Possible alteration to Cleric Stance

[Ghishlain]

That's the reason I made them hit for a bit less.

Healers should at least get a native +200 accuracy or something of the like, because melding accuracy is annoying since none of our gear has it.

Again, if you're going to propose such an EXTREME measure, you might as well remove the Accuracy stat entirely. Why should Healers, a Role by design to keep your party alive, have a free pass to DPS on any content they desire while all other DPS and Tanks jobs have to optimize for that stat.

I don't mind if Cleric Stance gets an Accuracy boost, but an Accuracy boost of this magnitude is far from any form, shape, or semblance of balance whatsoever.

I'd rather Cleric Stance has a scaling Accuracy based on your ilvl that is small yet noticeable. Say maybe +10 Accuracy for every 20 ilvls above 150.

I might have to agree with the proposal just for the fallout that would ensue, then.

I got a feeling the only reason S-E keeps Accuracy as a stat is to keep Healer DPS in check. If they removed Accuracy as a stat, my gut intuition tells me they'd end up removing Cleric Stance in 4- and 8- player DFs at the very same time. Call me pessimistic but I just got a feeling.

[Shurrikhan]

I got a feeling the only reason S-E keeps Accuracy as a stat is to keep Healer DPS in check. If they removed Accuracy as a stat, my gut intuition tells me they'd end up removing Cleric Stance in 4- and 8- player DFs at the very same time. Call me pessimistic but I just got a feeling.

My only real question there is what comparison do they have for whether Healer dps is "in check". Is it combined HPS-DPS output compared, in which case they've almost always exceeded DPS, or even HPS/Mitigation-DPS output, in which they'll now likely outdo tanks in casual fights? By either of those comparisons, it's not exactly "in check" right now, not that I especially mind this. After all, DPS is unlimited, where as healing and mitigation quickly max out as soon as fights lose their challenge, making it unlikely that a DPS would lose their spot to a bonus healers in virtually any content, even if healers were given bonus accuracy enough via Cleric Stance to need only half as much melding as they would now for 'rain-proofing'.

To be clear, I'm not a fan of removing accuracy entirely, I'd just like to see the amounts needed reduced, and to see less of a gap between "raid" content and all other content types. It makes no sense that the larger the enemy gets, the harder he is to hit.

I'd rather see the requirement reduced, especially the base from zero bonus accuracy to back-cap, so that it stands at least as much an optional stat for hitting from the flank and front, at least for melee dps, as it does a stat dump. Have its relative cost increase a bit, as it does now, but such that it's still no more than maybe 8-12% of our overall secondary stat expenditure, down from some 18-22%, and likely decreasing that proportion a bit with further ilvls.

An additional option would be to increase magic accuracy requirements to be equal to flank-cap for melee, at which point their average expenses are equal, but that's just to keep caster stats from gradually scaling ahead of physicals' now that a larger portion of accuracy only affects flank>frontal capping, in other words now that the optional range is a larger portion, rather than relatively small compared to the base (zero to back). In the first case, Cleric Stance and Rain of Death could each cover one step out is the progression of Zero Accuracy > Halfway > Back/Caster Cap > Flank Cap > Frontal Cap, guaranteeing healer hits with Rain of Death without allowing others to bypass accuracy requirements outright, while in the second, Zero > Half > Back > Flank/Caster > Frontal, Cleric Stance would get you 25% of the way, and could either give another 25%, nearly guaranteeing healer hits, or 50%, guaranteeing hits for healers and nearly for no-acc casters. While it's true that this would give a lot of free stat to healers, at present, no one else has to consume nearly every materia slot they have just to reach cap. Moreover, with such changes the overall value of accuracy will have been reduced. At that point it's really not much different from when accuracy was included for free on i100-130 gear.

inb4 "Why keep accuracy as a stat sink at all?"
Mostly so that Rain of Death and other evasion reducers still have a place, and to keep that optionality from being either too expensive or too trivial a cost, especially if caster cap remains equal to back cap. I mean, ideally it'd be a much more analog stat, where excess still contributes in some way, but as it functions now in gameplay I feel that roughly equal halves are perfect, especially with an adjusted caster cap.

