High potency skills and/or auto-crit/auto-direct-crit

Do you like these? Or don't like them? Do they cause too much variance? Does it feel too bad when Double Down doesn't crit but also every Midare auto-critting also feel bad? Does WAR Inner Release and Primal Rend auto-direct-crit feel bad? What about skills like MCH Reassemble, using it as a specific mechanic for your tools? Should Shoha 1 and 2 be combined to make room for Kaiten which can make Midaire auto-crit? Or just do bonus damage like before?

What's FFXIV's General Discussion's opinion about these right now?

The higher the potency of an attack you have, the more variance you will encounter. Take for exemple Communio from the Reaper with a 1100 Potency and nothing guaranted. When you DH Crit on that, you can feel the difference against a non crit one.

Let's also say you are Unlucky and on a 10 minute fight you only do No crit and no DH on those. You could have done way more damage if you are lucky.

Variance should always be a thing but it shoudn't affect if you can kill a boss or not in the end just because of this.

Also, This will enforce the Crit Meta as the more you have, the more often you do and the more powerful they become

I like crit and big number.

Well you've been hanging around here lately so may have caught some arguments on this, but for the duration I've been here, the general opinion is that high-potency attacks are bad because of how these attacks critting or not critting can make such a massive difference. However, I only see it brought up occasionally, so it's the sort of issue that not everyone brings up over more simpler buzzwords like "2 minute meta". It tends to get brought up when someone makes a more detailed post about the subject, which is rare, compared to just saying "2 minute meta = bad".

I remember that before this was such a big issue, WoW had a similar problem that everyone brought up as a way of saying this game was better. They would say that WoW's crit variance was so massive that it completely imbalanced the classes on a massive scale and that SE was better with balance, leaving only minimal differences. But now in this expansion, we have reached a point where burst windows caused a significant imbalance that made GNB practical to clear P8S over a PLD due to things like Double Down in a burst window.

As for auto-crits and auto-dh, these were complained about a lot until SE addressed it by making crit chance and DH chance still contribute extra damage to the attacks, but this effectively makes them high potency attacks as well.

It might just be better if we flat out didn't have buff windows and just have our job rotations, or if party damage buffs couldn't stack so that people just spread them out and don't feel the pressure to get all attacks into a narrow window.

I do like high-potency attacks. They feel good. But they don't need to be that high. I remember a "high potency attack" used to be something like 400, 500 or 600 potency, not 1200. But maybe it's the stat squish and how high level we are now. Maybe we just need to condense levels so ARR goes up to 30 instead.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I do like high-potency attacks. They feel good. But they don't need to be that high. I remember a "high potency attack" used to be something like 400, 500 or 600 potency, not 1200. But maybe it's the stat squish and how high level we are now. Maybe we just need to condense levels so ARR goes up to 30 instead.

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I don't think Level have actually to do anything in this. For exemple, the potency of the bard are mostly low. Other classe like Reapers can hit almost twice as strong with any attack they have. If anything, it's more a balance issue over Crit and DH than anything else.

To be more precise, Having DH and Crit on top of each other is actually a design that will bring incredible Variance. The formula work like this : Base Damage * Crit DMG% * DH DMG

Usually a Crit DH goes around 1.8x to 2x the base damage (if not higher) which create those huge variance.

For me, We should only need Crit to reduce that variance and rework Direct hit to be something else.

Unfortunately, doing such a thing will require SE to rebalance the whole game. A fast solution would be to increase potency in accordance to the potential DPS loss of DH removal, but it will only be a bandaid and not an actual solution.

Variance is of course needed inside a game, but it should be kept inside a certain window to not break balance completely or make classes impossible to play on Savage or Ultimate because of bad crit rate inside a burst window.

