Despite the stat squish why are we still recieving potency buffs while leveling?

Power creep is something just about every game faces through it's life. Players want new toys to play with and, especially for RPGs, they want to feel like they are growing their character. However it leads into the problem of power creep that is only going to get worse and worse the longer we ignore it. Level syncing is a good start to help make sure the old content isn't obsolete. But with every new expansion we are still scaling in power beyond what is sustainable.

SE just did a stat squish to curb power creep. Numbers were getting too high. And yet despite acknowledging the issue they still introduce more potency buffs and spells and traits that are only in effect for certain parts of the game. Scholar has it the worst. It has Ruin and then 4 different versions of Broil. Explain to me what it is about level 64 specifically that magically turns a potency of 165 from balanced to completely underpowered. Why is it that jobs like GNB can have the same basic rotation from level 26 though the rest of the game? The whole point of potency was to create a generic multiplier that you only had to set once and it was effective at any level.

Why is it necessary that every expansion be another doubling of player power? Surely it can't be for the sake of players want to see bigger numbers, because we just squished all the big numbers. I'm not saying don't make your character stronger as you level, but if all we're doing is making numbers go bigger you get that same effect already just from improving your gear.

On top of it being unnecessary it makes balancing jobs a complete nightmare. You have to spread an entire job's toolkit across more and more levels. This leads to some jobs being awful to play for certain ranges while they wait for their basic skills. Every time a job gets reworked they have to be retroactively reworked for each expansion as well, just so old content doesn't break. And it means limiting the amount of content where we're allowed to use our cool new abilities since the new stuff is always made absurdly strong. Why can't our power increase just be linear so we don't have to worry about these issues.

They didn't do it to curb power creep. They did it because the game engine literally couldn't support such high numbers, or was getting close to it at least.

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Originally Posted by AziraSyuren

They didn't do it to curb power creep. They did it because the game engine literally couldn't support such high numbers, or was getting close to it at least.

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That is still combating power creep. It's just one of the problems it causes. It still doesn't answer why they are still accelerating the problem. If they know there is a limit to how high the numbers can go, and we just had to scale back to avoid that limit, why are still climbing up to that limit faster again? Is the plan to keep stat squishing forever? There's only so many times you can do that before you spread everything too thin.

I think the oddest thing about the stat squish is how although the numbers are indeed smaller we feel notably stronger across dungeons. For anyone who has done roulettes consistently you'll see dungeons go by much faster than before. I'm not sure enough consideration was given to the overhaul. I actually want to do mechanics in lower level content and I'm seeing boss fights end way before signature mechanics ever start. Our power level in synced content feels a little ridiculous in ARR and Heavenward. Things like Cape Westwind were always a meme but more content is falling into that situation. A lot of the immersion in game comes from the struggle to overcome obstacles and I hate to. See it go completely. Even running content at Minimum Item Level has many baffled at the newfound ease.

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Originally Posted by SquigglesMajor

That is still combating power creep. It's just one of the problems it causes. It still doesn't answer why they are still accelerating the problem. If they know there is a limit to how high the numbers can go, and we just had to scale back to avoid that limit, why are still climbing up to that limit faster again? Is the plan to keep stat squishing forever? There's only so many times you can do that before you spread everything too thin.

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Yes and no. The real problem was the boss health. However, the thing is that they didn’t just target potencies. They targeted the base scaling of how much stats the gear have and how much they provide as well as how much bosses do and they have health wise. They aren’t “accelerating the problem” unless the problem was the damage players were doing themselves. And it probably isn’t a stretch of the imagination to think that they might do it again if it gets that bad.

You said it, character progression : fresh animations and the feeling of getting stronger. Especially for healers, since the dps spell is almost all you see.

Potency increases exist as a way of increasing a job's throughput relative to the pack as they level and as a way of limiting throughput in past content relative to the pack without having to add or subtract new buttons thus allowing for jobs to have progression where some jobs can get new buttons in their rotation without giving other jobs buttons they don't want at the same level range; this has nothing to do with the exponential progression of characters needing to be flattened for being exponential due to the base stats on items being exponential in growth over the course of 4+ expansions and numbers that would threaten integer overflows if unresolved.