[JackFross]

I'd rather see the requirement reduced, especially the base from zero bonus accuracy to back-cap, so that it stands at least as much an optional stat for hitting from the flank and front, at least for melee dps, as it does a stat dump.

Hitting flank and front is not optional as a Melee dps. In all of the newest raid tier, you cannot guarantee that you will never use an attack from the front of the boss you're fighting. Bosses spin to face you if they target you with their random target skills in every single fight. Sure, you'll run away sometimes, but other times you won't, as a melee. So, like, yeah?

All they'd need to do is give Cleric the ShO/Def/Grit treatment and slap on a 5% accuracy buff to the stance. 95% accuracy rate is easy to hit, and that's all you'd need to hit every time.

I don't think Accuracy is a worthless stat as everyone here is saying. I don't think it should be gotten rid of. Yeah, we need better, more interesting secondaries, so that gearing up becomes a choice - not an easily-discovered BiS set. I'd love for there to be more stats with boosts you can't measure as strictly weighted. I've never played an MMO besides this one, though, so I have no idea what people mean when they say "MORE STATS PLS" since I have no framework for thinking of a stat that does something other than strict damage gain, crit rate increase, and speed boosts.

As it stands, Accuracy is the only thing that makes gearing up interesting, challenging, and fun. If you remove that stat from the game, everything just becomes boring. You just slap on the highest dps piece and you're good, because, at the end of the day, this game is all about how much damage you can do to the target. Unless these secondaries are some fourth, fifth, or sixth way of boosting damage dealt in a meaningful way, they'll be widely ignored for the crit/det options.

tl;dr: Constantly reminded why not everyone is a game developer.

[Shurrikhan]

Hitting flank and front is not optional as a Melee dps. In all of the newest raid tier, you cannot guarantee that you will never use an attack from the front of the boss you're fighting. Bosses spin to face you if they target you with their random target skills in every single fight. Sure, you'll run away sometimes, but other times you won't, as a melee. So, like, yeah?

tl;dr: Constantly reminded why not everyone is a game developer.

It is when you have a Bard... Even when healers aren't dpsing, it'll be worth the 50 potency for me to put up RoD before the next random target ability if and only if my melee dps are merely flank-capped. In my suggestion, that'd be an extra 4% secondary stats, not spent in accuracy, for the OT, healers, and melee dps, just for my 50 potency. I'd call that an option. As is standing closer to hitbox center and holding the GCD for a quarter second's movement, especially when not in a tight window (excess SS) and in a fight in which I'm going to run out of TP without Paeon/ProRook/Goad anyways.

If accuracy itself is the only thing that makes gearing up interesting, challenging, or fun, I think we have larger problems than just the required expenditure on a given stat around which to select our next gear purchase. The stats themselves suffer from imbalance and oversight, and their direct effects exist only among a few classes.

Skill and spell speed are probably the two with the most obvious potential as both could have very, very meaningful effects on rotation if 1) we had a bit more secondary stats outside of accuracy to work with and 2) if the oversights affecting each (especially Skill Speed) were fixed. Skill Speed itself would need approximately three things: a faint effect on AA and oGCD damage, to reduce TP ticks by 20% and tick per player GCD (bonus TP regen similarly applied on player tick at 20% reduction), and for animation speeds to scale with Speed. Ideally, its weight, rather than GCD reduction, should be linear, as well, rather than being undervalued at low amounts and being strong at very high amounts. Now certain classes are no longer locked out of using it based on lower weaponskill damage percentiles (compared to AA & oGCD), it no longer prevents double-weaves, and it no longer TP starves an SS-heavy player far more quickly than others (though it will still punish above-average TP cost moves), potentially forcing Paeon use for the party's lowest denominator. That much mere 'fixes', though admittedly large ones, would solve.

The other issues lie in the class designs themselves. Only two classes in the game actually give noticeable effects to anything but rate of attack, and the latter is debatable. Archer's have River of Blood, Arcanists have their on-pet-crit proc. Everyone else simply finds that they parse a bit higher overall the more they crit, with zero effect on their actual gameplay. And then there's Det....

