Scale back Critical Hit

Controversial topic to a lot of people, but I figured I'd put this out there from a recent discussion I had in a different thread: Critical Hit needs to be scaled back.

Considering that we've had many gripes with how the current meta is always 2 minute Burst, one of the main issues in that meta is Crit Variance.

Crit Variance refers to the difference between dealing a Critical Direct Hit and a normal hit within a raid buff window.

This variance has caused issues namely with the start of the current tier, as even World First groups had to either swap jobs or run multiple PERFECT runs at optimal levels to even manage the DPS Check to get into P8S Phase 2 before the HP Nerf.

For those wondering "Why should we reduce Critical Hit?", the Critical Hit stat refers to both the chance of hitting a Critical Hit, AND the damage scaling of said Critical Hit. Having this dual-use has made it a favorite since Stormblood's Critical Hit issues where it scaled too high.

I'd say we're at that time again, except in a different form - namely where having the 2 Minute Burst Window has caused Critical Hit Variance to become a major issue in dealing the damage required in content, as I hope the development team has realized.

As much as I hate the 2 minute burst window, we should at least address this while waiting for them to actually do something about the burst window itself come 7.0.

The more damage is focused into unreliable crits, the more we are at risk of having balancing situations where you can have a perfect run but still not beat enrage due to bad crit rng. Once our stats get so high again that crits become reliable again this problem will solve itself but at that point we are probably also looking at the next stat squish. Which would start this entire thing over again.

I think the bigger issue is that secondary stats are pretty awful and need a redesign to make other options compelling. When your secondary stats for everyone are crit > everything else you have messed that one up. Good issue to bring up regardless.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

The more damage is focused into unreliable crits, the more we are at risk of having balancing situations where you can have a perfect run but still not beat enrage due to bad crit rng. Once our stats get so high again that crits become reliable again this problem will solve itself but at that point we are probably also looking at the next stat squish. Which would start this entire thing over again.

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This became a specific problem with the 2 Minute Burst Meta that was created by the development team. Crit Variance did not have a major effect in any other expansion than this one.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

Once our stats get so high again that crits become reliable again this problem will solve itself but at that point we are probably also looking at the next stat squish. Which would start this entire thing over again.

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The problem is, stat scaling is effectively reset with each expansion, however, this problem has only appeared in EW and not other expansions.

The vast majority of this issue is down to the 2 minute meta. With everything lining up every 2 minutes, that is where you get massive spikes in damage, which means crit RNG has a bigger influence on the damage. Of course, the next question is, why was this never an issue before? Well, no 2 minute meta. Everything lined up at the start of a fight and every 6 minutes after that, with smaller bursts every minute based on job cooldowns. This means damage is less spikey and crit RNG has a lesser impact on final damage.

As for the solution. One of the easiest ways is to get rid of the 2 minute meta to flatten out the DPS variance through the fight. Another is to go after the stat itself. This can either be by making it scale differently, or altering the stat completely. This could be by making it just crit rate or crit damage, or, for a more drastic change, split the crit stat into 2 and have, say, the crit stat affect the chance and repurpose DH to affect the damage. This would prevent the double scaling that is inherent with crit and I suspect could lead to more interesting builds, focusing either on crit rate or crit damage.

That's just my thought on it though.

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Originally Posted by Amenara

I think the bigger issue is that secondary stats are pretty awful and need a redesign to make other options compelling. When your secondary stats for everyone are crit > everything else you have messed that one up. Good issue to bring up regardless.

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And that's where we need to look at the functionality of stats. Direct Hit is the second best stat in the game next to Determination, as DH provides a chance of dealing 25% more damage and Determination raises your damage floor and healing done. Critical Hit infinitely scales upward in terms of the rate it can proc and the damage it can deal.