Potencies were not reduced in response to this, they were reduced because WEAPON DAMAGE on weapons was changed to scale directly with MAGIC DAMAGE. It used to be that physical characters had to have potencies that were much higher than magical because magic damage on weapons was much higher than physical damage. Instead with the statsquish they also made Magic Damage equal to Weapon Damage, so potencies needed to be altered for physicals to revert back to parity. Now potency values have more parity across jobs (though they still won't compare directly because of traits and hidden job coefficients.)/thread

Personally I think gear is the bigger problem in power creep. I said this all the way back in ARR, I was concerned that with HW and the level cap raise we would either be having ilvl gear from the get go (which is what happened) or there would have to be some kind of massive gear reset to go back to level 60 from ilvl 130.

I always say it would have been better if they just went with much smaller ilvl numbers. For example first coil could have been ilvl 52, second coil ilvl 54 and final coil ilvl 56. We’d still have been gaining power but in much smaller increments, then when HW rolled around they could have just released level (not ilvl) 50-60 gear and then ilvl 62-66 for HW endgame and so on. It would be the same result as what we have now, our endgame gear from the previous expansion would last us until about halfway into the new expansion and then new gear would be better, but the numbers would be so much smaller. Think about it, we would be into ilvl 92 gear right now if it had gone in that direction. That is only just beating the ilvl of gear that was released in FIRST COIL. Our tanks wouldn’t even be breaking 10k Hp yet and 1k damage would still be impressive. Even if they were playing with potencies on our kits it would have a much more subtle effect if our gear numbers were that low.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

Personally I think gear is the bigger problem in power creep. I said this all the way back in ARR, I was concerned that with HW and the level cap raise we would either be having ilvl gear from the get go (which is what happened) or there would have to be some kind of massive gear reset to go back to level 60 from ilvl 130.

I always say it would have been better if they just went with much smaller ilvl numbers. For example first coil could have been ilvl 52, second coil ilvl 54 and final coil ilvl 56. We’d still have been gaining power but in much smaller increments, then when HW rolled around they could have just released level (not ilvl) 50-60 gear and then ilvl 62-66 for HW endgame and so on. It would be the same result as what we have now, our endgame gear from the previous expansion would last us until about halfway into the new expansion and then new gear would be better, but the numbers would be so much smaller. Think about it, we would be into ilvl 92 gear right now if it had gone in that direction. That is only just beating the ilvl of gear that was released in FIRST COIL. Our tanks wouldn’t even be breaking 10k Hp yet and 1k damage would still be impressive. Even if they were playing with potencies on our kits it would have a much more subtle effect if our gear numbers were that low.

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Well done, you have just made a suggestion that completely destroys any sort of character growth throughout an expansion. It would be impossible to finely tune fights to take into account the miniscule stat gains between each raid tier which means you would likely be able to clear the last fight of an expansion with the starting gear. Crafting gear becomes useless, you destroy any sort of incentive to gear up, it is just a bad suggestion overall.

However, ilevel is just a number, they can scale stats however they want between ilevels, which is basically what happened with the stat squish, make the stat scaling between ilevels smaller, which leads to smaller numbers overall.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

Well done, you have just made a suggestion that completely destroys any sort of character growth throughout an expansion. It would be impossible to finely tune fights to take into account the miniscule stat gains between each raid tier which means you would likely be able to clear the last fight of an expansion with the starting gear. Crafting gear becomes useless, you destroy any sort of incentive to gear up, it is just a bad suggestion overall.

However, ilevel is just a number, they can scale stats however they want between ilevels, which is basically what happened with the stat squish, make the stat scaling between ilevels smaller, which leads to smaller numbers overall.

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There are more than 15 other FF games including another MMO where they have balanced the game around smaller numbers, so no it wouldn’t kill any sense of character progression, you can make an increase of 10 points of defence as meaningful as 1000, but the former doesn’t cause your numbers to break the game within 4 expansions. This is exactly what the stat squish is but they could have done it earlier and made it much more extreme.

