Why does this game hide essential character info?

So, when you open the character page in FFXIV, you will see ton of primary and secondary stats. Strength, tenacity, direct hit, etc.
You can see their numerical value, yet these numbers are meaningless without context, without feedback for my character.
What is my chance to crit? Exactly how much extra damage/healing/dmg reduction do my tanks get from their tenacity? How much damage reduction I gain from my defense values?

I have never seen this in any other MMORPG. I've been playing them for over a decade, I have high level characters in 5 MMOs and I dabbled in many others, and I can't remember not being able to see such basic, essential info like what is my crit chance.

I guess there are some fan-made online calculators where I put my stats and see the desired info, but that's kinda my point, I shouldn't have to rely on fan-made third party resources to see such basic stuff.

Why does it matter?
- its impossible to make any character/gear optimization, theorycrafting, without being completely reliant on player-made guides.
What is my best secondary stat? Is this piece of gear with slightly higher ilvl, but lesser amount of materia slots better? Who knows?
- it can lead to outright wrong choices when gearing up. For example, going by ingame description, Tenacity seems like such a wonderful, all-in-one stat for tanks, and new player might be tempted to stack it as much as possible. Yet when you read any tanking guide, every advanced player will tell you that tenacity is bad and you should stack CRIT and DH as tank.
- character and gear progression feels much less satisfying in this game compared to other MMOs. Yet "the loot hunt" is one of the main reasons to keep playing MMOs once you've completed the story and hit max level.
Sure, my lvl80 SAM with rankVIII materias has much more CRIT, DH, DET, than my lvl 68 DNC in Shire gear with V materias, but ultimately this tells me nothing.

The only stat whose progression you can easily see is Vitality, where you can see your HP increase with each item you equip. Everything else is hidden for some reason. Why? And why aren't more players concerned with this?

Yeah, that was one of my first thoughts when I started and I still feel like it. If you can't look at a piece of gear and instantly tell if it's better than what you currently have or not without consulting theory crafting sources first, the system failed.
In other games, getting new gloves, you felt a difference, no matter how minor it was. In FF14 your whole ilvl can go up 20 levels and the only difference you notice is you have more hp, everything else feels exctly like it did before and you'd have to use 3rd prarty tools to even see if your damage out put in increased or i there are more crits than before.

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Originally Posted by ValerianA

And why aren't more players concerned with this?

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Plenty are. They just asked this question repeatedly back in ARR, and, having been repeatedly given no answers, eventually stopped asking.

Well maybe if we keep bombarding the devs (politely ofc) they might change it, or at least give us their reasoning?
Like players kept bombarding them with male bunny outfits, playable Viera, in-game parsers etc., and either we got what we wanted, or at least we got a reply why it cannot be done.
This is first day I am posting on forums, but I have been playing since HW, and I visit the forums almost daily (Lurky McLurker at your service) and I have never seen this being discussed.
Recently we had a big Q-A session with the devs, and again nobody brought it up.

It was really off putting for me aswell when I started this game. It still is, I just roll with it because after years of no change to this despite many people asking for it, it's likely never going to change.
But it does still irk me. I'm not against looking up things myself and I enjoy theorycrafting but seeing so many meaningless numbers ingame because the game itself provides absolutely no context aside from "This number is higher. It's probably better" still bothers me.

The interface does give some explanation as to what each stat does in general terms if you hover the cursor over it in the character screen. However, they're deliberately not going to explain in detail what the mathematics do under the hood as that sort of information players would then use to exploit the game deliberately. And even keeping it secret has not stopped players already doing just that. Unfortunately, you're not going to get an in-depth explanation from the development team about this I'm afraid.

Being able to actually know the stat thresholds in games like WoW was really helpful as some stats like skill speed are genuinely useless until you hit the next breakpoint that actually lowers your GCD.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

players would then use to exploit the game deliberately. And even keeping it secret has not stopped players already doing just that.

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"Exploit" has a rather negative attribute. I don't know what should be so malicious about knowing what your stats do. Isn't it a good thing to know what your gear does?

It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.

Harder to trap players in the Skinner Box if they understand that the bigger number doesn't actually mean anything.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Being able to actually know the stat thresholds in games like WoW was really helpful as some stats like skill speed are genuinely useless until you hit the next breakpoint that actually lowers your GCD.

