With the removal of 2min stackable raid buffs the value of Skill/spell speed will naturally increase because "drifting" or having your big hits not line up with the burst window every 2 mins is no longer a punishment for going through your rotation faster than a certain speed. This will allow Speed to gain value as a stat for resource generation compared to Crit's current dominance of extra damage on big hits but with Crit double dipping with both chance or chits and damage there is still a risk it remains the dominate stat in Evercold if rotations still end in big beefy hits. I believe more can be done to diversify the value of secondary stats between jobs going into Evercold.
(some ideas borrowed from ForsakenRoe)
-Merge skill and spell speed for the sake of mixed jobs like DRK. Also just QoL when reading gear stats.
-Split Crit into Crit Chance and Crit Damage
-Remove Direct hit because it’s just “did my crit crit?”
-Make Determination only benefit DPS as the dps only Ten/Piety keep each locked to the gear for jobs of that role (this only really matters sub lvl 50 where DoW and DoM lump multiple roles together)
-have more auto crits that don’t scale off of crit chance.
What does this accomplish? Currently we have too many stats that are just “do more damage” Crit is more and bigger burst of dmg, Direct hit is everything has another chance to be bigger, and Determination is straight throughput of damage. Because Crit was the best scaling “do more” stat it was prioritized.
By splitting Crit into chance and damage and removing DHit we get a choice between increasing the rate we get burst of damage, making our burst bigger, or making our overall damage bigger.
By having auto crits that don’t benefit from crit chance in any way we can devalue crit chance while increasing the value of Crit damage and Det.
For rotations that have moments of big burst but low base rotation damage and no auto crits, Det loses value because increasing the base rotation is worth less than getting a chance at a crit on your burst and a bigger crit.
That's a basic change to give some variety with just the stats as they work now but we can do more.
We’re no longer worried about drift and trying to fit in specific party wide windows lets have some fun. To double down on diversifying stats in Evercold we can change how individual jobs interact with various stats. Strategically assigned Auto Crits (i.e. don’t put them on everyone and everything) will change some approach to gearing and Speed will change the feel of rotations on their own but that leaves us with Crits and Det/Ten/Piety (I’m just going to call them Role Stats). Leaving Crit as just “maybe we do more damage" is a little boring and Role Stats are fairly bland passive throughput so lets spice them up:
-add more tie-ins for procs to be based off of Crits. (i.e. Dancer feather procs or cd reduction)
-Scale some ability effects off Role Stats (increase AST card effects, Sheltron dmg reduction, Trick attack’s ninja damage amp, Bard song heals, etc…) or they can effect the proc rate of certain abilities too (but maybe don’t stack with crit chance)
If you want something to have a ~25% proc rate but think a moderate amount of crit should give you ~15% crit chance then give the ability itself or the job as a whole 10% crit chance with a trait or make the job itself receive 66% more crit rating from gear. You can also use these trait tricks to either have a job benefit more from a stat than other jobs or make them less reliant on gear for that stat devaluing it for them (1%->2% from gear is double the crit rate but 10% baseline -> 11% is only a 10% crit rate increase by comparison).
Role Stat effects don’t even really have to be good for the job but they should add a little something for flavor. 10% Ten meaning your Sheltron is a 16.5% damage reduction instead of 15% isn’t going to be game changing but you’ll still get the base damage increase and damage taken reduction from Ten so it’s just a little extra flavor. I can hear someone shouting from the back “thats just WoW’s Mastery stat” ehn kinda but with more guaranteed baseline effect of increased damage/damage reduction/mana regen based on role. Now you could tune it so that certain effect increases make it the desired stat for a job but that might be too bold for this game.
How this could play out:
Take MNK, it likes to cycle through its rotation for chakra and moderate burst in steel peak. So the goal is do it faster and do it harder = det/spd maybe crit as third.
SAM likes big critty slices. Bring back kaiten now that other buttons have been consolidated and make kaiten cause the next spell to auto crit. Generate double kenki whenever you crit with basic abilities. Now they favor crit chance for more auto crit setups and crit dmg/det for the juiciest slices after a kaiten.
SMN cycles through rotations fast to get to the big birds but want more chances for big birds to crit don’t care about lower gem cycle damage= crit chance/spd.
What if ninja got .5-1sec cooldown reduction on mudras when they crit with autos or weaponskills.
Dont give Black mage an auto crit and it can build spd/det for machine gun play or crit/crit dmg for big Flare explosions.
AST draws more cards with speed and the card effects also scale off of piety.
