Transparency: Potencies and Secondary Stats

So, I'm unsure of where to post this, so I'm gonna do it on the general forums.

Anyway, onto the title. Final Fantasy XIV has a problem. And that problem is needless obfuscation of the means of potencies and secondary stats. As it stands, we are forced to attempt to reverse engineer the usefulness of our secondary stats. Due to this, we as players are, by design, lost in making intelligent decisions.

While potencies aren't as troublesome, after all, Benefic is flat out weaker than Benefic II, but we struggle to quickly understand how much weaker it is on the fly. Like, I know from math that Benefic is only .625 of Benefic II, but why must I do math to understand that difference. Why can't it be something along the lines of "Potency is equal to X% of your Attack Power, Attack Magic Power, or Healing Magic Power." There's no explanation of something so simple.

However, what is troubling is the secondary stats. Accuracy, Critical Hit Rate, Determination, Parry, Skill Speed, Spell Speed, and for healers, Piety are completely obscured. We have explanations of what these stats do, accuracy increases the chance of you hitting a target with an offensive ability, critical hit rate increases the rate at which you land criticals as well as the power of those criticals, determination is effectively a secondary core stat (why does this exist?), parry increases the rate you parry physical attacks, skill and spell speed increase the rate at which you can use weapon skills and spells, and piety increases your MP pool and by proxy increases your MP regeneration. What we do not know, is what these stats actually do. We have reverse engineered the math to a degree, but we don't know how much power these stats hold. Do I really need that determination? What about more spell speed? How can I tell if my Piety is worthwhile, certainly I have figured it out using "The Keeper's Hymn" to be about 6.6 MP per point, but why did I have to even do this?

So, this is a plead to the developers, please, let us know what we are doing. Let us know how powerful our secondary stats are, let us know how powerful we are. We need more than just a "Beginner's Hall," we need information to work upon making ourselves not only better players, but more powerful characters.

I agree. Simpler is not also better.

I can't give you a link, but I remember the developpers one time said that they like it this way.
They want the people to try it out, to give the community something to work on.

They can do as WoW (for example), but they like it the other way.

https://dervyxiv.wordpress.com
Current stat weights.

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Originally Posted by Priwia

I can't give you a link, but I remember the developpers one time said that they like it this way.
They want the people to try it out, to give the community something to work on.

They can do as WoW (for example), but they like it the other way.

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All I can think of is just....... WHY?!? Why in the flying hell would they prefer to keep it so pointlessly vague? It's utterly incomprehensible and flat out mind-boggling... sigh.

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Originally Posted by MiniPrinny

Like, I know from math that Benefic is only .625 of Benefic II, but why must I do math to understand that difference.

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Is there a non-mathematical way to express "X is greater than Y" or "X is valued at Y% of Z?"

This is a case of where I think "keeping it complex for the sake of complexity" is a bad thing, especially if it does not lend anything as far as gameplay is concerned. Same with them not showing if the boss attacks are physical or magic (especially when they keep making the thematic behind it inconsistent, landslide and earthshaker is physical despite it glowing and looking all magicky, but everything else that involves throwing rocks is magic).

It makes it hard for making stat comparisons, it doesn't show dimishing returns (if there is any), and in the case of accuracy, it does not show how much we actually gain versus what is actually needed (since bosses always have a flat value require that's ever increasing, rather than a static avoidance value)

Potency is probably "down-to-earth" as we can get as far as damage comparisons is concerned.

Yeah, I like how Diablo 3 handles stats, there's a breakdown for every value. The game has a calculator in it but for some reason we have to do the legwork...

This is a holdover from FFXI's method of handling stats. It's meant to encourage player collaboration and data sharing. It took players YEARS and YEARS to finally figure out FFXI's algorithm for simple ACCURACY because SE refused to give hints. They've been quiet for a decade and a half on their games' math, so I doubt they will ever add any more transparency to FFXIV. This is the company that included a boss in FFXI that was unbeaten for 2 WHOLE YEARS by ANYONE due to its weird mechanics until SE finally released a video to give people a hint.

