Two Minute Raid Buffs - The Bane of Endwalker Job Design

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Auto-Crit/Auto-DH effects are functionally the same as removing Crit/DH, because you no longer get to roll for buffed damage. Let's just say that it's the less controversial way of removing Crit/DH.

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It makes sense to 'remove Crit/DH' in this way, because these auto effects typically apply to the highest potency burst attacks.
With Crit/DH being a percentage increase, a Crit on a higher potency attack makes for a greater damage variation. It's basically the same concept behind Limit Breaks being immune to stat and raid buff bonuses.
Crit/DH on more regular, lower potency attacks like your core weaponskills isn't as much of an issue. They're used frequently enough that the average flattens out over the course of a fight. You wouldn't gain much by removing them, and you're losing two stats and two classes of materia in doing so.

In the name of fairness between jobs though, they probably should turn each jobs most potent attack into an Auto-Crit/DH attack. So Crit buffs like Chain Stratagem don't become an issue for party composition again.

This type of thinking is a function of the culture of this specific game, because fight designs at baseline have little to no variability, and it's very easy to reset encounters. This makes it ideal to speedrun. The problem is that this mindset filters down to all levels of play, even for players who are just learning the basics of an encounter. Oh, if I only crit during my burst, then we would have cleared. Well, what about the thousands of potency you gave up by not staying on the boss? You still obsess over the theoretical maximum that you could only achieve in spreadsheets when you're still sloppy on the basics. What controllable factors can you change about your performance?

I think this is one of the advantages of designing fights with less predictive and more reactive design. That forces players to stop obsessing about their GCD by GCD ideal spreadsheet play and start actually using their brains on the fly. That way there are way too many things out of your control and you're forced to work with what you have, rather than complaining about your tools. Critical hits are as old as the genre, yet it's really only in here that you see people so upset at the concept.

The solution is the exact opposite. Add more variability and less predictability. Make it harder to achieve the ideal speedrun conditions.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lyth

This type of thinking is a function of the culture of this specific game, because fight designs at baseline have little to no variability, and it's very easy to reset encounters. This makes it ideal to speedrun. The problem is that this mindset filters down to all levels of play, even for players who are just learning the basics of an encounter. Oh, if I only crit during my burst, then we would have cleared. Well, what about the thousands of potency you gave up by not staying on the boss? You still obsess over the theoretical maximum that you could only achieve in spreadsheets when you're still sloppy on the basics. What controllable factors can you change about your performance?

I think this is one of the advantages of designing fights with less predictive and more reactive design. That forces players to stop obsessing about their GCD by GCD ideal spreadsheet play and start actually using their brains on the fly. That way there are way too many things out of your control and you're forced to work with what you have, rather than complaining about your tools. Critical hits are as old as the genre, yet it's really only in here that you see people so upset at the concept.

The solution is the exact opposite. Add more variability and less predictability. Make it harder to achieve the ideal speedrun conditions.

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I'm confused... you were arguing in favour of removing Crit/DH before.

No, my earlier statement was done in irony. I've actually argued the exact opposite ever since Xeno popularized the concept of Crit RNG being unfair prior to the 4.2 WAR changes. It's a really bad direction to take the game.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

The problem is that Physical Ranged has long since grown out of its traditional roots as a MP/TP supplying 'support' subrole yet it still gets treated that way for rDPS purposes in contrast to the so called Magical Ranged jobs. The solution is to merge the two subroles into a single Ranged category, and then players will stop defending the discrepancy.

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That doesn't hold, RDM has always been sometimes part of it, sometimes just awkwardly above. And SMN this expansion has also been tossed into the bag. I do agree and have always said that the support role of rphys was actually something back then (MP support, party wide mitigation etc), and hasnt been since shb, and that's a problem, but they've also been pushing more and more jobs behind this too, and those are actually casters.

What would merging casters and rphys achieve exactly? The damage arbitrary gap would still be there with melees and BLM, and it would only solidify the discrimination between two groups of DPS with one doing less than the other without anything valuable to make up for it.