Give SGE mana back on attack spell crits so it can go harder on offensive stats than other healers and actually scale kardia heals to damage dealt to encourage a more aggressive style of healing.
Make stats mean something different job by job not just role by role. 2 min meta is dead. The world is our oyster, let us feast!
(Ps make the stats more readable in the character sheet. Idk know what 800 crit rating means for actual crit chance and damage. Its a little silly to have a stat with a value that is unreadable as presented in game)
Diversify Secondary stats in Evercold.
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05-20-2026, 01:59 PMReylahDiversify Secondary stats in Evercold.
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05-20-2026, 02:47 PMSupersnow845
-make piety worth more than a stat you literally downgrade gear to avoid
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05-20-2026, 03:58 PMhydralus
Can't wait for the meme builds of 5% crit chance and 230% crit damage. Granted that would be nice for jobs that have a lot of their damage based on auto-crits.
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05-20-2026, 07:01 PMReimmi
I would love this especially skill speed being useful for the mixed jobs
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05-20-2026, 07:56 PMHanzz96
I really don't want a skill speed meta. This game is awful on ping and I really don't want to clip everything at like a 2.0 GCD. But yeah piety and tenacity need a bigger role and direct hit for super crit kinda sucks
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05-20-2026, 10:03 PMAbsurdityI don't really see why not, we used to have those for certain jobs for years. You usually had the choice between like 4 different tiers of speed, depending on what your ping could handle.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hanzz96
Were the slower ones like 1% less dps? I mean, technically. But you probably lose more from bad crit RNG. -
05-20-2026, 10:27 PMHanzz96I just want to keep the field fair for those on 300+ ping because SE won't get it together and fix their netcodeQuote:
Originally Posted by Absurdity
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05-21-2026, 12:17 AMRaionKansen
I would rather them just get rid of DH completely.
Its really annoying where you reach a point in performance where you're just praying you land enough Crit+DH hits to hit a new PB.
Also, Piety needs to increase healing done and at a higher ratio than DET. Piety is completely useless with how much mana regen has been given to healers.
Tenacity should always be better than Determination imo. A tank with 1000, 2000 more tenacity should feel notably different. -
05-21-2026, 02:06 AMundull1
Honestly just scrap the secondary stat/materia completely. Slotting materia is boring, mindless medium.
Make the choices simple but impactful. Give weapons 2 weapon materia slots that choose between increase damage/healing or improve cast/recast times.
Give each armour piece 1 armour materia slot that chooses between defense, movement speed or self-healing rate.
It would let players tailor their jobs to the play styles they prefer without forcing them into optimising the fun out of materia by always choosing the "correct" more damage choice. -
05-21-2026, 02:23 AMSekundessounet
I agree with fusing spell/skill speed, them being separated serves no purpose besides making the stat worhtless for mixed jobs.
I like your ideas, but in the end, stat weights will make everything a bit pointless. Unless haste becomes suddenly more valuable, it will be the same playstyle between any stat builds. -
05-21-2026, 02:26 AMprogramcanaan
Not really a fan of diversity when I know 3rd party tools are going to inevitably(and immediately) be used to find the best methods.
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05-21-2026, 02:34 AMSekundessounetYou don't need 3rd party tools for that, just math.Quote:
Originally Posted by programcanaan
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05-21-2026, 03:05 AMprogramcanaanHypothetically. But we all know that's not going to be the case as the hypothetical quickly becomes a scapegoat for some players to play the way they do.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sekundessounet
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05-21-2026, 03:21 AMVeyaAkemiMy sibling in Hydaelyn, The Balance will have the math figured out long before 3rd party plugins are updated for Evercold, if your problem is just "People will optimize the fuck out of it anyway", has has nothing with do with 3rd party shit.Quote:
Originally Posted by programcanaan
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05-21-2026, 03:23 AMReylahI think thats more for a conversation about animation lock being tied to ping, but I agree that I don’t just want the pendulum to swing the other direction and everyone stuck stacking Spd because of the extra resources from completing rotations faster which is why I advocate for other stat interactions also being able to generate resources. A solution would be to have say the gauze rifle in MCH’s wildfire window be auto crits encouraging them to stack crit dmg over spd which would just make thier lives harder.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hanzz96
I also like the weaving in FFXiV and think it’s a unique mechanic that should be kept around. Personally I think they should lean into it more too but something that hasn’t really been talked about is the statement that evolved mode will have fast gcds. If thats the case it would already become harder to weave. We know that Bards still have a oGCD in their demo but the over all frequency of oGCD weaving is likely to go down especially as buttons are consolidated. We’ll have to see how that shakes out. -