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Originally Posted by Mykaelus

This is a holdover from FFXI's method of handling stats. It's meant to encourage player collaboration and data sharing.

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Sans the players opinions, this is discouraged from the game's ToS (use of parsers), ingame mentioning, and at best, discussion of it on the forums. I think someone here acutally got banned for discussing the numbers and is pretty much left to posting his findings on a blog.

The most we can really go about doing is saying "I'm not getting any reported misses with X accuracy" or "I need X amount of skill speed to reduce my GCD by .01 seconds", which then does not account for it's affect on DoTs and summoner pet damage.

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Originally Posted by Mykaelus

This is a holdover from FFXI's method of handling stats. It's meant to encourage player collaboration and data sharing. It took players YEARS and YEARS to finally figure out FFXI's algorithm for simple ACCURACY because SE refused to give hints. They've been quiet for a decade and a half on their games' math, so I doubt they will ever add any more transparency to FFXIV. This is the company that included a boss in FFXI that was unbeaten for 2 WHOLE YEARS by ANYONE due to its weird mechanics until SE finally released a video to give people a hint.

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This. It's really just SE being SE.

Also, mentioning the vagueness of AV and not PW, the boss that literally forced SE to change all of their future content because of the marathon and people having no idea how to beat him beyond brute force? For shame man, for shame.

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Originally Posted by RiceisNice

Sans the players opinions, this is discouraged from the game's ToS (use of parsers), ingame mentioning, and at best, discussion of it on the forums. I think someone here acutally got banned for discussing the numbers and is pretty much left to posting his findings on a blog.

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Yep, it was Dervy, who figured out the stat weights given earlier in this very thread.

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Originally Posted by RiceisNice

Sans the players opinions, this is discouraged from the game's ToS (use of parsers), ingame mentioning, and at best, discussion of it on the forums. I think someone here acutally got banned for discussing the numbers and is pretty much left to posting his findings on a blog.

The most we can really go about doing is saying "I'm not getting any reported misses with X accuracy" or "I need X amount of skill speed to reduce my GCD by .01 seconds", which then does not account for it's affect on DoTs and summoner pet damage.

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Maybe "data" sharing wasn't the correct wording; I meant more like what you said, people noticing things and then adding them up on their own. The FFXI devs were/are strictly against modding, to the point they would actively change code to sabotage known mods and parsers.

The point being, FFXIV's pretty transparent about its numbers in comparison, so I don't think we're going to get any clearer numbers from SE.

People really complain about everything and everything...

Is it really so hard to comprehend, X < Y? Yeah, stuff like crit is vague, but it's not something to drive the development time into. I would prefer them working on more important things than numbers only a handful of people want to see.

I never quite understood why the devs insist so much on us doing all the reverse engineering ourselves, while said reverse engineering is strictly against the ToS.

Logic is flawed somewhere

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Originally Posted by xXRaineXx

I would prefer them working on more important things than numbers only a handful of people want to see.

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I would prefer that too. It's that easy right? Why have people do math if it's that easy, just throw it out there. If it's that easy, it would not take them crazy development time to provide us with info on it in the first place.

This question comes up every time. Apparently there are enough people interested in this matter. Oh, and whenever you read some random person ask "should I go for this body, or that body"? Nine out of ten times the answer is based on something that has been researched by someone and generally accepted as the better piece.

It's also peculiar they want us to find this out because "it's part of the MMO experience". Yet we can not use parsers for example.

There must be another reason. My guess is they don't even know or worse, it would expose the egregious stat design, not to mention its shallowness.

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Originally Posted by MiniPrinny

Final Fantasy XIV has a problem. And that problem is needless obfuscation of the means of potencies and secondary stats. As it stands, we are forced to attempt to reverse engineer the usefulness of our secondary stats. Due to this, we as players are, by design, lost in making intelligent decisions.