[JackFross]

It is when you have a Bard... Even when healers aren't dpsing, it'll be worth the 50 potency for me to put up RoD before the next random target ability if and only if my melee dps are merely flank-capped. In my suggestion, that'd be an extra 4% secondary stats, not spent in accuracy, for the OT, healers, and melee dps, just for my 50 potency. I'd call that an option.

It's literally 10-20 points. That's not 4%. I'm currently sitting at ~1600 stat points added to my character at i222.

586 Det - +368 points
1003 Crit - +649 points
655 Sks - +301 points
660 Acc - +306 points

Moving 10 points from accuracy to crit so I could drop to the flank cap is a 0.6% gain. That's called negligible and makes it pretty clearly obvious that melee should just be stacking the acc for whichever side they're required to be hitting, rather than rely on a Bard to use their evasion reduction skill every time I'm gonna have to poke the face. In A6S, on Blaster (the very first boss), I need to be hitting it in the face consistently for a rather substantial time in order to properly handle mechanics and not wipe the raid. Every single time the Bard has to sacrifice damage so that I can not miss for those periods is a dps loss for the Bard that would otherwise not happen if the melee would just carry the appropriate accuracy.

Not optional.

As is standing closer to hitbox center and holding the GCD for a quarter second's movement, especially when not in a tight window (excess SS) and in a fight in which I'm going to run out of TP without Paeon/ProRook/Goad anyways.

Holding the GCD is a bigger dps loss than pretty much anything else. That would be a larger loss over the course of the encounter than the 0.6% stats you shift into Accuracy so that you don't have to hold those GCDs for 10-15s while handling mechanics that require you to stab the enemy in the face.


Basically, you and I have very different definitions of "optional." While you consider it "doing sub-optimal things" I consider it "doing something equally optimal."

The stats themselves suffer from imbalance and oversight, and their direct effects exist only among a few classes.

The comments on sks/sps are pretty spot-on, but none of that addresses the point that I was making. Accuracy is right now the only stat that actually requires thought while gearing out. I'm aware that everyone keeps saying that the stats are bad and this is the issue, and I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just saying that the people shouting to get rid of Accuracy without offering any sort of alternative means of making gear progression interesting and varied are completely missing the point.

Though, the argument about TP holds no water in the current raid tier, as there is currently no situation where any Job should be starved for TP unless they're shit at managing their own restoration abilities. Even in A6S, I spam Ring of Thorns on the Blaster Mirages and have yet to encounter even close to TP-Zero in that encounter, while maintaining 1700-1900 dps through the end of that fight.

The other issues lie in the class designs themselves. Only two classes in the game actually give noticeable effects to anything but rate of attack, and the latter is debatable. Archer's have River of Blood, Arcanists have their on-pet-crit proc. Everyone else simply finds that they parse a bit higher overall the more they crit, with zero effect on their actual gameplay. And then there's Det....

Higher stats absolutely have a noticeable effect. Just look at your numbers when swapping gear around. Every Job gets noticeable effects from the various secondary stats. You need large amounts of them to get anywhere, which would be an issue if we weren't getting them by the hundreds right now.

Determination brings a very noticeable degree of consistency to your output.
Critical Hit Rate brings a very noticeable increase in the frequency of critical hits.
Skill/Spell Speed brings a very noticeable change in how quickly your gcd spins.

Every Job gets these benefits. The thing is that every Job gets different bonuses from each of them, based upon what their optimal rotations look like and (in some cases) how the stats interact with their skills.

[_slowpoke_]

Accuracy is right now the only stat that actually requires thought while gearing out.

Not everything that requires thought is interesting or fun, though, and Accuracy is neither of those. That's the point at least I was making.

I'm just saying that the people shouting to get rid of Accuracy without offering any sort of alternative means of making gear progression interesting and varied are completely missing the point.

Gear progression is neither interesting nor varied, because Accuracy essentially removes a great deal of choice from gearing progression, instead of adding any. How is this missing the point when it is the very thing I was arguing?

However Accuracy is a good way to arbitrarily limit Healer DPS to a curve that satisfies the dev team.

It's not a good way to do that. In fact, it's one of the absolutely worst ways to do it.

