Please change the Accuracy stat...

[Ashelia_Ferron]

I think the only problem it has now is that accuracy caps are still only going up incrementally, but the amount of accuracy on individual gear has increased a ton. A single piece could have like 60 accuracy on it. It's very hard to be "at cap" instead of greatly over or greatly under anymore.

[Shurrikhan]

Just make it into cooldown reduction. That makes it enough of a side-stat that it won't trump every other side-stat, -and- it's a desirable stat no matter the role.

No matter the role? Sure. No matter the class/job? Not so much. Some have far larger dps bonuses from CDs than others; some CDs would require immense amounts of Haste (CD reduc) to provide any real advantage (BotD, Enochian); more still would desync CDs from rotation, requiring an equal amount of Skill Speed, currently a significantly inferior stat even on Monk, to make use of.
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On topic: I'm sold on all but the Armor Pen component being positionally dependent. I'd also prefer that it be inferior to other stats past acc cap (though not sheer waste, as accuracy alone is currently), as to be primarily a "raider's stat," rather than the eventual 'physical dps' king stat'. If not, accuracy itself should probably be further revised, and something like armor pen separate.

I like that accuracy exists, to an extent. I like that I can eventually afford not to be attacking from the back. I just feel like the cost is too high currently, and between it and the somewhat weak effect of our secondary stats now (e.g. i210 at 60 compared to i90 at 50), we have little room for any extremes or experimentation in builds. That and (Skill) Speed just needs to be outright fixed, for its (slowly) exponential value, its lack of AA/oGCD dmg mods, and its eventually immense TP drain (if it costs more, it should do more -- ideally, if we don't want to mess with the support meta, it should cost the same and have the same weight). Rethink Parry and defensive secondaries from the ground up.

Edit: I really like Anova's idea of giving base accuracy with ilvl. If we eventually got some freely shiftable stats on gear, we could then choose to toss in a bit more accuracy for those fights where we're forced to attack from the front a bit while our gear's still at the progression level, but since accuracy is basically little more than a raider's proof of gearing / sacrificed real secondary stats, this would fit the bill nicely.

[Nurvus]

I agree Accuracy should either be gone or start making sense.

I'm not even going to discuss the fact that Crit and Accuracy are exactly the same thing.

At the very least, it's not acceptable for our character to outright miss unless we're blinded.
Our character is "extraordinary". Not a mundane soldier wannabe.
Even if it did make sense missing attacks at low levels, it doesn't at high levels.
Hitting a rabbit in the left eye, but Missing a golem just because of level difference, is simply hilarious.
By Miss, I am not talking about getting blocked, parried or dodged, but simply failing to hit the mark.

However, it is perfectly acceptable for our attacks to not always hit exactly where we want them to or how we want them to, and thus cause a portion of the intended damage.

In this fashion, I believe the OP's idea is a good one.
The details aren't necessarily perfect, but the idea of having our attacks range from - at worst - a glancing blow to - at best - a perfect hit in a vulnerable spot, is vastly superior both in immersion and in gameplay to a binary hit or miss chance that you may not notice at all for a whole fight, and completely ruin your rotation in the next fight.

As for soft caps, I think it should simply be a diminishing return on the progression of armor penetration, such that it takes more and more rating to advance another 1% of armor penetration.
This might have a target limit.

[Shurrikhan]

I agree Accuracy should either be gone or start making sense.

Even if it did make sense missing attacks at low levels, it doesn't at high levels.
Hitting a rabbit in the left eye, but Missing a golem just because of level difference, is simply hilarious.
By Miss, I am not talking about getting blocked, parried or dodged, but simply failing to hit the mark.

However, it is perfectly acceptable for our attacks to not always hit exactly where we want them to or how we want them to, and thus cause a portion of the intended damage.

This is the thing that always got me. We have bosses that are getting harder and harder to miss just due to their gigantic sizes, yet somehow require higher and higher accuracy... That and our enemies don't seem remotely capable of defending themselves with dodges, blocks, or parries. I could see our accuracy coming into play in order to avoid being blocked/parried/dodged, but because we're suddenly unable to gauge our arm-length between ourselves and our target?...

[Kabooa]

Accuracy doesn't just represent making contact

It represents penetrating the natural armor they have - 'Miss' is just the universal word for 'ya done !@#%ed up.' It's the same reasoning why Full Plate has the same armor class as someone with 26 Dexterity; The armor stops the hit, the dexterity dodges the hit, but they're both classified in the general term of "Armor Class".

That being said, Accuracy as a stat has been outdated for the past decade.

[Nurvus]

Accuracy doesn't just represent making contact

It represents penetrating the natural armor they have - 'Miss' is just the universal word for 'ya done !@#%ed up.' It's the same reasoning why Full Plate has the same armor class as someone with 26 Dexterity; The armor stops the hit, the dexterity dodges the hit, but they're both classified in the general term of "Armor Class".

That being said, Accuracy as a stat has been outdated for the past decade.

I disagree. You're trying to mix completely different game concepts.
In games like D&D, armor class represents chance to get hit, but when you get hit, there is no mitigation apart from special abilities, spells and items.
In MMOs armor reduces the damage, and that is represented in the % damage reduction it provides.
Translating it to realistic terms, if you wear plate and get hit with a sword in a protected part of your armor, you won't take the full slashing damage, but the impact should still result in blunt damage, resulting in a bruise instead of a lethal wound.
The armor did its job protecting you.