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this is still the case, which is why The Balance exists to do all the testing and number crunching for the community.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

they're deliberately not going to explain in detail what the mathematics do under the hood as that sort of information players would then use to exploit the game deliberately. And even keeping it secret has not stopped players already doing just that.

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So the fact that I know that I have to meld Direct Hit on my PLD to get the most DPS out of my gear is an exploit?

How?

It's generally because the numbers don't actually do anything anyway. They get higher as you level sure but they don't actually do anything..

A level 50 blm with 350 spell speed has pretty much the exact same cast time as a level 60 with 800 or a level 70 with 1100 or a level 80 with whatever a level 80 blm has.

It's been the same forever even things like crit. The number keeps on going up and up and up but the crit rates essentially stay the same....

Its just some number that arbitrarily gets bigger but doesn't actually do anything

that's why you never feel or see any increases because there generally aren't any. which I would say is one of the reasons so many players are so sick and tired of the treadmill.

In FFXI they did also hide the effects of stats, but the difference was in FFXI people knew exactly what stats did. They knew exactly how much stronger Stoneskin would be with 1 extra point of mind. Or exactly how much 1 vit would increase chakra. Or that 5 accuraracy would increase there hit rate by exactly 2.5%

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Originally Posted by Fhaerron

So the fact that I know that I have to meld Direct Hit on my PLD to get the most DPS out of my gear is an exploit?

How?

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on the flip side of the argument, they could be hiding exactly how useless Tenacity is and hiding it is the only reason it's not 100% ignored.

but in reality, its more so that stats as such as Tenacity/Determination affect different values whereas Crit/DHit are pretty straightforward in what they increase. Players are always smarter than the devs anticipate, so I can only assume they're hiding lacklusterness of these substats.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

It's generally because the numbers don't actually do anything anyway. they get higher as you level sure but they don't actually do anything..

a level 50 blm with 350 spell speed has pretty much the exact same cast time as a level 60 with 800 or a level 70 with 1100 or a level 80 with whatever a level 80 blm has.

it's been the same forever even things like crit. the number keeps on going up and up and up but the crit rates essentially stay the same....

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this is...very not true.

Besides what OP already mentioned, I'm annoyed that skills like Peloton don't tell me how much faster I'm moving. Would be nice to know how different the speed is on monk's Fists of wind vs ninja's passive runspeed trait vs Peloton etc. And all the other skills that just say "increases damage" or "increases healing". Why do they have to be so vague? Is it really that hard to say "Peloton, increases runspeed by x%"?

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Originally Posted by Fhaerron

So the fact that I know that I have to meld Direct Hit on my PLD to get the most DPS out of my gear is an exploit?

How?

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I thought there was a point where crit overtakes direct hit for tanks in general for dps gains. Is that not the case?

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Originally Posted by MomomiMomi

It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.

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Also in 11 we did not have to worry about gear being outdated every few months, ex: Rajas ring was a lvl 30 ring but was the best TP ring to use even at lvl 75 and up. Yes each job had several type of gear sets to use depending on what they were doing. I had 80 inventory slots and when I played my PLD I only had 9 slots open to hold things due to all my gear sets I would use. Theory crafting in 11 was really part of the game if you did a lot of end game things, and you could go to BG and FFXIAH to find info on the best gear setups to use.

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Originally Posted by Nicodemus_Mercy

I thought there was a point where crit overtakes direct hit for tanks in general for dps gains. Is that not the case?

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the problem is that tank gear never has any native direct hit, so literally any direct hit melded is a DPS increase.

Because dealing damage in this game has become so vastly simplified, and there are no "conditional" situations to worry about (like, this mob is vulnerable to fire, or that mob has extremely high evasion), if the exact results of the handful of stats that remain were spelled out so clearly, there'd be little or no reason to go after other pieces of gear. If the game did the math for you, and it became obvious that upgraded tomestone hat increases your damage by 2.526 DPS, while raid hat increases your damage by 2.521 DPS, there'd be no reason to go after the raid hat (except possibly for glamour).