While potencies aren't as troublesome, after all, Benefic is flat out weaker than Benefic II, but we struggle to quickly understand how much weaker it is on the fly. Like, I know from math that Benefic is only .625 of Benefic II, but why must I do math to understand that difference. Why can't it be something along the lines of "Potency is equal to X% of your Attack Power, Attack Magic Power, or Healing Magic Power." There's no explanation of something so simple.

However, what is troubling is the secondary stats. Accuracy, Critical Hit Rate, Determination, Parry, Skill Speed, Spell Speed, and for healers, Piety are completely obscured.

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Sorry, but math is required every time you need to find the difference between two numbers or their ratio. That's just how it is. Even if potency was displayed as a percentage of your attack power, you'd have to do a little math to find how much bigger. Abilities will not always have easy values like 50%, 80% etc. For example, undestanding how much smaller 47% of AP is compared to 61% of AP is not any simpler than understanding the difference between 470 potency and 610 potency.

Going to agree with you on the stat thing though. This game already has a wonderfully clean way of portraying ability power but lacks means to find the power of stats. It's... weird. Something along the lines of, "Critical hit rate increases the chance to deal double damage by 1% per every <your character level> points.", would be amazing for theorycrafting.

What is the problem with potencies? it's looks pretty clear, the higher the potency the higher the damage/heal. If you have an ability with 100 potency and one with 200, it's pretty obvious which one does more damage.

You are asking to get the info on how it will reflect in battle, but did it not cross your mind that it might not depend on your stats alone?
Like said before, if you look at accuracy, every fight has a different cap, because every monster has, for example, a doge value and you need a certain accuracy value to get past it in what can be a very complex formula. (including for example character lvl and acc but also target lvl and dodge)
Some stats like skill/spell speed are easy to see the effect by just looking at your GCD.
So in the end what you want could become a full database of every monster in game with their stats and the formulas used inside the game. In the end you will still need to do some math or have some tools do it for you.

Hitting a dummy and seeing how the damage changes sounds a lot easier :)

While I do see where OP is coming from, I would like to mention this: do we really need reverse-engineering-level math basically anywhere in this game? With so much hand-holding and such vertical gear progression, I really don't think so. Even the any-time-current bleeding edge endgame (currently maybe A3S and A4S?) is just mostly just a DPS check as far as numbers are concerned, and with that - the bigger the better. That small percentage of players who actually do the endgame content will go out of their way to find the absolute best options anyway, and I guess SE just considers this to be a part of that too; for everyone and everything else, there's really no need to worry about it. ... Which is, of course, the subject of an entirely different discussion.

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Originally Posted by BreathlessTao

Even the any-time-current bleeding edge endgame (currently maybe A3S and A4S?) is just mostly just a DPS check as far as numbers are concerned, and with that - the bigger the better.

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Except for accuracy.

When I found out I only ever need 650, even if I do ultimate endgame A4S, I had almost 800 of that stuff on my gear >_>
I would have paid closer attention to my gear choices if I had known sooner I don't need that much.

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Originally Posted by Mykaelus

This is a holdover from FFXI's method of handling stats. It's meant to encourage player collaboration and data sharing.

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Yet, they don't give us an 'in-game' way to parse the data to make accurate determinations.

That's just asinine.

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Originally Posted by Kuwagami

I never quite understood why the devs insist so much on us doing all the reverse engineering ourselves, while said reverse engineering is strictly against the ToS.

Logic is flawed somewhere

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I think there is something fundamentally wrong with your argument. It might stem from the fact that you are using words you don't understand the context in which they get their meaning (hint: reverse engineering). Deriving a formula is not reverse engineering, that's call regression (curve fitting). Reverse engineering is inspecting an element to determine it's physical (or logical) structure. Using the word in the context that does not apply to engineering should have given you the hint that it doesn't mean what you think. Reverse engineering often require datamining (if you wish to determine the algorithmic or logical structure of software), disassembly (that is software disassembly for determining algorithmic structure or, completely different, hardware disassembly for determining the physical structure, or a Data Analytics (for logical structure of state machines, which incidentally can be reduced to datamining). Recording information and using algebra is not data mining.