05-21-2026, 03:37 AMprogramcanaanIf 3rd party tools are apparent then they should always be considered when developing. It's just silly to implement systems that are only going to add the illusion of choice for some.Quote:
Originally Posted by VeyaAkemi
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05-21-2026, 03:50 AMDaraliiLucid Dreaming seems to be gone in the showcase build, which might be some desperate attempt to make piety desirable. We'll see if they actually succeed this time, I guess.Quote:
Originally Posted by RaionKansen
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05-21-2026, 04:02 AMVeyaAkemiAnd I am saying they don't matter, they impact zero on this point in particular.Quote:
Originally Posted by programcanaan
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05-21-2026, 05:07 AMStarryaAs long as the best methods for jobs are different, with some wanting high crit rate, some wanting high crit damage, some wanting high skill/spell speed, etc. I think that's fine. In fact, 3rd party tools would "mandate" diversity at that point because it would be optimal. No matter what you wanted to do, it would be the best thing you could do for some of the jobs. Surely that's better than the 2.5 gcd, max crit meld T-pose we have now.Quote:
Originally Posted by programcanaan
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05-21-2026, 07:08 AMAbsurdityThat's not "impactful", that's like the most boring, uninspired and thoughtless replacement for an already bland system I've ever seen. At that point you might as well just remove stats from gear outright and give everyone a preset, about the same amount of player agency.Quote:
Originally Posted by undull1
But yes, let's reduce the RPG in this barely-MMORPG even more. -
05-21-2026, 09:43 AMundull1If players want higher API choose skill speed, if they want slower choose damage.Quote:
Originally Posted by Absurdity
If players want more flexibility in dodging and uptime they can go with movement, more forgiveness tankiness go with defense, more forgiveness for failing mechanics go with healing rate increase.
If it were between the current system and removing all Rpg elements I would gladly go with the latter, at least that version is more honest and less of a pain to gear for. FFXIV has not had any player agency in character building for decades....like I thought this up in 5 minutes so god no it's not a well designed irontight design philosophy but it's better than nothing and as of now we have......nothing, just copy and pasting the balance answer to what is essentially a math question, not a player expression question. -
05-21-2026, 09:44 AMMsMisatoyou don't know whatg you miss with skill speed was in the play. ever seen a warrior pull 6 cleaves before lolQuote:
Originally Posted by Hanzz96
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05-21-2026, 09:59 AMReimmiI mean we wont have double weaving in evercold evolved mode (most likely), so it shouldn't be a problemQuote:
Originally Posted by Hanzz96
And if we do, just don't meld it. even if the chagnes op proposes happen secondary stats will still be minor gains -
05-21-2026, 10:49 AMStriderShinryu
Secondary stats could definitely use some adjustments, and merging the speed stats seems the most obvious to the point where I wonder why they just haven't done it already. Makes me think there's some weird back end jank that's preventing them from doing it.
Either way, of course it's true that the min maxers and spreadsheeters will figure out the meta builds but that's going to happen regardless. There will always be a meta build so it's not really worth worrying about it especially if it just makes things more fun and/or interesting for everyone else. -
05-21-2026, 02:11 PMAbsurdityNone of those options influence how you play your job but on top of that they are mostly superfluous.Quote:
Originally Posted by undull1
You can perfectly dodge and keep uptime under the current base movement speed, all it takes is proper planning and fight knowledge. Additionally most mechanics that currently make it impossible to keep uptime through better planning do so for much longer than any amount of speed could help with, you can't "outrun" damage snapshotting by over two seconds.
Same problem applies to the other two options, their impact will most likely not even be noticeable.
We can already see it with Tenacity right now, you never actually need the additional mitigation because incoming tank damage is entirely designed around not having it. All you need to comfortably deal with tank mechanics are your cooldowns and whatever HP and defense values you have at minimum item level.
Surviving a tank buster with 30% HP or 40% makes functionally no difference.
The healing rate increase is probably the most pointless because not only is it unnecessary, it is also competing with the "tankiness" increase...and losing.
In any content where these would remotely matter you are most likely just getting oneshot and even in casual content failing mechanics is very likely just going to kill you, making healing rate increase worthless since it can't help with "dead".
Whereas the defense increase at least has the potential to save you from death.
Seems unlikely considering that the "haste" stat exists for exploratory zones and does exactly that, give you both.Quote:
Originally Posted by StriderShinryu