The damage variance between a Critical Hit and a Non-Critical hit.

Is absolutely disgusting.

Talking about Bard in particular:
A max gauge Apex/Blast Arrow Crit's for upwards of 40k, a Non-Crit hits for 14k.
A 3 gauge Pitch Perfect Crit's for 38k, a Non-Crit hits for 14k.

How is that much variance, almost THREE TIMES the damage, acceptable?

It feels absolutely disgusting with 2515 Critical Strike and still never hitting a single Crit on your big abilities.

Here's the actual secret: variance in gaming is fun.

Critical hits are pervasive in gaming (and have been for decades) because that dopamine hit from a gigantic direct hit crit on your biggest ability is an experience that hits the dopamine. In FF14's case, it also opens some design space for moves that auto crit/auto DH instead of the normal chance-based proc.

Also, that one time that you didn't crit isn't why you hit enrage :)

This is why we lose stuff like Kaiten and skills become boring auto-crits...

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Originally Posted by Amenara

This is why we lose stuff like Kaiten and skills become boring auto-crits...

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No you lose stuff like Kaiten because the average player doesn't know how to press their buttons and that reflects in the data SQE collects.

Kaiten was a good skill and gave the job some depth, but that depth of knowing when to use Kaiten was too hard for the average player.

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Originally Posted by DixieBellOCE

Is absolutely disgusting.

Talking about Bard in particular:
A max gauge Apex/Blast Arrow Crit's for upwards of 40k, a Non-Crit hits for 14k.
A 3 gauge Pitch Perfect Crit's for 38k, a Non-Crit hits for 14k.

How is that much variance, almost THREE TIMES the damage, acceptable?

It feels absolutely disgusting with 2515 Critical Strike and still never hitting a single Crit on your big abilities.

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does it really matter unless you're running parse runs in PF chasing high 99s

but yeah, reducing the variance would be fine. idk why people think that is the same thing as reducing complexity or proc-based decision making

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Originally Posted by DixieBellOCE

No you lose stuff like Kaiten because the average player doesn't know how to press their buttons and that reflects in the data SQE collects.

Kaiten was a good skill and gave the job some depth, but that depth of knowing when to use Kaiten was too hard for the average player.

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Well going with what SE gave us, they added auto-crits to the big attacks in that patch and Kaiten was removed as well for "button bloat". If I had to guess they did all of it to reduce variance because it "felt bad" when your big hits didn't crit and to further reduce the variance they just removed Kaiten and baked it in. Whether it was for making the job more accessible or not we will never know for sure as they didn't start "explaining" changes till the next patch.

Direct Hit probably shouldn't even be a stat honestly.

If I had to guess most classes operate on a formula that outputs a nice little curve which probably involves a lot of mathing than just those two points of variance (overal variance, standard dev, mean, etc).
Those crit values vs normal values are on that curve that balances the overall damage BRD does. More points needed on graph maybe.
BRD doesn't do the best damage so it'd make sense that when it does crit, its crit are big brain to bandaid the sad feels.
It's very late and I am half asleep. Forgive me.

because for whatever reason they decided that crit should make you crit % and crit dmg higher so it scales exponentially. it's way too good of a stat. The damage variance of crit+DH compared to non-crit, or crit-nonDH is way too high.

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Originally Posted by Mewthredel

because for whatever reason they decided that crit should make you crit % and crit dmg higher so it scales exponentially. it's way too good of a stat. The damage variance of crit+DH compared to non-crit, or crit-nonDH is way too high.

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This is why i always thought that critical strike should not add damage, just % Chance.