If the dev team thinks healer DPS is a problem (which, as far as I'm aware, they don't, they just don't want healer DPS to be required to clear content, as it was in the second half of Gordias Savage during early progression), then this should be fixed with encounter design, and not by punishing healers who want to do something when there's no one to heal with heavy RNG.

Give us fights where it's actually required to be healing nearly 100% of the time. Make it extremely risky to hop into Cleric Stance because someone might die in the two GCDs until you can deactivate it again. Or give us something meaningful to do other than DPSing while we don't have to heal (AST's cards are probably the closest thing we currently have in this regard). Hell, even straight out nerfing healer damage would be a better way to go about reducing healer DPS. The current situation is complete bullshit.

[Ghishlain]

It's not a good way to do that. In fact, it's one of the absolutely worst ways to do it.

If the dev team thinks healer DPS is a problem (which, as far as I'm aware, they don't, they just don't want healer DPS to be required to clear content, as it was in the second half of Gordias Savage during early progression), then this should be fixed with encounter design, and not by punishing healers who want to do something when there's no one to heal with heavy RNG.

Give us fights where it's actually required to be healing nearly 100% of the time. Make it extremely risky to hop into Cleric Stance because someone might die in the two GCDs until you can deactivate it again. Or give us something meaningful to do other than DPSing while we don't have to heal (AST's cards are probably the closest thing we currently have in this regard). Hell, even straight out nerfing healer damage would be a better way to go about reducing healer DPS. The current situation is complete bullshit.

I never said the Dev team thought healer DPS was a problem. What I said is I feel the Dev team is trying to limit healer DPS in specific ways (in this case - accuracy) to make it more difficult for healer's to DPS as a control mechanism to help keep DPS in line with how they perceive it should be for the current content tier. It's arbitrary but it serves the purpose they seem to have (my own opinion, I don't speak to know how the Devs operate).

If the dev team had any problem with healer DPS, they would out right remove Cleric Stance in any 4- or 8- player content like they removed it from PvP. But they haven't yet, so that clearly indicates that they enjoy how the healer meta is currently working (or they don't have a viable solution yet if they dislike how its become). Again, also my opinion based on my own observations.

Unfortunately, because of way Cleric Stance work you can't possible have an encounter so healing intensive that you're forced to heal every GCD. If you do that you're effectively going to run the healer out of MP in like 6-7 minutes without support like Mage's Ballad and thus making encounters exceedingly short at that point compared to the current 10-13 minute encounters we have (whether this is good or bad is up to the Dev team to decide). You can encourage more risk / reward of Cleric Stance by having a longer cooldown period when you toggle Cleric Stance (say in the realm of 10-15s) so there are less opportunities to Cleric Stance and keeping healing required every 3-4 GCDs or so but then that'll mean the healer is sitting there for 2-3 GCDs waiting for something to happen. Likewise, nerfing potencies of Healer DPS spells would mean healer's having difficulty clearing solo MSQ content and also not a very good solution.

It's an interesting trap the Dev team put themselves in when they made Cleric Stance. I've played quite a few MMOs in my past and FFXIV is the first MMO where a healer has the ability to have their main attack stat comparable to magical DPS and have similar restrictions and freedoms their magic wielding counterparts have too. It makes for interesting play as a healer while also making it a very difficult thing to balance from a development perspective. If you make Healer DPS too powerful, normal DPS will start to complain at the ease healer's get. It also allows for specific groups to clear content earlier than intended because of the amount of DPS a healer can provide over the course of a fight. If both healer's combined contribute 6-8% DPS total that's 6-8% DPS less the raid has to do to clear content. Since content isn't designed with healer DPS in mind, it almost feels like the dev team has to provide something arbitrary to try to keep healer DPS in check so content is cleared exceedingly fast which is a fine line to tread.

Whether we like it or not, Accuracy is here to stay until at least 4.0. In my mind, it feels like it's the check and balance to healer DPS that the Dev team can tweak to suit their liking. This can lead to issues down the line that are hopefully addressed as future content is released leading up to 4.0. Until then, I will gladly work around this limitation to the best of my ability and see where the future development holds.

[Shurrikhan]

It's literally 10-20 points. That's not 4%. I'm currently sitting at ~1600 stat points added to my character at i222.