But they want you to chase the raid hat. They want you to chase ALL the hats. So, they do their best to obfuscate which hat is BEST hat - and because there's no conditional situations, one hat will always BE Best Hat. Sure, folks will crunch the numbers and figure out the details - but it's a relatively small number of players who actually scour the Internet for that kind of thing. The bulk of players will have no idea, and just chase the stats they THINK are best. ("Oh, boy, with all this skill speed my MNK's gonna punch like E. Honda!")

It's a fundamental flaw in the design of the game. They want folks to keep playing, to stay subscribed, and to participate in as much of the content as possible. However, they've removed most of the REASON to participate in all of the content. Why were folks still farming Sky Gods in FFXI a decade after the content was added? Because in certain situations, gear from there was STILL the best to have.

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Originally Posted by MomomiMomi

It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.

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This is also what I remember. Also it's not like you have plenty of gear options. You're mostly picking between two sets at cap level, while leveling higher ilvl is pretty much the way to go, always, since stat impacts aren't meaningful in rainbow gear.

Min/maxing is also something that should take a bit of effort and distribute players across skill tiers. Obfuscating stat weights in a really simple gearing environment (2 to 4 sets at most, often times only one viable build, on rare occasion two viable builds) is a way of creating this distribution.
I really don't mind. It just means you have an opportunity to create a bit of a gap in optimizing between you and others by taking 30mn to read up on third party theorycrafting.

Its one of those weird equations that takes your level into consideration. Higher level means you need more of that stat to get the same effect. You can see this happen in Diablo 3 as well, though they go on depth and tell you what you get out of your current stat values.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

Why were folks still farming Sky Gods in FFXI a decade after the content was added?

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They are still trying to get a Diorite to drop to pop Ullikummi, to finish off that Byakko pop set.

Welcome to why I don't do the gear treadmill in this game as much as I do in World of WarCraft and Elder Scrolls Online. It's buried under layers of obfuscation.

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Originally Posted by Ayuhra

Welcome to why I don't do the gear treadmill in this game as much as I do in World of WarCraft and Elder Scrolls Online. It's buried under layers of obfuscation.

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You've got nothing to do. If you're lazy it takes literally 30s to google "FFXIV the balance" and then another couple minutes to set up your class there and get the BiS list of gear for the tier with melds and everything. No need to reinvent the wheel. Same goes with optimized rotations and openers.

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Originally Posted by Nora_of_Mira

this is...very not true.

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Are you sure? GCDs for example aren't really any faster now even when players have skill/spell speeds in the thousands than they were way back in ARR.

You can go look at logs of like gordias savage for example and compare average crit rates from jobs to what the average crit rates were for midas, creator, delta, sigma, etc etc... and see they really don't change that much at all despite the stats getting higher and higher with every tier of gear..

Speed is the same thing. Why is it that if you get synced down to say 50 and lose over 1000 points of spell speed your flare cast or your fire 3 cast isn't really any slower?
Because the stat makes no real difference at all. It just keeps getting higher and higher and doesn't really do anything.

This is why they can't make stats transparent, because they have no consistent value or effect. If you make a comparison to FFXI as an earlier posted said it was exactly the same there. In as much that stats effects were hidden yes they were.
However the effects in FFXI were measurable and consistent. You could easily work out that the 15 dex stat on Byakkos Haidate would result in a 3.75% increase to your ninjas hit rate because stat effects were consistent 1 accuracy would always result in a 0.5% boost to your hit rate. 2 dex would always equate to 1 accuracy for a 1 handed weapon user. the same was true with pretty much every stat. although hidden the effects were measurable with a high degree of precision.

It just doesn't work in 14 because the stats don't have a consistent value. A few jobs have demonstrated it quite well over the course of the game since ARR.. Where magic numbers for skill or spell speed would allow you to squeeze that extra heavy shot into something like a raging strikes window. But then suddenly you can't do that anymore because now you don't have enough speed.... So you need to pile on even more speed stats just to do what you used to be able to do with less points in that same stat...

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Originally Posted by Nora_of_Mira

the problem is that tank gear never has any native direct hit, so literally any direct hit melded is a DPS increase.