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Originally Posted by SquigglesMajor

Power creep is something just about every game faces through it's life. Players want new toys to play with and, especially for RPGs, they want to feel like they are growing their character. However it leads into the problem of power creep that is only going to get worse and worse the longer we ignore it. Level syncing is a good start to help make sure the old content isn't obsolete. But with every new expansion we are still scaling in power beyond what is sustainable.

SE just did a stat squish to curb power creep. Numbers were getting too high. And yet despite acknowledging the issue they still introduce more potency buffs and spells and traits that are only in effect for certain parts of the game. Scholar has it the worst. It has Ruin and then 4 different versions of Broil. Explain to me what it is about level 64 specifically that magically turns a potency of 165 from balanced to completely underpowered. Why is it that jobs like GNB can have the same basic rotation from level 26 though the rest of the game? The whole point of potency was to create a generic multiplier that you only had to set once and it was effective at any level.

Why is it necessary that every expansion be another doubling of player power? Surely it can't be for the sake of players want to see bigger numbers, because we just squished all the big numbers. I'm not saying don't make your character stronger as you level, but if all we're doing is making numbers go bigger you get that same effect already just from improving your gear.

On top of it being unnecessary it makes balancing jobs a complete nightmare. You have to spread an entire job's toolkit across more and more levels. This leads to some jobs being awful to play for certain ranges while they wait for their basic skills. Every time a job gets reworked they have to be retroactively reworked for each expansion as well, just so old content doesn't break. And it means limiting the amount of content where we're allowed to use our cool new abilities since the new stuff is always made absurdly strong. Why can't our power increase just be linear so we don't have to worry about these issues.

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The potency for most damage abilities was scaled back significantly, with minor "buffs" given later as you leveled. The overall damage of most abilities was nerfed. Let alone, some power creep is fine. You don't want the player to feel as strong in early content as they are in later content. This really isn't a situation to be concerned about.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

There are more than 15 other FF games including another MMO where they have balanced the game around smaller numbers, so no it wouldn’t kill any sense of character progression, you can make an increase of 10 points of defence as meaningful as 1000, but the former doesn’t cause your numbers to break the game within 4 expansions. This is exactly what the stat squish is but they could have done it earlier and made it much more extreme.

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And they can all be completed at a low level, even surviving attacks designed for high level parties.

Lets ignore stats for now as they are essentially just an arbitrary number and focus on damage/HP. Below is a table I have compiled by entering various instances at minimum ilevel as a Paladin to show the HP growth;

ilevel | HP
50 | 4114
55 | 4331
57 | 4424
60 | 4502
65 | 4719
70 | 4858
77 | 5246
80 | 5416
82 | 5509
90 | 5943
95 | 6207

Obviously, I cannot do every single ilevel as I am limited to the instances, however, lets break down how your HP would grow:
Level 50 4068 - 4424
Level 60 4502 - 4719
Level 70 4858 - 5246
Level 80 5416 - 5509 (though with an ilevel closer to 87, it would be ~5700)
Level 90 5943 - 6207

Going from ilevel X0 to X7 gives ~300 extra HP, which, by your rules is ~300 HP per expansion. As the numbers get bigger and bigger, that 300 HP means less and less (7.3% at 50 and 4.8% at level 95), which means you gain less relative strength throughout the expansions. If that is then split into raid tiers, you get less than 100 HP per raid tier, do you really think that is going to make a difference?

DPS would be a similar case. With the same scaling, that being a linear growth, I can estimate roughly what DPS you would do at certain ilevels. IIRC, in ARR, high DPS was about 500 at ilevel 130, so I will use that as a baseline. Since it is linear growth, it is a simple divide and multiply equation to get a rough estimated DPS of 192 at ilevel 50, at ilevel 56, 215. Can you really effectively tune fights to that? If we take the relative increase, it is ~11% increase, bear in mind damage is +/-5% in this game. We can to the same calculation for level 90 (346) and 96 (362) to get a 4% increase, which is something tha gets lost in the damage variance for the game, and it only gets worse as you get higher ilevels.