Moving 10 points from accuracy to crit so I could drop to the flank cap is a 0.6% gain. That's called negligible and makes it pretty clearly obvious that melee should just be stacking the acc for whichever side they're required to be hitting, rather than rely on a Bard to use their evasion reduction skill every time I'm gonna have to poke the face. In A6S, on Blaster (the very first boss), I need to be hitting it in the face consistently for a rather substantial time in order to properly handle mechanics and not wipe the raid. Every single time the Bard has to sacrifice damage so that I can not miss for those periods is a dps loss for the Bard that would otherwise not happen if the melee would just carry the appropriate accuracy.

Not optional.

In my suggestion, that'd be an extra 4% secondary stats, not spent in accuracy, for the OT, healers, and melee dps, just for my 50 potency.

Sorry, I was referring to its value within what I had proposed earlier, not as it currently is. That's a very large difference in premise, which I should have highlighted earlier. As you have it listed, your Accuracy currently accounts for ~19% of your secondary stats. I said I'd like it to be around 16% max instead (front capped), primarily from taking from the base amount (between 0 and back) such that about half the total expense is from back to front (where casters general cap = flank cap). In that scenario, it would be around 25% less accuracy expenditure, or 64 secondary stat points, a 3.8% secondary stat increase, for your character. At that point it seems optional to me. It would of course depend on the predictability of the turning mechanics though, as to place Rain early enough, and on whether Rain would have healer dps use in addition (often not the case during these 'turning and nearly killing a random player' moments).

Holding the GCD is a bigger dps loss than pretty much anything else. That would be a larger loss over the course of the encounter than the 0.6% stats you shift into Accuracy so that you don't have to hold those GCDs for 10-15s while handling mechanics that require you to stab the enemy in the face.

10-15s? So he's swapping about to and fro for 10+ seconds at a time? Sorry, I wasn't aware of that. I was thinking that once per 15 seconds, he'd turn and quickly turn back, which could be more easily compensated for.
I still think tight windows have a lot to do with whether a .25s hold would be a dps loss in other situations, though. My 2.39 pre-GL Monk would have to use Meditation once per Demolish as to perfect its timing, as it stands. However, I can use this at any point per Demolish, as long as no two occur during the same application of DK/Twin. Needless to say, I use it during those times. Pre-movement helps a lot as well, based on where the party is standing. If I'm the target (and not running away already, as from drill), I'll either Meditate and move or just take my chances. This is only because I'm waiting to hit sufficient accuracy at the moment, though, as Monk isn't my main. It would take the above system for that to be a real option.

Basically, you and I have very different definitions of "optional." While you consider it "doing sub-optimal things" I consider it "doing something equally optimal."

No, our definitions are the same. I just hadn't done as much math as I should have, and tend not to put my disclaimers as obviously as I should when saying what is otherwise ridiculous.

The comments on sks/sps are pretty spot-on, but none of that addresses the point that I was making. Accuracy is right now the only stat that actually requires thought while gearing out. I'm aware that everyone keeps saying that the stats are bad and this is the issue, and I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just saying that the people shouting to get rid of Accuracy without offering any sort of alternative means of making gear progression interesting and varied are completely missing the point.

I do certainly understand that. I'm sorry if I've been part of that wave as well.

Though, the argument about TP holds no water in the current raid tier, as there is currently no situation where any Job should be starved for TP unless they're shit at managing their own restoration abilities. Even in A6S, I spam Ring of Thorns on the Blaster Mirages and have yet to encounter even close to TP-Zero in that encounter, while maintaining 1700-1900 dps through the end of that fight.

To be honest, it's not as much about the current tier to me as sheer parity. I feel like later tiers could be better if they actually thought at times about what is otherwise irrelevant, making fundamental fixes even if not absolutely necessary, because they might just cut their later options short otherwise. I'm not saying I want back endless dummy fights in which TP would be an issue without these changes. Just... it's more a matter of principle I guess.

Higher stats absolutely have a noticeable effect. Just look at your numbers when swapping gear around. Every Job gets noticeable effects from the various secondary stats. You need large amounts of them to get anywhere, which would be an issue if we weren't getting them by the hundreds right now.