If we're to look at stats as a whole, there are a few stats to consider reworking:

Tenacity - Tank-only stat that reduces damage taken. It reduces damage taken very, VERY slightly, and only slightly raises damage done. Not a good stat to invest into.
Piety - A stat that Healers are familiar with, they typically only want to reach a certain piety(even if that Piety is 0 on gear and melds) to be able to handle their MP Economy effectively.
Skill/Spell Speed - A stat that determines your GCD. Definitely needs looking at, as its only purpose is to enforce certain GCD tiers and not provide much else. It's been the bane of some jobs' existence as well.

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

And that's where we need to look at the functionality of stats. Direct Hit is the second best stat in the game next to Determination, as DH provides a chance of dealing 25% more damage and Determination raises your damage floor and healing done. Critical Hit infinitely scales upward in terms of the rate it can proc and the damage it can deal.

If we're to look at stats as a whole, there are a few stats to consider reworking:

Tenacity - Tank-only stat that reduces damage taken. It reduces damage taken very, VERY slightly, and only slightly raises damage done. Not a good stat to invest into.
Piety - A stat that Healers are familiar with, they typically only want to reach a certain piety(even if that Piety is 0 on gear and melds) to be able to handle their MP Economy effectively.
Skill/Spell Speed - A stat that determines your GCD. Definitely needs looking at, as its only purpose is to enforce certain GCD tiers and not provide much else. It's been the bane of some jobs' existence as well.

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I think I remember reading somewhere about Yoshida wanting to redesign secondaries at some point but I am not sure where he talked about it. I agree, Tenacity is a junk stat because of how poorly it scales and how little the damage reduction matters with the biggest concern being tank busters instead of steady damage throughout a fight along with healers being very strong in the healing department. I wish there was a way to make skill speed akin to haste stat in FFXI, but unfortunately that would require a major combat rework to make auto-attacks more impactful and have a lot more of your skills CDs affected by the stat (bringing us closer to WoW combat I guess :/ ). Piety is more or less a junk stat I imagine got implemented because the people who redesigned substats in ShB ran out of ideas and if I had to guess and expected MP economy to matter at some level.

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Originally Posted by Amenara

I think I remember reading somewhere about Yoshida wanting to redesign secondaries at some point but I am not sure where he talked about it. I agree, Tenacity is a junk stat because of how poorly it scales and how little the damage reduction matters with the biggest concern being tank busters instead of steady damage throughout a fight along with healers being very strong in the healing department. I wish there was a way to make skill speed akin to haste stat in FFXI, but unfortunately that would require a major combat rework to make auto-attacks more impactful and have a lot more of your skills CDs affected by the stat (bringing us closer to WoW combat I guess :/ ). Piety is more or less a junk stat I imagine got implemented because the people who redesigned substats in ShB ran out of ideas and if I had to guess and expected MP economy to matter at some level.

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Piety's been here for quite a while, actually - since inception. Its use hasn't changed at all, other than just the amount of MP regenerated from it. It used to raise your MP ceiling, I think, back in Heavensward and ARR when it actually mattered. Now that it doesn't matter as much due to capping at 10k MP for all jobs, it is a junk stat as you say - but some healer builds still need it to an extent to make sure they don't run OoM in a raid setting, particularly Savage or Ultimate.

No.. please give me back my crit variance. Do you have any idea how absolutely boring auto crits are? May as well just remove crit as a function at that point.

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

Piety's been here for quite a while, actually - since inception. Its use hasn't changed at all, other than just the amount of MP regenerated from it. It used to raise your MP ceiling, I think, back in Heavensward and ARR when it actually mattered. Now that it doesn't matter as much due to capping at 10k MP for all jobs, it is a junk stat as you say - but some healer builds still need it to an extent to make sure they don't run OoM in a raid setting, particularly Savage or Ultimate.

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Completely forgot about Piety being around back in the day.

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Originally Posted by Ransu

No.. please give me back my crit variance. Do you have any idea how absolutely boring auto crits are? May as well just remove crit as a function at that point.

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You know how frustrating it is trying to fit a Critical Direct Hit in a damage window? Because Auto Crits aren't what I'm asking for.