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Technically yes, But because Direct Hit only affects your chance to DH, while crit not only increases your chance to Critical but also increases the damage when you do crit, there is a point where the double dipping of crit becomes stronger than the DH increase point for point and becomes priority meld stat #1.(The above also doesn't apply to WAR, who wants det/CRT more than DH since all of their burst is guaranteed DH anyway)

At the beginning of Stormblood, it was the same. DH was king for tanks since they naturally couldn't get any, but midway through Sigmascape to the end of Alpha CRT became stronger point for point than DH. Some people have mathed it out to happen somewhere in the 3500 point range of crit, and several BiS builds for tanks are already melding crit to reach that point. The best simulated PLD builds for example are ditching several DH melds for CRT ones.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

snip

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This is another 'technically' situation.

Because of the fact they need to stat squish every expansion to prevent players from hitting 100% crit rate/100% DH rate or GCDs of 1.5s, substats are still doing something, you just need more of it for the same effect. Main stats are relatively unaffected going from expansion to expansion. But at the end of the day, more stats is still making you stronger. You have a much higher chance to crit with 3500 than with 1600 at level 80, the stats are making you more powerful. The substats just operate more on a 'staircase you gradually ascend only to be pushed down it at the end of the expansion.' type of thing.

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Originally Posted by Nicodemus_Mercy

I thought there was a point where crit overtakes direct hit for tanks in general for dps gains. Is that not the case?

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In Stormblood, yes. The caps are different again now, probably in half a year we will need to use a mix of DH & Crit again. Really depends how the caps are going to be and how much we get of x stat on our gear.

WAR's do benefit from DET too IIRC. I don't really use WAR in savage so I don't keep updated on that job.

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Originally Posted by MomomiMomi

It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.

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They also do it because they want to limit game-breaking things being discovered. FFXI for example, the great TP nerf dealing with asuran fists with relic knuckles. Due to how h2h damage was calculated, this was a 34 damage weapon that gave 20 tp per fist, with 2 attacks per round. After getting tp (2-3 attack rounds, or an icarus wing), they would need to land 5/8 hits (62.5% accuracy) to get 100% tp. Since it was a 34 damage weapon, mnks could still do ~800 dmg with asuran fists, and then have tp to do it again, and again, and again, without ever stopping.

Now imagine if people had stats to crunch together. It could result in some unintended OPness. People mentioned that WoW shows such stats and I remember a fuss over Hunters stacking shaman gear/stats (?) and having a ridiculous arcane arrow.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

It just doesnt work in 14 because the stats dont have a consistant value. a few jobs have demonstrated it quite well over the course of the game since ARR.. where magicnumbers for skill or spell speed allow you to squeeze that extra heavy shot into something like a raging strikes window. but then suddenly you cant do that becasue now you dont have enough speed.... so you need to pile on even more speed just to do what you used to be able to do with less points in that stat...

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in regards to the raw stat values from the past and now, yes that is correct. But the actual effect gained by the stats isnt computed by just raw addition (having twice as much Skill speed doesnt make 2x as fast etc) Like someone said before, our character level has to be in the equation somewhere that causes this "slower feeling" power gain.

The main thing i was taking from your post is skill/spell speed make no difference but DRG BiS currently has 3 skill speed tiers to choose from. IMO, it kind of has to be this way since we cant just level over expansions and somehow reach a 1.5 GCD.

however, if people expected that from HW to ShB we would be reaching ridiculously low GCD and super high crit rates, thats unfortunate. I cant see SE balancing it that way and we'll never be able to know how they change the potencies of stats from expansion to expansion, sadly.

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Originally Posted by MariaArvana

Technically yes, But because Direct Hit only affects your chance to DH, while crit not only increases your chance to Critical but also increases the damage when you do crit, there is a point where the double dipping of crit becomes stronger than the DH increase point for point and becomes priority meld stat #1.(The above also doesn't apply to WAR, who wants det/CRT more than DH since all of their burst is guaranteed DH anyway)

At the beginning of Stormblood, it was the same. DH was king for tanks since they naturally couldn't get any, but midway through Sigmascape to the end of Alpha CRT became stronger point for point than DH. Some people have mathed it out to happen somewhere in the 3500 point range of crit, and several BiS builds for tanks are already melding crit to reach that point. The best simulated PLD builds for example are ditching several DH melds for CRT ones.