Determination brings a very noticeable degree of consistency to your output.
Critical Hit Rate brings a very noticeable increase in the frequency of critical hits.
Skill/Spell Speed brings a very noticeable change in how quickly your gcd spins.

Every Job gets these benefits. The thing is that every Job gets different bonuses from each of them, based upon what their optimal rotations look like and (in some cases) how the stats interact with their skills.

...and their direct [gameplay] effects exist only among a few classes.
...meaningful effects on rotation...
...with zero effect on their actual gameplay.

Agreed. They absolutely do. To parses. My point here was on the gameplay... which I really should have written where it is now bracketed. (By which I mean personal, not just the party gameplay of 'do we need to pop CDs for this weak dps check we'd rather not waste CDs on?') E.g. would you ever end up using a different ability because you've crit every move in your combo? Would you ever do anything differently because of any stat other than Speed (or in very, very few cases, Crit)?

The only noticeable gameplay adjustment I've noticed from secondary stats are (via Crit) in how likely my Bloodletter is to take up part of my next oGCD weave on Bard, and (via Speed) in extra Heavy Shot/double buffed EA on Bard and (suboptimal) combat-Meditation/extended rotation opportunities on Monk, and the 2.33 gimmick 5-Geir/min rotation on DRG. That's it. Whereas tracking crits as part of your "gambling" has been known to matter hugely for certain classes/specs in other MMOs. Ours, as powerful as they are, are mostly rotationally insignificant. It's a shallow complaint, meant mostly to provoke a little thought about what *could* happen with certain redesigns. (Though also why I mentioned those "late-game" crisis largely shared by those same highly secondary-stat-affected classes. They're admittedly more difficult to balance across tiers of content.)

[JackFross]

Sorry, I was referring to its value within what I had proposed earlier, not as it currently is.

Ah, that's my bad, I should have paid more attention.

All I really have to add, though, is that Accuracy caps will never be optional for anyone who can miss. If you have even a slight chance to miss the boss due to a certain situation or position or anything, you are playing sub-optimally. You should never be relying on one skill to be used for a marginal gain in stats. Even a gain of 60 secondary stats is ~10 points of main stat, which is less than 1/3 of the (borderline-negligible) gains we get from Attribute Points.

/// And general concerns

I don't disagree with all the people parroting the same shit that's been tread in this thread again and again.

Accuracy isn't interesting or varied, but it's right now the only thing that makes gearing up anything more than braindead. I hate to repeat myself, so I won't. I explained this earlier.

As it stands, Accuracy is the only thing that makes gearing up interesting, challenging, and fun. If you remove that stat from the game, everything just becomes boring. You just slap on the highest dps piece and you're good, because, at the end of the day, this game is all about how much damage you can do to the target. Unless these secondaries are some fourth, fifth, or sixth way of boosting damage dealt in a meaningful way, they'll be widely ignored for the crit/det options.

And I have yet to see a single person propose how this statement is anything other than accurate. The only thought that goes into gearing up is "how will I maximize [favored stat] while meeting Accuracy?" - if you remove Accuracy without doing anything else, that statement becomes "I will maximize [favored stat!]"

So, like, if people wanna sit here and keep saying "get rid of accuracy" or "here's a way to make accuracy not matter" - provide me with some sort of example of what they could implement instead to actually keep choices of gear. Despite what everyone says about Accuracy limiting options, it is actually the reason that options exist in the first place. The main reason to choose one piece over another of equivalent item level is the accuracy on the two items. Sure, it results in one "best in slot" set that is definitively better on paper than any other set you could conceive, but uh, so what? What sorts of stats would you add where this would not be the case?

Or is the issue simply just that Accuracy is a poor choice for this, because it gimps Healers for no reason at all? (which is a fair criticism, and the very first post I made in this thread has me saying that all they need to do is put a 5% accuracy boost on Cleric Stance and they're golden)

[Shurrikhan]

And I have yet to see a single person propose how this statement is anything other than accurate. The only thought that goes into gearing up is "how will I maximize [favored stat] while meeting Accuracy?" - if you remove Accuracy without doing anything else, that statement becomes "I will maximize [favored stat!]"