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

Tenacity - Tank-only stat that reduces damage taken. It reduces damage taken very, VERY slightly, and only slightly raises damage done. Not a good stat to invest into.

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I disagree with the assessment that it's slight because it can reduce the incoming damage by 10%. The damage reduction is just about fine, it's just that we can get away without it. Even if it was 20% or 30% mitigation, nobody would care because we use Rampart, Sentinel and Sheltron on the busters and have the defense stat and a trait that reduces damage. Tanks survive mechanics that everyone else in the raid can't, including ones that are supposed to wipe the entire party, so why would they need yet more mitigation? Additionally, once you gear up as weeks progress, the extra Vitality makes up for not having Tenacity by giving everyone more room for error. When you combine these facts with how it increases damage less than Determination, a lot of people will choose the piece with Determination on it over the piece with Tenacity on it.

If someone is of the mindset to help the healers as much as possible with the Abyssos dots at the expense of their damage, they already have plenty of reason to stack Tenacity, but let's be honest, everyone just goes to The Balance or their friends reiterate information from there to avoid Tenacity, so they will avoid it even if it's 20%, 30% or 40% mitigation. They can say "it could be useful for prog" but people will just skip past that, seek out a BiS list and use it.

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Skill/Spell Speed - A stat that determines your GCD. Definitely needs looking at, as its only purpose is to enforce certain GCD tiers and not provide much else. It's been the bane of some jobs' existence as well.

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Skill/Spell Speed increases the damage of dots/damage areas and auto-attacks as well. I don't think that this stat is actually a problem itself. The problem is that we have strict rotations that can be messed up by using it and there will always be a meta, and that meta is regarded as being crit. If we got rid of crit and dh, jobs without too strict or unaffected rotations might actually use it.

There will always be a meta stat, especially while we have crit and dh available to all jobs. Without those it would probably be different stats for each job.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

If someone is of the mindset to help the healers as much as possible with the Abyssos dots at the expense of their damage, they already have plenty of reason to stack Tenacity, but let's be honest, everyone just goes to The Balance or their friends reiterate information from there to avoid Tenacity, so they will avoid it even if it's 20%, 30% or 40% mitigation. They can say "it could be useful for prog" but people will just skip past that, seek out a BiS list and use it.

There will always be a meta stat, especially while we have crit and dh available to all jobs. Without those it would probably be different stats for each job.

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I think with heals being so strong is the biggest mitigating factor for wanting Tenacity as well. If there is little to no need for healers to burn a GCD on healing the tank then why would the tank need more mitigation when they can stack more effective sub stats. There 100% is a meta, but the meta is dps is king which makes things that dont contribute or contribute less trash stats past any breakpoints you want or need.

Square tried to mitigate the no-GCD healing meta by making bleeds ubiquitous in Abyssos. The problems with that approach are numerous.

• They want to make healing harder without scaring unskilled healers, which are practically mutually exclusive goals
• They made it a mitigation check instead of a healing check, which is a party responsibility that's blamed on healers when things go south
• oGCD healing is still meta, because free and instant always beats slow with an opportunity cost
• Their desire to make GCD healing more important is entirely rooted in "because that's what healers are supposed to do", which ignores how dreadfully boring GCD healing spells as currently designed are.

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Originally Posted by Amenara

I think the bigger issue is that secondary stats are pretty awful and need a redesign to make other options compelling. When your secondary stats for everyone are crit > everything else you have messed that one up. Good issue to bring up regardless.

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Gosh I agree with this so hard. I know people here hate talking about WoW, but I think they did sub-stats pretty decently. Everything isn't "you only want crit ever", some specs actually want more haste and/or mastery (mastery does different things depending on the spec, and in some specs it's VERY strong).