I've always argued for DPS subroles doing the same rDPS across the board, be it melee, ranged, or caster. Occasionally doing a positional or stopping to cast a spell or charged attack (melee do both of these, by the way) doesn't entitle you to additional dps. Level the playing field, and let the best players rise to the top.

Merging both ranged subtypes into a single subrole just eliminates the traditional preconception that magical ranged are somehow superior to physical ranged for occasionally stopping to cast spells, because let's face it, this matters about as much as positionals do with True North. It's completely an aesthetic choice at this point. Ranged is still ranged, regardless of whether it's fireballs or arrows. Remove the distinction, and players will stop justifying it.

Yeah I also agree that as long as a role doesn't bring something VALUABLE and UNIQUE more than the others (which was the case of MP support or mitigations back then), it should do the same rdps no matter what. But I mean, most people justify the damage gap by comparing melees with rphys, not really rphys with casters... Especially since now SMN is struggling as well. I'm not sure it would achieve much more...

Oh it will for sure. The only reason for the current setup is the devs want to force you to run two melee and two ranged, and that's not going to change without them deliberately changing their entire approach to spread/stack mechanics in fight design. Tanks and melee don't want additional players in melee range, given the choice. It has nothing to do with utility or rotational difficulty.

But it's also not fun to be guaranteed a slot just because a group is forced to take you. That's why rDPS parity is so important, and why this 'support/pure dps' separation in ranged is a problem.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

This type of thinking is a function of the culture of this specific game, because fight designs at baseline have little to no variability, and it's very easy to reset encounters.
[snipped for chars]
The solution is the exact opposite. Add more variability and less predictability. Make it harder to achieve the ideal speedrun conditions.

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The reason people are recently upset about critical hits is because of how much damage variance they cause, leading to situations like P8S where good crit can lead to a comfortable clear, and poor crit can lead to a 0.1% wipe. The variance is simply too much. You argue that this filters down to less-skilled players, which -- sure, it absolutely does. Lower-skilled players will complain about anything from crit variance to the weather to explain away their lack of DPS. The real problem is when these sort of issues begin appearing at the highest level of play, which we saw commonly during Week 1 of the last tier, and we are (possibly) observing now in the latest ultimate, if what can be observed currently through streams carries any weight. It's too early to say.

Currently, it's possible to achieve a 47% damage increase via raid buffs. Naturally, you'd stack your pot on top of that, and blow your biggest cooldowns for maximum PPS during that critical effective 1.5x damage window. If you crit in that window, the value of your crit skyrockets. If you do not crit, your damage plummets. It is precisely because buff windows have been forcibly aligned that crit variance has become such a problem. Like you, I agree that crits should be in the game. They're a hallmark of the genre, and frankly it feels good to crit. The issue is that rather than tackling the actual problem (strict two-minute buff windows), the devs are tackling just about everything else -- symptoms, rather than the root of the issue.

I strongly doubt that the developers will drastically change up the way they design fights -- I would go so far as to argue that the way fights are designed, as a complicated and specific dance, is one of FFXIV's appeal points, for those who like that style of raiding. You will never manage to eliminate players who look to speedrun or optimise; even in WOW where fights are (to my knowledge, I don't play the game so please correct me if I'm mistaken here) as you described, parsing and speedruns are still a huge part of the culture and integral to high-end raiding.

The solution is not to remove crits, nor to change the way fights are designed, but to remove the ridiculously large multiplier which causes crit variance to skyrocket into problematic territory. That is the core of the issue.

When was your first clear of any fight ever a genuinely flawless run? A lucky run will get you that clear sooner due to damage variance, sure. But there are always a lot of other controllable factors that you're executing incorrectly, and you clear comfortably when those are fixed. That's why being able to clear and farm are still two different things, and why a lot of week 1 strats get replaced with better ones that offer better uptime. They design the checks with a margin knowing full well that your first clear will be sloppy and luck driven, and nerf the check when players don't live up to the expected clear rates.

You can do whatever you like to the multiplier, but players will still complain about damage variance. Oh, if only I crit all my attacks in a ten minute run. There's nowhere to draw the line.