What you're describing is the difference between hitting where it hurts the most, and hitting where it hurts the least.
There's already a stat that covers that - Critical Hit Rate - it determines how good you are at aiming for vulnerable spots.

Accuracy, on the other hand, is how good your hand-eye (or spell-eye) coordination is. How close to where you want to hit you actually manage to hit.
Did it hit right where you wanted to, close, or barely?

Likewise, I believe Dodge should not always necessarily succeed 100%.
You might dodge part of the damage by turning a perfect hit into a glancing blow.

Same thing with Parry. You might not always perfectly parry a blow, but greatly reduce its damage.

What I'm defending here is making hit, dodge, parry, etc, less "all or nothing".
At least where it comes to hitting, you should never, ever get a "nothing" without interference from the enemy.

[lyndwyrm]

I'm kinda at work so this can't be too long, but...

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...move-accuracy?
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/232003-Please-remove-accuracy?

I'm still in the camp of we shouldn't remove accuracy because then gearing would literally go to purely stacking the better weighted off-stats, in which case we should also just remove the 3rd onward ranked off-stats (*cough* parry *cough* speed *cough*).

I'd be fine with changing it, but that would be a LOT of work on the dev's part. And since the dev's haven't responded to any of these, in general I think we're

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When it comes to having gradual scale vs. entire scale stats.



So long as the entire scale stats work a lot slower (and generally I would say accuracy does [yes, yes, my opinion and all that]).

[Shurrikhan]

LOT[/B] of work on the dev's part.

I'd really like to see the secondary stats revised a bit in general. Less primary stat weight, more secondary stat weights, (and better weight-balance between secondary stats in most jobs) so we can actually feel like they're having an effect, or like we're actually able to experiment a bit. The "it keeps you from adding stats you'd rather have" doesn't really seem like a benefit to me... I like the idea of adding a little accuracy to deal with certain fights, but on the whole, I don't see why we need 640 of it to attack a giant robot when a small, nimble wasp required 400 to hit, nor do I see stacking it as adding to any raid experience; all it does is ensure that we eventually build two gear sets, our highest ilvl set with acc cap for raiding, and our highest ilvl set with as little accuracy as possible for everything else.

On accuracy, from the tank PoV: My favorite system for armor classes vs. evasion included two extra stats on armor. [Note: here accuracy caused percentile damage.] I forget their exact terms but the first, call it 'Balance', controlled how quickly enemy attacks became glancing blows and how quickly glancing blow damage tapered off, essentially the dice roll range for mitigated attacks and their devaluation curve. The second, let's call it 'mass', was actually a debuff component to a lot of heavier armor sets - being larger, certain attacks that may have missed in a slenderer armor set are now instead minor glancing blows - enlarging the total dice roll range, so to speak. The result was that higher armor classes tended to be more reliable, but were a bit less able to 'thread the needle' via perfect evasion.

Different attack types used different balance points, where piercing highest chance to actually hit at all, but had the least chance of being a glancing blow, while blunt attacks had the least difference between full hits and glancing blow strikes, slashing in between. Weapons had further modifiers for 'impact' (a multiplier of attack power that dealt lingering suppression on the target - slowing, delaying, or canceling its abilities or movements), 'penetration' (which multiplied the attack's impact to attempt to ignore armor completely, and 'balance', which controlled how enemy target's armor mitigation curve - how far one has to penetrate enemy armor for decent effect. Penetration and impact worked against each other slightly; the more penetration (damage priority), the less impact (mitigation priority) dealt. Blunt weapons tended to have the lowest pen, piercing the highest, while both blunt and piercing weapons needed relatively little. Slashing weapons, potentially the most devastating, needed fairly high impact and penetration in order to meet their armor-piercing needs. (Note: penetration literally removed enemy armor, adjusting its balance, essentially chipping away at the part that would be glanced - so it made sense to, say, open with piercing (DRK strike-lead), follow up with blunt to enlarge the opening (MNK in pursuit), and rip through with slashing (DRK reaper). On paper it sounds a overly complicated, but in-game it worked just as one would realistically expect. All that's really needed is to keep things roughly consistent, so that these factors need not be re-theory-crafted with each new gear-set or raid tier, if ever.

[Viviza]

That's exactly why accuracy is a terrible stat. You should never have to budget yourself around a stat. Instead the stat should become less optimal than other stats but not a burden if you have more than you need. The current issue is: If you have too much you just wasted a better slot for secondaries, if you have to little you need to find more and will likely cause yourself in an overage. When a stat negatively impacts you for having it, it's bad design.

Why? Why do all the secondaries need to be more stat = more good? Why is this bad design?

I can tell you why I think it's good design. I think it's good design because it forces decision-making upon the user. It creates incentive to mix-and-match their gear so they can juggle accuracy at near-cap as they gear up into their BiS pieces. It forces minor dilemmas such as "do I want to occasionally miss or waste a few points and never miss?" It creates a bit of depth for food choices as a set grows into more or less accuracy.

Without decision making or occasionally drawbacks, they may as well make every piece of gear have one stat, let's say "Goodness", and higher is better. Why bother with mixing and matching sub-optimal stats. Goodness rolls everything into benefit for you. But how horribly boring!

Anything, in my opinion, that generates discussion and allows players choice as to their performance, is better for the health of the game.

[Vandril]

I hate to be "that guy", but...

World of Warcraft removed Accuracy as a stat a while back, and it was the best damned change the game has had in over half a decade.

Just do that. There are other stats one can min-max around.