Haste is actually desirable in large amounts sometimes, and not just for meme builds (gotta go fast BLM for example) or "to a certain point" or "for comfort". And unlike spell speed/skill speed, it doesn't run as much of a risk of completely screwing up your rotation if you accidentally get too much (I can never seriously use my SMN with my spell speed addiction for my BLM, but fire 4 go BRRRRRRRRRRRR). Haste also increases HoT/DoT speed which feels really nice for classes that use those, I'm not entirely sure why spell/skill speed increase damage instead of rate???

Versatility is basically determination, but better (increases your damage and healing by a % and reduces damage taken by half that percent).

As said before, mastery does different things for different specs, but for some specs it's very strong. Like for resto shamans, it basically turns every healing spell into astro's essential dignity.

In comparison to WoW's substats, FF14's substats just... feel bad. I don't get excited that I just got a new piece of gear with crit on it... because I'm going to meld crit anyways.

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Originally Posted by Amenara

I think the bigger issue is that secondary stats are pretty awful and need a redesign to make other options compelling. When your secondary stats for everyone are crit > everything else you have messed that one up. Good issue to bring up regardless.

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The nature of MMO players is always going to be "what combination of gear/melds/rotation will yield the most DPS?" And when they find that combination, that'll be the "new crit." The closest we've ever been to having to actually think about what gear to choose was back when tanks could go with STR or VIT melds on accessories and we had accuracy thresholds. On Day 1 of a new gear tier, it was pretty clear what BiS would be... but not how to get to BiS while maintaining minimum accuracy and maximum crit.

What we have now is mostly "highest iLvl that has crit and no Skill/Spell speed." The minimal thought process we have is what to do when our gear options are higher iLvl without crit vs 10 iLvl lower with crit. That's about it.

I think people whine too much about this and possible gear wrong.. maybe the gearing is more towards DET and DH...

Also for any given window it is all about skipping mechanics... if lower crit rate does this, then it also get more difficult to skip a mechanic... skipping mechanics in raids = bad and lowers the players skill of being able to actually deal with these mechanics...

Everyone that play this game know that every boss Savage as none Savage all run on a scripted run and if you can pass the time limits you will entirely skip certain mechanics.

Let it stay as it is, if it mean it is more difficult so be it, if you need the next tier to beat the previous.. so be it.

Also main stat is STR, DEX whichever stat that adds to your main attributes.. CRT, DET, DH,TNC, SPD, PT, SPS is all counted as secondary stats.. and most of them you can only raise the percentage of whichever thing by a couple of points by adding to.

Revamp current Crit stat into Critical Damage%

Get rid of current Direct Hit stat, replace it with Crit%.

...Maybe.

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Originally Posted by Amenara

I think I remember reading somewhere about Yoshida wanting to redesign secondaries at some point but I am not sure where he talked about it. I agree, Tenacity is a junk stat because of how poorly it scales and how little the damage reduction matters with the biggest concern being tank busters instead of steady damage throughout a fight along with healers being very strong in the healing department. I wish there was a way to make skill speed akin to haste stat in FFXI, but unfortunately that would require a major combat rework to make auto-attacks more impactful and have a lot more of your skills CDs affected by the stat (bringing us closer to WoW combat I guess :/ ). Piety is more or less a junk stat I imagine got implemented because the people who redesigned substats in ShB ran out of ideas and if I had to guess and expected MP economy to matter at some level.

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The issue with Tenacity is two fold:

First problem, tank has too many defensive CD already, and all the TB mechanic has always been about them using their CD correctly to survive. Tenacity never really played a role in determining whether the tank live or die to a buster.

That leave Tenacity as a damage reduction stat is only meaningful for AOE and Auto attack. Tank pretty much just shrug off the former, and auto-attack come down to one thing: how often does a healer has to heal you for auto? Basically, it needs to reduce the damage from auto enough that it will save the healer one single target heal. The issue is ... healer's single heal are very strong, so the damage reduction have to be massive as well, otherwise all it does it adds overheal on the healer, which is the second problem.

Frankly the tank design in FF14 does not really lend itself to a passive "tank" stat. Pretty much all of their defensive cool down are duration base instead of hit base (like TBN). For example, in dungeon, with proper CD tank can have almost have 100% up time on their mit unless the DPS is really bad, and thus passive damage reduction is negligible.

