Auto-crit buffs have pushed melee too far ahead of Casters (and MCH)

Quick rundown of which melees got buffed:

Samurai (Midaare + Ogi) biggest winner
Monk (Bootshine) second biggest winner
Dragoon (Litany + Lifesurge)
Reaper (Got potency buffs to ensure parity with auto-crit melee)

Of the physical ranged, it's ironically not Machinist who benefited the most from the auto-crit changes, but Dancer who, on top of being able to partner the highest selfish DPS class in the game at 100% efficacy again, also has an auto-crit during their burst.

All of these changes have ended up widening the gulf between melee and casters to an unacceptable degree. Black mage, Summoner, Red Mage and Machinist all need the same parity buffs that Reaper got, Bard to a lesser degree since it benefits more than Dancer in team compositions where damage is more evenly distributed.

Ideally this would be the last set of powercreep buffs in this expansion since the auto-crit changes are a one time occurrence. The only other general system changes would be changing merging Skillspeed and Spellspeed and giving them the auto-crit treatment (buffs the damage of everything they don't affect in some way) but even then this would be nowhere near on the level of the auto-crit changes which are built into job kits vs an alternative method of gearing to crit stacking.

That is something some people WHO DON'T play a Caster or a Ranged dps completely overlook. Because they don't care, it's not their class...

I agree with you on the part where some ranged should have a buff to compensate the tweak, like MCH, or for class that don't have auto-crit, like BLM for exemple.

That being said, adjusting the potency for MCH and/or Caster won't be an easy task. Dancer may buff other class than one who auto-crit and that "Damage boost" is lost (For exemple with a Reaper, we have no auto-crit. Of course DNC will try other class before RPR...) so the rDPS gain may have some serious variation there. I wonder how much a crit/DH buff actually does in term of rDPS for auto-crit class like SAM against non auto-crit class like RPR ?

Auto-crit is a flawed system that never really works, has no significant impact on performance (hitting 3 times 5 is the same as hitting one 10 a 2 and a 3) and doesn't even feel rewarding to play.

Then again, it's not like the forums have been on fire, complaining about that exact problem.

Stop. Trying. To. Make. It. Work.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ecause-of-this

Devs do not care, they are super lazy people who milk ff14 as a cash cow. Intern saw sam dps variance because of crit and thought lets kill sam and remove kaiten (not using button is damage variance) and put auto crit.

The problem is not auto crit. The problem is that 19 classes have like 5 devs working on them and they have zero clue how to balance classes besides putting 10k+ potencies on 2 minute cooldowns. Auto crit is a band aid on band aid on self inflicted wound.

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Originally Posted by Thursdays

Auto-crit is a flawed system that never really works, has no significant impact on performance (hitting 3 times 5 is the same as hitting one 10 a 2 and a 3) and doesn't even feel rewarding to play.

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That line of reasoning is fine if everything is equal, but not everything is. Taking Samurai before 6.1, if you kept critting on your Midares, it will spike up your damage, to show how extreme it can potentially be, take old Midare, which, IIRC, was 1200 potency after Kaiten take a crit multiplier of 1.5 and it is suddenly 1800 potency. Compare that to SAM's weakest GCD, Hakaze, which is 200 potency, or 300 after a crit. That is 6 times the potency just because your got lucky. Even if you take an average of SAM's 8 GCDs to get to a Midare, you are looking at an average of 416.25 potency compared to 1800, add Midare into that equation and it brings the average of those 9 GCDs up to 570, that is ~37% increase, and that has assumed everything has crit, If you only make Midare crit and none of the others, you have the 8 GCDs at 277.5 potency per GCD, increasing to ~446.67 potency per GCD, an increase of ~61%.

The actual average will, of course, be somewhere in the middle, however, should your damage have a variance of around 20% just because of crit luck? That is a huge difference that is put of the player's control and is purely a consequence of frequent high damage hits. As it currently stands, the average GCD over the 9 is 353.3 and that is unchanging (still taking 1.5 crit multiplier, no idea how the recent changes would affect this, but it will be higher), what crits will do though, is bring the rest of the GCDs closer, which means, rather than spiking your damage, you keep it more consistent.

