Dragoons: A Rotation Reborn

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Originally Posted by Dervy

The problem is that if you go below 202 DET (Gaol Debuff in Titan), it lowers your damage. This was proven last year, unless going below 202 DET gives a negative value, but that's something I seriously doubt.

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Wasn't that a mistranslation? The debuff was simple called Determination down - later it was renamed to "Damage down". Plus that debuff did not affect healing done - which would be impossible if it actually changed Determination.

Edit: Not missing Hirose's post above the quote would've helped.

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Originally Posted by Mibhas

It is a big deal! That's potency going down the drain if you miss it. Sure, hit it from the flank if you moving to the rear at the time is absolute death, but if it's only dangerous to do it from the rear... Do it anyway :p

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Oh I'm doing it don't worry. But when it misses for whatever reason I don't feel nearly as bad as I felt when I missed my HT or ID back in the days :D

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Originally Posted by SunnyHirose

Determination Down from Gaols was an erroneous label, which has been rectified. It never actually did that, and the Japanese client has always (correctly) had Damage Down.

I intend to give some reference values for every job, but it will not be that comprehensive. I just don't have the willpower/time for it (I graduated, time to go job hunting lol).

Unresolved mysteries like the actual damage formula will be left as "known unknowns". I would like to focus more on methods than results.

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Originally Posted by Hustensaft

Wasn't that a mistranslation? The debuff was simple called Determination down - later it was renamed to "Damage down". Plus that debuff did not affect healing done - which would be impossible if it actually changed Determination.

Edit: Not missing Hirose's post above the quote would've helped.

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Interesting. Never actually noticed that. Learn something new every day!

I'm personally not bothered about the exact formula either, as long as we have a model which accurately represents how stats scale damage, I'm more than happy (Which I have, but it needs more work). I might collect a lot more data in HW with much higher potencies and damage ranges and try to figure it out in my own time, but for now, I cba.

Makes me wonder how game devopers come up with these contrived and overly complex formulas for mechanics. Are programmers and developers all math gurus. Who comes up with these?

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Makes me wonder how game devopers come up with these contrived and overly complex formulas for mechanics. Are programmers and developers all math gurus. Who comes up with these?

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I'd like to say: "Practice, practice, practice..."


But they most likely had a close to death experience and saw the light, or somehow travelled to the edge of existence, saw the truth, and came back.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Makes me wonder how game devopers come up with these contrived and overly complex formulas for mechanics. Are programmers and developers all math gurus. Who comes up with these?

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Engineering and Computer Science disciplines are usually taught with an extremely heavy focus on math and statistics.

Computer Science at my university was literally in the faculty of mathematics, for every programming or cs theory course there was a required math course as well to take.

ninjaedit: It's not the same for every school but most still have strong focuses on math as well.

I'm pretty sure we're just wrong on the damage formulas. Also, a formula with like 3 variables and a few constants isn't really what you would call complex.

So the reason the scaling may be odd is because they need to lay the foundation for a game that (they hope) will last 10+ years...its not just a "hey lets make 3 stats, primary, crit, and det, and just multiply them together and call it a day". They need to balance ilvls with item budgets and that is the reason stats behave the way they do.

What bothers me instead is the lack of transparency behind the formulas. Would be nice to have tooltips that can be datamined (like WoW has) so we can exactly know how the formulas work.

This is also SquareEnix we're talking about. Just take a look at how complex the mechanics and formulae were in FFXI. Well, two things are for certain. Everything multiplies with each other, somewhere, and there's a base value of damage.

My personal opinion on game design (though influenced a bit by games like Morrowind and Civilization) is that if you present it as a legitimate choice (e.g. stacking skill speed or parry), it needs to be one or you're not being honest with the players.

This can be accomplished by making choices roughly equal (which is boring and lacks consequences for poor decisions), or by showing in enough detail what it is the choices do so the player can decide.

But opaque numbers are a longstanding FF tradition, I guess, and it's not like the system is completely unintuitive. I just feel it's less than ideal that, say, you need to know introductory statistics to kind of know what 1 crit does after days of auto-attacking a dummy.

At least we have dummies to practice on. In ffxi you had to attack a target and know it's vit/agi and crap and then parse for hours and pray you weren't killing mobs of varying levels (until a certain something came out which allowed players to check mob level instantly)