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Originally Posted by Raven2014

The issue with Tenacity is two fold:

First problem, tank has too many defensive CD already, and all the TB mechanic has always been about them using their CD correctly to survive. Tenacity never really played a role in determining whether the tank live or die to a buster.

That leave Tenacity as a damage reduction stat is only meaningful for AOE and Auto attack. Tank pretty much just shrug off the former, and auto-attack come down to one thing: how often does a healer has to heal you for auto? Basically, it needs to reduce the damage from auto enough that it will save the healer one single target heal. The issue is ... healer's single heal are very strong, so the damage reduction have to be massive as well, otherwise all it does it adds overheal on the healer, which is the second problem.

Frankly the tank design in FF14 does not really lend itself to a passive "tank" stat. Pretty much all of their defensive cool down are duration base instead of hit base (like TBN). For example, in dungeon, with proper CD tank can have almost have 100% up time on their mit unless the DPS is really bad, and thus passive damage reduction is negligible.

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100% agree, and that's not even talking about self-healing on tanks. All of this is kind of why I'd prefer they just go back to the drawing board when it comes to secondary stats since it looks like they are just going to double down on current combat design and not change that.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

If someone is of the mindset to help the healers as much as possible with the Abyssos dots at the expense of their damage, they already have plenty of reason to stack Tenacity, but let's be honest, everyone just goes to The Balance or their friends reiterate information from there to avoid Tenacity

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Good.

As a healer, the best way to help with Abyssos dots and autos is to play your job well. Not stack tenacity and sacrifice dps. The entire tier can be done without needing to GCD heal tanks. This is another reason tenacity is worthless except as a small set of training wheels while learning a job. Everything can be covered by playing well.

Imagine if Piety and Tenacity were actually useful stats!

Shame 90% of healer gear gets Piety for mana problems that dont exist outside of WHM.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

If someone is of the mindset to help the healers as much as possible with the Abyssos dots at the expense of their damage, they already have plenty of reason to stack Tenacity, but let's be honest, everyone just goes to The Balance or their friends reiterate information from there to avoid Tenacity, so they will avoid it even if it's 20%, 30% or 40% mitigation. They can say "it could be useful for prog" but people will just skip past that, seek out a BiS list and use it.

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If somebody is in the Mindset to help healers, Meld for damage and end the fight faster. (Also do mechanics correctly).

Building defensive in an offensive orientated game is a terrible design choice.

The only job that melds tenacity is Warrior, and thats just when Crit/Det are already capped on an item since DET and SKS are now dead stats to them (Thanks devs).

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Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

Gosh I agree with this so hard. I know people here hate talking about WoW, but I think they did sub-stats pretty decently. Everything isn't "you only want crit ever", some specs actually want more haste and/or mastery (mastery does different things depending on the spec, and in some specs it's VERY strong).

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A Mastery stat would probably increase Tenacity for tanks and Piety for healers. I prefer the system we have that just makes a category for Role, otherwise the stat names become lackluster and we may as well just get rid of substats and have pure potency, weapon damage and attack power.

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I'm not entirely sure why spell/skill speed increase damage instead of rate???

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Because there is a fixed tick rate of 3 seconds and increasing the damage has mostly the same effect as increasing the tick rate, which is increasing overall damage. Probably a workaround.

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Versatility is basically determination, but better (increases your damage and healing by a % and reduces damage taken by half that percent).

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So it's Tenacity.

If a fight is clearable with all players getting 0 crits, I have no problem with high crit variance.
What is boring though, is attacks always crit/crit+DH because that's how the burst is designed.

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Originally Posted by Raven2014

That leave Tenacity as a damage reduction stat is only meaningful for AOE and Auto attack. Tank pretty much just shrug off the former, and auto-attack come down to one thing: how often does a healer has to heal you for auto? Basically, it needs to reduce the damage from auto enough that it will save the healer one single target heal. The issue is ... healer's single heal are very strong, so the damage reduction have to be massive as well, otherwise all it does it adds overheal on the healer, which is the second problem.