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thanks, im not able to keep up with all the different tank melds atm as I'm still only gearing up DRG.

Most of the time it doesn’t matter.

Best in slot here is highest iLevel in all but rare cases where there was a bad decision by the devs or where the crafted iLevel is below the max iLevel but extremely close, and you’re comparing a crafted overmeld with something and meed to actually look at the stats...

Usually if the craft gear has the same iLevel, the stats are the same.

So then you have melding. And for some jobs this is going to only make a 1% difference at best while for others it’s “can do rotation” vs “rotation won’t work”...
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So sometimes not knowing the stats is no issue and sometimes it’s vital...

I guess I’ve just argued myself out of my point...

At the least I would love to be able to see what my actual GCD is... that’s the most common place where you want a specific value not too high or too low...

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Originally Posted by Makeda

At the least I would love to be able to see what my actual GCD is... that’s the most common place where you want a specific value not too high or too low...

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I just mouse over any of my weaponskills and look at the tooltip, but now that i type that, yeah I think there should be a better way than that.

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Originally Posted by Nora_of_Mira

however, if people expected that from HW to ShB we would be reaching ridiculously low GCD and super high crit rates, thats unfortunate. I cant see SE balancing it that way and we'll never be able to know how they change the potencies of stats from expansion to expansion, sadly.

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I don't think its anyhting extreme like that.
I just think its easy to see why people think stats are boring and meaningless when you never actually gain anything from them because they're always adjusting potencies.

I also think its down to design. FFXI worked around a hidden stat many referred to as DLVL which scaled your stats according to a basic level difference between you and whatever you were fighting. and that always meant that you felt stat differences.

I sometimes think XIV would be better with something similar.. At least then if a level 80 player went and did Ifrit Ex unsynced he might actually see a difference in his crit rates by seeing them skyrocket, but when you unsync to 80 and your crit rates against a level 50 mob are the exact same they are against a level 80 then what does that stat actually do for you???

Or even just have some variance in monster stats. Mobs that are super slow but super heavy armored, mobs that are soft and squishy but evasive as hell... there's a lot they could do to cater for ever increasing stats without constantly changing the potencies and removing any gains..

Where as now I can step out of Ul'dah throw a shield at a level 1 bug and hit it for almost the exact same damage as I would throwing that shield at a level 80 boss.. It's kinda weird to think that boss has the the exact same defense as a level 80 bug... the only difference between them is the boss has way more hp..

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Originally Posted by MomomiMomi

It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.

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No.
It would be meaningless in FFXI because, like a lot of other RPG, calculations involve enemy stats and enemies have a lot of special characteristics and traits.
Estimation is possible, but the variety of enemies makes it limited (for example the game can tell the player character has around 90% hit rate on most enemies with his current equipment, but it no longer work against an evasive enemy)
Giving accurate number like the OP is suggesting is only possible in shallow games like "modern" MMO.

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Originally Posted by Nora_of_Mira

I just mouse over any of my weaponskills and look at the tooltip, but now that i type that, yeah I think there should be a better way than that.

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I’ve never seen my GCD listed, but will recheck.

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Originally Posted by Makeda

I’ve never seen my GCD listed, but will recheck.

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It's the recast time.

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Being able to actually know the stat thresholds in games like WoW was really helpful as some stats like skill speed are genuinely useless until you hit the next breakpoint that actually lowers your GCD.

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the silly thing is that you can actually know all these things from datamining, and confirm them through parsing.

They just dont display them.

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I thought there was a point where crit overtakes direct hit for tanks in general for dps gains. Is that not the case?

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This is correct.

Because crit affects crit chance and crit damage, it scales exponentially and will eventually outscale everything for almost everyone. It tends to happen at either the .2 or .4 patch (this expansion looks likely it might start happening at .2 for a lot of classes. Healers are already safe to get into their crit/det melds, but that has a lot to do with how modular piety is and how questionable spellspeed is right now)

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

The interface does give some explanation as to what each stat does in general terms if you hover the cursor over it in the character screen. However, they're deliberately not going to explain in detail what the mathematics do under the hood as that sort of information players would then use to exploit the game deliberately. And even keeping it secret has not stopped players already doing just that. Unfortunately, you're not going to get an in-depth explanation from the development team about this I'm afraid.