If you notice, in the single player titles, HP/damage/healing gain is NOT linear. It is exponential in some way. That extra 10 damage from that 1 extra strength means alot at early levels, but once you get to higher levels, getting 1 strength to give 10 extra damage....not all that impressive. That is why the trend is, higher stats, exponentially higher returns. You can see a similar trend in FFXIV. During the level cap ilevels, the gains are linear, however, because each expansion has to make you feel stronger and stronger, they effectively exponentiate your strength higher and higher. The stat squish just made the early expansion content exponentiate slower. Take Thordan, currently, minimum ilevel is 142 which gives 9852 HP, go in just level synced, ie, you are ilevel 270, you have 15330 HP, that's compared to the ~35K tanks had at the end before stat squish. ilevel 130 now gives 8702, whereas before, it was closer to 10K before. SB 17044 - 24488, used to max at ~78K. As you can tell even after the squish, there is still slight exponentiation on stats. It doesn't matter how well you balance it, because things are exponential, which is required to make you feel relatively stronger, things will at some point get too high. That is the nature of the beast. Could they have newer expansions exponentiate slower? sure, but it could cost that sense of stat progression. I suspect they have a working formula now so that they can easily squish expansions down when needed, however, even that will have its limits.

There is so much more that goes into stat growth and things getting too high than some might initially think of and far too many people think they have a solution to a problem, only for that solution to be plagued with problems. I will always encourage people to critically think about any downsides to any solutions as that is where the issues you have to fix will lie.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

There are more than 15 other FF games including another MMO where they have balanced the game around smaller numbers, so no it wouldn’t kill any sense of character progression, you can make an increase of 10 points of defence as meaningful as 1000, but the former doesn’t cause your numbers to break the game within 4 expansions. This is exactly what the stat squish is but they could have done it earlier and made it much more extreme.

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It was noted before but every FF has had an escalation of numbers. The size of the numbers is less important for what we're discussing than the rate that numbers scale.

If you look at FF12Za for example, you'll notice that the progression between weapons goes +3, +3, +5, +5,...+7, +8, +9, +15... and so on. The difference between the weapon's damage escalates at each level. However, this isn't the only form of scaling. The calculation goes ((Weapon Power+RNG)-Defense)*(1+Strength(Strength+Level))*coefficients so you not only get scaling from the weapon, but you also get a quadratic scaling from strength, and some scaling from level. So that's a Quartic level of scaling, but to make things even more rediculous, the stats themselves don't scale linearly with respect to your progress (except level), and it hits a point where you're going from hitting for 100 and before you know it, you're spanking for thousands.

Now, take that kind of scaling (which is necessary for progression to feel progressive), and now you have to do it 4 more times. Things will get out of hand. And there's no way to design to prevent it.

Let's say you want a given tier of gear to increase power by 50% over the tier's life. This means that exponential growth is required. It's not optional. expected output=[base output]*[1.5]^[number of tiers]=e^(#tiers(ln 1.5)+ln base) and there's no way to avoid that.

Of course 'well they could just do 25% power increase!' Now your formula is e^(#(ln 1.25)+ln base). 'Fine! 5%!' e^(#(ln 1.05)+ln base).

You can't get away from exponential scaling without forcing diminishing returns.

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Originally Posted by LauraAdalena

Yes and no. The real problem was the boss health. However, the thing is that they didn’t just target potencies. They targeted the base scaling of how much stats the gear have and how much they provide as well as how much bosses do and they have health wise. They aren’t “accelerating the problem” unless the problem was the damage players were doing themselves. And it probably isn’t a stretch of the imagination to think that they might do it again if it gets that bad.

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They also needed to normalize the way they calculate damage. Pre-endwalker different roles used different formulas to determine how much damage a skill would do, with Caster potency being weighed higher than Melee potency for example. Now everything runs off the same formula.