I really don’t understand why you are going through these mental gymnastics to try to prove some esoteric point. Let’s look at some actual almost-real-time data from today. I finished a 106 gr with my seasonal wastes barb. That earned me rank 230 on the barb leaderboard (fwiw, highest I’ve ever been on a seasonal board…yay me…ahem…). I was fairly impressed with myself until I looked at the other leaderboards and discovered (ok–confirmed what I already knew) that I wouldn’t have made the top 1000 on any of them. You want my preference? I want my rank on the barb leaderboard to be +/- 50 of the rank on any other leaderboard. I know this isn’t going to happen, but that’s my preference. I’d also prefer we try to get back to the point at hand, but I suspect that’s not going to happen either.
What?
What does any of this mean? Why are we using abstract numbers and nonsense terms like “functional power?” What does that mean? What are you talking about?
When my undergraduates present me with someone like this, I call it “gross convolution.” Then I make them re-write the essay until there’s a coherent dang thesis.
I have no response to this because it’s meaningless, abstract nonsense. Nothing really refers to anything else. Nothing has a tangible referent.
You want to talk about tangible referents?
There’s one.
Here’s another: Barbs are, globally, 4.1 GR tiers behind other classes in solo GR potential.
In conclusion, The Grapes of Wrath is a really good book, and look into their eyes, ma, you’ll see me, you’ll see me, you’ll see me, you’ll see me
Crap–here I thought I was the only professor who still played Diablo. I’m going to have to re-examine my priorities… 
Oh–and as for a thesis, I’m a fan of the old “assume you are right–tell me what we should do.” I like to throw it back on the students to try to make sense of their own gibberish. That wouldn’t be completely out of line here.
Welcome to the small, weird club. What Dept?
In the words of Ronnie Van Zant, “You got that right.”
I teach composition. You?
English!
Taught Comp, Lit, and CRW for 9 years. Back doing my PhD. American Lit post 1945 is my forte! You?
Excellent–good luck with that. Back in the day I focused on early modernists, but I like the later American stuff, too. You can’t go wrong with Malcolm Lowry (Edit: of course, after I posted this I remembered he’s English–still love Under the Volcano).
Lol I am an engineering professor too. Different from Free, I already have a PhD. Good luck with the tunnel with a light at the end. I would not dare doing another PhD
Free and Prokahn,
I have a saying: If you get 10 academics in a room, you may end up with 11 opinions.
From our discussions, it was clear to me that Free is coming from a non-STEM background that is consistent with him being an English professor. His writing style has a certain eloquence that mine lacks. His arguments still have room for improvement with respect to nuanced data interpretation and analytical reasoning. My self-assessment clearly highlights the fact that I need to improve in multiple areas. Educators definitely value lifelong learning as a worthwhile endeavor.
For Prokhan, I thought that he had a STEM background, but his terminal degree was in engineering/technology rather than science/math. It makes sense to me that he is an engineering professor. I based my guess on his educational background on two things: 1) The data analyses that he present and 2) Once he said that augments and legendary gem levels are 100% correlated with paragon level. No professional statistician/mathematician would make this claim. A statistician’s determination would be more refined and presumably dumbed down for this forum because of lack of knowledge about the educational background of forum members. A professional statistician would claim that it was highly correlated and if addressing a more educated crowd, might talk about R value or other statistical parameters. Needless to say, lectures/presentations are very different if given to undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, or colleagues in the field at national meetings. I appreciate the fact that Prokhan’s assessment of Free and my calculations is that both are insufficient to assess completely accurately differential class power. I disagree with his conclusions and think that there are a “reasonable” approximation with noted caveats and limitations. When I was criticized for my statistics/calculations, I responded with this:
This statement would not be coming from an uneducated imbecile. I admire Free’s passion but you may want to ratchet it down as illustrated by your OP in “Hold on. Pause. Excuse me?”, the creation of this thread, and other comments that you have posted. Creation of this thread also is walking a line where it might be construed/misconstrued as targeting another poster for potential harassment in a different thread.
My OP presents how the data was acquired and how the data was analyzed. Anyone could look at what I did and then draw their own conclusions, including questioning the data and its analysis. Of all the posts in that thread, the one that is particularly astute in my mind is Rashiels’ who questions sampling bias since we do not know the number of people who play each class and of that number, how many are playing competitively to push the top build. When I looked at Prohkan’s analysis of season 11 (I think), I noticed that for certain classes, the slope of the curve increased at the top end relative to high end clears. This likely tells us something about that dataset relatively to high end player number (i.e. that these classes have less high end players). Franky, I think Rashiel may be right in that there is inherent sampling bias that may be a significant confounder, because we don’t know how many people play each class in general and at a “competitive level”.
Lets start from common ground: We three agree that barbs are severely underperforming currently and need a buff. The conversation about dog whistling, ulterior motives, and precise methodology that we used to reach the conclusion that barbs are bad is not core to the issue that we all want addressed in that underperforming classes should be buff. Free has his preferred method of buffing support legendaries for barbs while I am primarily focused on buffs to achieve cross class equity relative to each class’s top build.
I think that we may be missing the forest for the trees. If Blizzard implemented all of Free’s changes for barbs that would be best. If they did this, all the other classes would want the same thing and they would be making their own websites. They would also want changes to shake up the meta.
The game is 7 years old. The best case scenario in my mind is that they buff 1 or 2 builds per class occasionally. D3 has a skeleton crew/classic games running the show and we already paid for the game. Developmental resources are being dedicated to new Diablo releases as mentioned in the 2nd quarter ATVI investor report. Kotick claimed that we would be able to experience these Diablo projects soon.TM
Back to my question about preference for scenario 1-5 and preference for scenarios 6-8. The reason I want to talk about an abstraction and what Free considers “gross convolution” is to remove some noise from the discussion.
Of 1-5, I told you that I prefer 5 then 4.
Of 6-8, I prefer 8 then 6.
What say ye?
I just got to ask, why would you throw out a chart of numbers that only have some kind of abstract meaning only to you and expect that anybody else would understand where you are coming from?
I edited my post for clarity to make it less abstract.
Honestly Free, I think you must have the patience of a saint.
Between the continued fight to get changes for Barbs, and dealing with the trolls, idiots, and people who just don’t get it, I am surprised you haven’t flipped out and told them all to jam it, or ended up in counseling by now.
Folks, I think it’s time to put this thread to bed. It doesn’t seem like we’re getting anywhere here, and whatever disagreements we all may have are just going to have to remain unresolved, because nobody appears to be convincing anybody else.
This will be my first and last post in this thread. Over and out.
Oh, now he’s asking for my thread in GD to get moved to the Barb forum.
So much SMDH, y’all, so much…