The current battle system mainly calculate everything from Your Rank vs Mob Rank

[Rydin]

The reason different weapons do the same damage on NM's is because there is a modifier and a cap on Str vs Vit AND ATT vs DEF

An extreme example of this is if you fought a MOB with 999 defense and another with 9999 defense
if the max ATT/DEF difference is 500 (Arbitrary number just to demonstrate a point) then both MOBs will take the same damage from weapons with Attack 1 all the way to a weapon with attack 499

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ken-Unbalanced

Some interesting tests here have led to 2 theories...
The first of which we have all come to believe... Attributes do very little

The other more interesting theory is in many cases, a cap is exceeded, and therefore, any additional attribute points, and conversely, any additional damage is null

For instance, in FFXI, Str - Vit gave a value, that could not exceed a cap set by the weapon rank
And that number was then used to find the actual +bonus/-penalty that was added to your base damage

One of the problems in this thread is everyone is screaming "Hard data, Hard data" which is correct, hard data should be present, but every good scientist does some interpreting of the data which leads to a new hypothesis
Thats the Scientific method, and there is nothing wrong with sharing a hypothesis on a forum.
For instance, from the gathered data, I believe rank indirectly affects damage, which is why the devs didn't realize the formula was going to cause so many problems
Just like the HP and MP gained from attributes is capped by rank, so are the values for damage formulas capped by rank and (Delta)rank
So while Rank and (Delta)rank don't directly affect the damage, they do directly limit the values that go into the damage formula, therefore, it would have been much harder to see how these caps would factor in at higher levels.
Not impossible, mind you... Just a little more foresight was needed

I feel old saying this, but I can recall a time when attributes mattered too much
When conjurers with a lot less defense from gear as a gladiator would still take the same amount of damage if their VIT was comparable

The November patch changed this, and we noticed when we logged in that everyone's HP was lower and everyone was squishier
Grass raptors that we used to fight at R36 were owning us at R43. But some good did come from it... DEF became paramount in the fight against physical damage mitigation
So then Gladiators, Pugs and Marauders actually became physical tanks....