And just to curb something just because I mentioned Kaiten. Kaiten has nothing to do with this at all. You can keep Kaiten and adjust the Iaijutsu potencies to accommodate and it will be functionally the same.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

That line of reasoning is fine if everything is equal, but not everything is. Taking Samurai before 6.1, if you kept critting on your Midares, it will spike up your damage, to show how extreme it can potentially be, take old Midare, which, IIRC, was 1200 potency after Kaiten take a crit multiplier of 1.5 and it is suddenly 1800 potency. Compare that to SAM's weakest GCD, Hakaze, which is 200 potency, or 300 after a crit. That is 6 times the potency just because your got lucky. Even if you take an average of SAM's 8 GCDs to get to a Midare, you are looking at an average of 416.25 potency compared to 1800, add Midare into that equation and it brings the average of those 9 GCDs up to 570, that is ~37% increase, and that has assumed everything has crit, If you only make Midare crit and none of the others, you have the 8 GCDs at 277.5 potency per GCD, increasing to ~446.67 potency per GCD, an increase of ~61%.

The actual average will, of course, be somewhere in the middle, however, should your damage have a variance of around 20% just because of crit luck? That is a huge difference that is put of the player's control and is purely a consequence of frequent high damage hits. As it currently stands, the average GCD over the 9 is 353.3 and that is unchanging (still taking 1.5 crit multiplier, no idea how the recent changes would affect this, but it will be higher), what crits will do though, is bring the rest of the GCDs closer, which means, rather than spiking your damage, you keep it more consistent.

And just to curb something just because I mentioned Kaiten. Kaiten has nothing to do with this at all. You can keep Kaiten and adjust the Iaijutsu potencies to accommodate and it will be functionally the same.

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That is some serious math out there mister ! Really cool to read !


Just to return to the subject, it's not the Auto-crit flawed system that is discussed here, but more the fact that classes (Especially ranged) didn't get any balance after the change on Auto-crits.

It is rewarding to use your Auto-crits inside a Crit buff to get more damage (Taking into account that every person in the team line up the buff perfectly) but does it actually balance everything ? Spoiler : No.

The fact that Samourai was not a good choice at 6.1 for Dancer because of the Auto-crits is now reversed. It is the perfect choice for them, along with MNK and DRG.

It may affect the overall dps given by DNC and BRD if the group possess multiple Auto-crit Classes, because that would basically work like a regular damage buff on those attacks (But really stronger).

Which lead me to the question : Do you think that MCH is actually a viable class in the current iteration ?

In my opinion, MCH need more fire power. He's supposed to be the "SAM" of the Ranged class.

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Originally Posted by TabrisOmbrelame

Just to return to the subject, it's not the Auto-crit flawed system that is discussed here, but more the fact that classes (Especially ranged) didn't get any balance after the change on Auto-crits.

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It was mainly as a response to what I quoted, which essentially reads as, it doesn't matter what crits, it evens out eventually, which is fundamentally false.

As for the rest of the topic, I do agree. I personally haven't seen how the numbers affect the damage (as I have alluded to) however, if jobs haven't been balanced around the new stat changes, there is going to be potential problems.

Here are some value I got by doing some test with the dancer crit/dh buff (20%) and the bard (20% DH) and the SCH 10% crit :

SAM (Only tested with Midare Setsugekka) : Around 19k Crit without external buff

Sam with only the Crit/DH Buff from DNC : Around 22k

So this is roughly a +15% Damage only on crit

WAR without buff (Only Fell Cleave + that Berserk boy): around 15k Crit + DH

War with buff (same as above) : 17k5 (Which is a little higher, 16-17% of damage up)

War with BRD buff : 16k (around 5-6%)

War with Scholar Crit debuff (10%) : 16k2 (around 8%)

More test are required, but we kinda roughly estimate that :

10% crit will buff damage around 8%

20% DH will be around 5-6%

But 20% Crit and DH gives around 16-17% ?

That actually make no sense because if we calculate correctly, straight forward, we should have more than 20% Damage buff. I even checked twice, the damage done with my war, and I am absolutely certain of those value.

We can then suppose that the "damage buff" given by those ability must have some sort of diminishing return.

I think more test must be done before stating on this tho...

Tell me you haven't actually looked at the numbers without telling me you haven't actually looked at the numbers.

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Originally Posted by Atmaweapon510

*snip*

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Here's my hot-take. Everyone should get the Auto-Crit treatment, or No one does.

Either/or. There are players who like non-fluctuating performances for less DPS variance, or how I like to call it " Boring/Bland/Stale " numbers cause that's what Auto-Crit did. Supposedly to address parsers that make up a literal 1% of the player-base since it relogs loggin on a 3rd party website. My job, Samurai, performs and I am not happy with it due to how it was implemented by removing Kaiten. For me this fixed nothing we still have DPS variance, just a tiny bit less. Even if it was reducing it more? it's still less flare and fun playing the job. The excitement of a big hit is gone at the cost of a very beloved Skill to not improve gameplay in my opinion.

So I don't like Auto-Crit's, but hey! if players truly desire to have them? then have every Job have equal amounts of Auto-Crit performances, or none. Not selectively one over the other. Fair is Fair.