefits are:

  1. Remove a significant RNG element from ranking
  2. Remove an easy and common method of rank faking
  3. Applies to all jobs equally so no issue about fairness

Disadvantages:
4. Balance may still allow faster encounter time and mechanic skips that can influence dps

The discussions in this thread show that personal dps is affected in many ways, and that normalizing them all is nearly impossible. There’s never going to be agreement on everything that is fair vs fun vs turning every boss into a solo dummy. But subtracting Balance from ranking is one thing that is minimally controversial, fair, and conceptually simple to do. We don’t have to solve all problems to benefit from solving the easy one.

Card RNG in general is nonsense for ranking anything but your AST’s luck getting those 6 aoe balances.:slight_smile: It would make most sense just to exclude AST parties from ranking but we’re obviously not going to do that. Subtracting out the balance is a straightforward compromise that gets most of the benefit.

21

This does sound complicated in terms of stripping buffs.

To state the current issues with the current parses:

  • Party members not hitting adds to inflate a single party member’s dps.
  • Using all the party buffs for the convenience of one party member such as balance, litany, hyper charge etc…
  • Double jobs such as 2 mch, 2 bard, 2 astros and feed all the buffs to a single party member.
  • Doing mechanics for a certain party member and having deaths to compensate for other mechanics.

I’m not sure if I missed out on anything else. Personally, as a raider I refer to “damage done on boss” to gauge my performance in terms of single target and not focusing on adds to inflate dps. This should probably be encouraged by having the ranking of all stars enabled for single target done to the boss.

Damage done to boss ranked page

Second, I want to note ways to detect catering on purpose:

  • Really slow or long fight duration from average: waiting for adds to die by a single player, waiting for buffs to align etc.
  • Really low-moderate dps from other party members compared to the catered player.
  • Significant percentage of buffs shown in the buffs tab (this also includes jobs duplication): like % of balance uptime and % of HC/Foes.
  • Multiple deaths due to mechanics that was supposed to be done by the person catered to.
  • Irregular compositions such as 1/1/6.

We notice that if all or most of the 5 triggers go off then chances are that person is being catered to manually and willingly by the party members. Now there are cases were in PF you get a comp of 3 bards 1 blm/smn and it cant be helped but that doesn’t disregard the fact that this smn/blm is still being catered to.

This brings us back to regular and irregular comps discussion which can probably help out with the given factors. The solution might look like:

  • A ranking dps page for efficiency: 2/2/4 composition, unique comps of jobs, damage done to boss involvement.
    so it should look something like (example) pld/war astro/sch smn/mch/drg/nin, say the smn did 100% total and his single target damage on the boss is 95% then the score ranking should be: (100% + 95%) / 2 or maybe a better formula.

The general idea behind this is interaction level from everyone in the party towards the boss/add in an efficient way to maximize uptime on the boss and minimize CD usage on the adds. This way maybe a balance is formed between the boss and the adds. The 4 adds on a12s during the portal should have the same idea where the 4 people who go inside interact with those adds and gain % while losing % on the boss. This makes it balanced imo.

Note that this solution is not so friendly with PF comps.