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Not only that but autos also just don't hit that frequently. In savage it always seems like the boss does like 3 or 4 autos before it starts casting something which stops autos, and often during mechanics (Snake and Centaur in P8S for example) there's just none going out. Still good to try to have a mit up for them when you can but yeah, not enough to want to stack tenacity.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

If a fight is clearable with all players getting 0 crits, I have no problem with high crit variance.
What is boring though, is attacks always crit/crit+DH because that's how the burst is designed.

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I'd have no problems with this either - sadly we live in a world that relies on variance in some fights, and even then for people who aren't as high a skill level in Savage it will still take some variance for them to win a fight even doing the mechanics correctly.

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

This became a specific problem with the 2 Minute Burst Meta that was created by the development team. Crit Variance did not have a major effect in any other expansion than this one.

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Yeap because if you don’t crit now that’s fine you will later. It averages out. But with the big windows such a massive portion of your damage is loaded into these short windows so if you don’t crit there it doesn’t really matter if you do later.

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Originally Posted by Raven2014

The issue with Tenacity is two fold:

First problem, tank has too many defensive CD already, and all the TB mechanic has always been about them using their CD correctly to survive. Tenacity never really played a role in determining whether the tank live or die to a buster.

That leave Tenacity as a damage reduction stat is only meaningful for AOE and Auto attack. Tank pretty much just shrug off the former, and auto-attack come down to one thing: how often does a healer has to heal you for auto? Basically, it needs to reduce the damage from auto enough that it will save the healer one single target heal. The issue is ... healer's single heal are very strong, so the damage reduction have to be massive as well, otherwise all it does it adds overheal on the healer, which is the second problem.

Frankly the tank design in FF14 does not really lend itself to a passive "tank" stat. Pretty much all of their defensive cool down are duration base instead of hit base (like TBN). For example, in dungeon, with proper CD tank can have almost have 100% up time on their mit unless the DPS is really bad, and thus passive damage reduction is negligible.

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Anything that adds stacks though... if the gear no matter what you do got some of it on then it can really hurt either other than a bit more protection and a bit more damage?

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Originally Posted by DixieBellOCE

If somebody is in the Mindset to help healers, Meld for damage and end the fight faster. (Also do mechanics correctly).

Building defensive in an offensive orientated game is a terrible design choice.

The only job that melds tenacity is Warrior, and thats just when Crit/Det are already capped on an item since DET and SKS are now dead stats to them (Thanks devs).

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Even warrior melds 0 tenacity since they changed how direct hit works, it's all crit where possible and direct hit everywhere else now...and I guess 2 DET melds for hitting the next tier there.


But my main problem isn't even with crit variance, or how potency bloat on our abilities and the 2 minute meta have made the problem that much worse, but with how utterly boring the substats are in general. They're all just "increases damage by XYZ", nerfing crit just means you'll stack one of the other "increases damage by XYZ" stats and get slightly less rng on your dps.

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Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

I'm not entirely sure why spell/skill speed increase damage instead of rate???

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Jeeqbit already mentioned it but that's because this game's engine literally can't make DoTs tick faster, they're bound to server ticks which is estimated to be every 3 seconds.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Because there is a fixed tick rate of 3 seconds and increasing the damage has mostly the same effect as increasing the tick rate, which is increasing overall damage. Probably a workaround.

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It achieves the same result but the gameplay "feel" is completely different. It's hard to explain but if you ever played Affliction Warlock or Shadow Priest in WoW and stacked haste you know what I mean.

when everyone crits all the time
no one crits ever

I'd not object to undoing the inner release stack change and having it as a 15s duration again. Stacking speed to hit 5 fell cleaves felt a lot better than "eh capped on crit, dh it is", and it also allowed for silliness in bozja with haste and blood rage