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Originally Posted by Mithron

Do you like these? Or don't like them? Do they cause too much variance? Does it feel too bad when Double Down doesn't crit but also every Midare auto-critting also feel bad? Does WAR Inner Release and Primal Rend auto-direct-crit feel bad? What about skills like MCH Reassemble, using it as a specific mechanic for your tools? Should Shoha 1 and 2 be combined to make room for Kaiten which can make Midaire auto-crit? Or just do bonus damage like before?

What's FFXIV's General Discussion's opinion about these right now?

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The whole Samurai button Bloat solution has been repeated enough we already know the solutions and yes Kaiten back but I hate... vehemently despise Auto-Crit.

I understand why? because players want to feel like their performance isn't going up or down? and for some shiny number... but for parsers? it's always going to be a Slot-Machine anyways on trying to get a funny number they want since we can still DirectHit-Crit. I just want big number on my screen achieved sometimes through RNG not some stupid ACT, and have me reach that big number on my screen through more then just spamming my Shinten or a Hollow 2 minute meta. Very Simple...

I would be okey with Auto-Crit? if everyone is treated equally. So if I get the Auto-Crit treatment? " Everyone equally does as well ". And if not? Then " None of us equally get the treatment ", mhm

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Originally Posted by TabrisOmbrelame

To be more precise, Having DH and Crit on top of each other is actually a design that will bring incredible Variance. The formula work like this : Base Damage * Crit DMG% * DH DMG

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True.

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For me, We should only need Crit to reduce that variance and rework Direct hit to be something else.

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I just hope that whatever they change it to isn't Accuracy. :D

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Unfortunately, doing such a thing will require SE to rebalance the whole game.

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SE has not usually rebalanced the whole game when they've changed things anyway. That's why, even reducing yourself to the Minimum Item Level, old content still becomes such a joke, like how MINE ARR extremes still had a significant amount of things being skipped compared to their unreal versions.

I think as long as the old content still has a bit of life to it with MINE settings then they don't worry about making changes.

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A fast solution would be to increase potency in accordance to the potential DPS loss of DH removal, but it will only be a bandaid and not an actual solution.

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Arguably, DH is one of the reasons old content dies quicker, because it is a pro-damage stat even at small amounts, whereas Accuracy was just preventing your attacks missing and combos from being missed. We have 100% Accuracy + DH now.

If we're talking about removing DH entirely, then for Stormblood and higher content, we could just pretend we've only ever stacked crit and determination. In theory content should have been clearable with this since it was meant to be a choice.

I don't like the really high potency hits.

I have made the case before that high potency attacks need to become multi-hit strikes with the potency distributed across each hit, like Double Down hitting 3 times for 350 > 350 > 500. That would immediately fix a lot of the crit variance issues that are caused by such massive potency spikes.

I understand that some people like seeing big numbers, so that can be solved by having a display option that only shows the final added up number as floating text.

I don't really mind the variance with the type of combat FF14 offers. If you're trying to be competitive then it might be frustrating, but outside of that it's only mildly disappointing/interesting to me. Forced crit/DH reduces rather than increases variance as it narrows the range of multipliers on a given skill. In that sense they are nice to have, especially for heals.

Conceptually I prefer the idea of crits being skill based rather than randomly generated. Critical damage based on timing, position, or something along those lines is infinitely more deep than random crits.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

I have made the case before that high potency attacks need to become multi-hit strikes with the potency distributed across each hit, like Double Down hitting 3 times for 350 > 350 > 500. That would immediately fix a lot of the crit variance issues that are caused by such massive potency spikes.

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This is mathemathicaly false. Even if you hit 3 time, you still roll 3 time with the same chance to do a crit.

So yeah, you may see a crit more often because you triple your try each time, but in term of damage output and variance, it's the exact same. If you are unlucky, you will not triple crit on double down or even double crit. The variance will still be there because it's related to luck anyway, unless it's 3 completely different Attack on 3 different button, it won't change anything because you still do all this in 2.5 GCD for 1 attack.

To resume, Increasing the number of it doesn't increase either the damage nor the chance to crit.