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Taking the (normally unnecessary) effort to be less ignorant about the core elements of one's game is not cheating.

Edit: You know what feels an awful lot like cheating, though? Developers hiding what stats do so they don't have to balance them well.

I tried figuring out the cure formulas way back, but what kept throwing me off is the variance between the min and max values. I know crit basically doubles the final value, but I never figured out the chance.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

I dont think its anyhting like that. i just think its easy to see why people think stats are boring and meaningless when you never gain anything from them because they're always adjusting potencies.

I also think its down to design. FFXI worked around a hidden stat many referreed to as DLVL which scaled your stats according to a basic level difference between you and whatever you were fighting. and that always meant that you felt stat differences.

I sometimes think XIV would be better with something similar.. at least then if a level 80 player went and did ifrit ex unsynced he might actually see a difference in his crit rates by seeing them skyrocket but when you unsync to 80 and your crit rates against a level 50 mob are the exact same they are against a level 80 then what does that stat actually do for you.....

or even just have some varience in monster stats. mobs that are super slow but super heavy armoured mobs that are soft and squishy but evasive as hell... there's a lot they could do to catar for increasing stats without constantly changing the potencies and removing any gains.. where as now i can step out of uldah throw a shield at a level 1 bug and hit it for almost the exact same damage as a level 80 boss.. it's kinda weird to think that boss has the same defence as a level 80 bug... the only difference between them is the boss has more hp..

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Also curious if our defense makes any real difference. Was running some low level dungeon unsync the other day to get WT done, and I swear trash mobs were hitting me for 25dmg or so, as far as I remember that should be pretty similar to the damage they did when I was level 20 with 300 hp or so lol.

I've subbed 4+ years.I am here after wanting to understand stats better for tanks--my PLD--WOW! What's crazy to me is that I really never thought much about the stats because, as mentioned, player created content always was available .A couple weeks ago, I was re-reading the short stat narratives, and questions popped up that I've thought about many times, yet never sought answers.

OP, I applaud your post--more players should herald the observation. I'd like to add to OP's outspokenness my reoccurring boggle throughout my subscription tenure. I am tired--and apologize if I like clarity..

On our character UI window we have an operational button with the ability to equip a personal inventory BiS.
1. Is SE algorithm correct? Have we merely been duped by a covert organization that has purposely distorted stat weights so as to retain ownership of the ranking on the site that shall not be named? Seriously, who is correct: a) SE Devs OR b) FFXIV content creator X?

2. Why would the above mentioned BiS in-game tool NOT fit us with BiS? Is it that content creators engines churn out gear sets that focus solely on maximum damage output? --while SE's calc does some function that adds job specific variable to its equation (e.g. piety, tennacity)?

3. I have experienced this with crafted HQ versus patch raid gear versus tomestone. All MAIN STATS equal--the only difference being "sub stats." The following is merely one recount as it's the freshest in my mind. I outfit pld with 350 norm gear. 5.05 begins, and so with my avatar, I penat-meld HQ acc's(neck & a ring) plus penta up a chest and leg slot. I manually equip the penta-melded, replacing the norm 350. If i go to the in-game BiS solver, it wants to put the norm gear back onto my character. I ignore it. I have been omni thru SB, and so I glam alot. That said, I use the BiS solver often as a quick check to make sure I'm not slotting any ilv 1 pieces I was glam geeking on. I have seen the norm pieces from want to take the slots over my pentas though they haven't been worn for a few instances. THEN! Magically! The BiS solver no longer wants to place them on my avatar--I sure hope someone else has witnessed this!
Why does this happen? What is going on?

4. FFXIV demands that X amount of dps be doled out on X boss in X amount of time or you will be served an enrage.The dps pld skills have tooltips that contain their potency, and this allows me to craft a rotation without player created guides(yes,I know...pld is on the simpler side) Stats that affect the effect of my dps in any given instance are an unknown--though absolutely necessary to aid a party in taking down a boss under SE's fight formula of partyDPS>(Boss HP/Instance Enrage Timersecs .
I am a bit tired, but please do not read as salty. The OP has a very legitimate question.I hope it entices converstion and a SE response. Peace.