So, like, if people wanna sit here and keep saying "get rid of accuracy" or "here's a way to make accuracy not matter" - provide me with some sort of example of what they could implement instead to actually keep choices of gear. Despite what everyone says about Accuracy limiting options, it is actually the reason that options exist in the first place. The main reason to choose one piece over another of equivalent item level is the accuracy on the two items. Sure, it results in one "best in slot" set that is definitively better on paper than any other set you could conceive, but uh, so what? What sorts of stats would you add where this would not be the case?

Or is the issue simply just that Accuracy is a poor choice for this, because it gimps Healers for no reason at all? (which is a fair criticism, and the very first post I made in this thread has me saying that all they need to do is put a 5% accuracy boost on Cleric Stance and they're golden)

This certainly isn't as solid an answer as you were hoping for, and it will largely be reiteration, but temporary (early/late game - low stats, high stats) weight-scaling imbalance between stats could go a fair way into interesting gearing or meaningful stat choice IF the secondary stats are abundant enough to actually reach very high amounts prior to the end of a given expansion, and if each stat can still be useful in both at low and high amounts.

For instance, in ARR critical strike was the preferred stat even by allegedly Det-high classes, to a point. Or, from the opposite perspective, even among Crit-high classes, Crit eventually gave way to Det and/or Speed. Even Bards' critical strike contribution tapered drastically enough that if Det had been even more of an intensely ideal for AAs, it would have been preferred over the holy River of Blood secondary stat at a certain point (though we never quite reached it). Skill Speed already has the complexity of having a few different usable plateaus, but some of these take drastic amounts of Skill Speed to reach, and the stat itself fairs poorly until it's gradually reducing the global by a greater and greater percent of the remainder (at which point its contribution is crippled by animation speed oversights, and partly by TP drain). In other words it had a linear value stat, a de-exponential relative value stat, and an exponential relative value stat. Though less obvious than missed attacks, that is a balance around which to build one's gear, each with equal or greater complexity than gearing for proper (least excess) accuracy. Some of the largest wasted opportunities we have now lie simply in Crit's "fix" and Speed's lack thereof.

Now, that's by no means a reason to remove accuracy. And if Accuracy were reduced as a percent of the total, the amounts saved (how little excess Accuracy one can have) would be that much less satisfying. I agree with you in that. I simply thought it expendible even so, IF, and only if, the other stats were at least balanced as to provide additional equilibrium to balance one's gearing around, noticeably, even now. That's why I included a few ways to fix the oversights on Skill Speed in my reply. (I didn't mean to ignore your post; I found it relevant to what you were asking.) It's also why I dislike what's been done with Critical Strike, in pairing the actual chance growth with increased crit bonus. The oversights to the first, and the overpowered fix to the second reduce the ideal gearing points we can aim for apart from finely cut accuracy. Crit even reduces the decision making on virtually every class to "how do I get the most Crit with the least of my shittiest stat", by being the highest weighted at any amount (after necessary speed plateaus).

(Granted, that find-the-Crit style gearing may be an equally enjoyable task to some; you have the "good" stat, and the "bad" stat(s), and maybe a mediocre one, too, and you want to maximize the "good"; the distinction is certainly stronger than if each stat were equally good, albeit with different ideal proportions and uses. I guess this too may come down to personal preferences.)

(To be honest, I could go either way on whether there is a noticeable best stat at a given level in other stats (whether each has a preferred relative amount to balance around), but at the very least I'd like to see each balanced against the others. Looking up a stat weight for my job is not interesting--all the less so when those stat weights are less dynamic. But at least having the choice of whether I want to go for an extended rotation or not (for indistinguishable outputs, or almost indistinguishable outputs correlatable with their required skill to perform), to have so many Bloodletters it's difficult to get every oGCD in before Internal Release ends or not, would feel damn good, given how little other avenues of customization there are. I like plateau-matching, but I also like the general freedom to customize.)

>> On topic: With all things as they are, I too would be quite happy with just a bonus 5% accuracy on Cleric Stance as well, if only because that'd at least leave them a few melds left to choose something else for coming into later Midas-S floors.