Bard: critical hit rate, determination or skill speed?

[MiniTyra]

People like you who cannot use common sense are the usual defenders of stat weights. How can a person with no official info calculate 100% UNDENIABLY accurate stat weight for a job he cannot do tests with? How can a person calculate 100% weight for a stat, that has diminishing returns when stacked over certain amount? Answer is you cant. No matter how you or anyone claim it being 100%, IT WILL NEVER be 100% without square releasing all the information needed to calculate it. No matter how much you do theorycrafting, it WILL remain a theory.

Hi, Dervy here.

What on earth are you talking about?

I know exactly how Determination Scales. I know the exact formula SquareEnix uses for Critical Hit Rating and Damage and whilst I don't know the exact formula of SS, I've nailed down precisely how it scales your GCD.

1) Stat-Weights will never be 100% accurate, of course. You're just stating the obvious here. Everyone should know this by now. If you're looking for 100% conversions, then you'll need to use Stat-equivalence. I refuse to use Stat-Equivalence, as many factors such as Job Rotations play a huge part in the performance of X Stat. None of those are factored into Stat-Equivalence. I believe, the exact ratios are something like:

CRT: 0.212 = 4.71698 : 1 STR
DET: 0.174 = 5.747 : 1 STR
SS: The JPs know.

They're strangely familiar to the actual weights I've posted for all Jobs... But, the Stat-Equivalence does not factor in things like Bootshine or Bloodletter, like I mentioned.

On top of this, amount of X stat you stack, will greatly affect the rate at which your stats scale your damage. For reference, here's a chart of CRT/SS functions on RAW DPS, without taking into account rotations:

https://i.imgur.com/xcZA9cO.png

2) What Job can't I do tests with, exactly? I can just "out-source" information from other players, and reference check them with all of my linear regressions solvers for inconsistencies.

3) No Stat has "Diminishing Returns" in this game. They have Marginal Diminishing Utility. Determination, Weapon/Magic Damage and "AP/MP" are the 3 main Linear Stats in FFXIV. Each stat will always scale exactly the same, per point, as the last point will, no matter if you have 5 of X stat, or 5000, each point will be valued exactly the same. However, the percentage growth (Utility), per point will decrease. This is what the graph looks like for Determination, all the way up to 3000. There's no fall-off.

http://puu.sh/oPRuN/2c6adee966.png

4) Even with knowing the formulas, the relative weights will always still remain inconsistent and never 100% accurate because the exponential growth of Crit and SS on gear, as well as the min/max allocations allowed on gear.

5) Elon, why are you on the aggressive towards JackFross? His knowledge of FFXIV is superior than a vast majority of players and he's actually studied Mathematics in University, unlike I have. He's corrected myself on multiple occasions.

So is Skill Speed in theory but you get into uptime tiers and so on.

Bingo. I had this discussion a few days ago with someone who does a lot of Monk Theorycrafting. Despite what the theoretical vacuum result of SS is, its potential is always tiered. Supposing in an encounter, you can do 100 GCDs in 4 minutes, putting you at a GCD of 2.4, or 625 SS. Any amount of SS you stack is wasted, until you can do 101 GCDs within those 4 minutes, or, you needing a GCD of 2.376, or 688 SS.

Which means, 62 points of SS are "wasted" and would've been better invested in DET or CRT, if you cannot hit the next theoretical threshold. This principle one of the many unfortunate fallacies of Skillspeed.

Though, this doesn't always reflect the exact performance in an encounter, as you'll never have 100% uptime to intensively min/max in this manner. If you have 0.5s downtime, when min/max'd at 688SS for example, that will automatically through you back into the 100GCD bracket.

So SS should be used as a rough guide to build your rotation and any left-over SS should be treated as a "filler", an aid, in case you mess up, or scrapped for CRT/DET. Example, a Monk at approximately 800SS can hit 11 GCD BFBs, so Monks should try to aim to build for 11 GCD BFB, then dump everything else into CRT, if they can. (For this patch of gear/raids at least)

Man, I could go on about this forever.

[Cetonis]

Though, this doesn't always reflect the exact performance in an encounter, as you'll never have 100% uptime to intensively min/max in this manner. If you have 0.5s downtime, when min/max'd at 688SS for example, that will automatically through you back into the 100GCD bracket.

Right, and for Bard in particular you're going to sporadically double weave and EA and so on, throwing any effort at exacting calculations right down the chute.

I like the idea of getting to a ~2.4s GCD to support doing two double weaves in a cycle without going down to 6 GCDs between Jaws, but I doubt it'd be worth cutting crit for anyway so it's something I only really get into if someone asks about SkS caps specifically.

[kalasnikov]

Dervy stuff

You should know me dervy, i go with my own bard instincts. Hmm and i can always be corrected, like with the diminishing returns you just did.

Also Reason that got me to reply to jacks post was him claiming weights being 100%, which they even you stated, cant be.

[ruskie]

It's always crit due to river of blood. The rest depends on what you are using. But for a double empy opener ~600sks(+/- depending on lag). Though sks/arrow helps bard as well from what I've read and from my own experiences. I don't generally even look at det when looking at gear. Does it have crit/sks/acc? Det I get by way of it's on the gear already...

[Krindor]

Dervys stat weights are accurate enough to guide people on how to pick their pieces. They would probably be 99% accurate if it wasn't for SkS. Running a simulator to find the best set of gear and then compare it to the highest stat weight set for MNK the difference in DPS is about 0.2% which is about 4 DPS. The difference isn't significant enough to say that you can't use the stat weights to guide players to what gear and materia to get and use. The amount of people sitting on tools that can help them with deciding what might be the 100% best upgrade doesn't even amount to 1/10000 of the player population.

[jssanderson747]

Generally speaking from a melding perspective, unless you're pentamelding with tier 5s for some reason, skill speed will always be the preferable substat regardless of the weights. I would generally argue ss to be a much better stat than det now since tp isn't even a problem at this point.

[Yeol]

So I found this info and tested it.

Acc 700 max (for A8S)
Det 620 min (general)
SkS 775 min (general)

If you have acc at 700 then you should work on increasing your other attributes, try to have SkS in the 800s and Det in the high 600s
With my current stats I was able to down A5S and A6S without food or pots, got A7S and A8S to 1~4% HP on SSS without food or pot (still have free meld slots).

Edit: Once you reach your goal meld crit and use food to increase it even more.

[Judge_Xero]

It's always crit due to river of blood. The rest depends on what you are using. But for a double empy opener ~600sks(+/- depending on lag). Though sks/arrow helps bard as well from what I've read and from my own experiences. I don't generally even look at det when looking at gear. Does it have crit/sks/acc? Det I get by way of it's on the gear already...

A couple things I look at for Bard.

CRT obviously for these reasons:
- Straight Shot buff = 10% Crit Rate Increase. This will always be compounded with it's Crit Multiplier. For example at the base CRT it is worth a 4.5% Damage Increase (10% * 0.45 Multiplier) The more CRT you stack the greater the buff is -> @ 0.75 Multiplier (1623 CRT) it is a 7.5% Damage increase (10% * 0.75)
- Blood Letter/ROD Proc Chance
- Straighter Shot Proc (Guaranteed Crit)

SPD
- Stacking Skill Speed changes BRD's single target Potency/Second on top of increasing # of attacks:
* Increased Number of Heavy Shots has a higher probability of Procing Straighter Shot which prevents using the lower potency Straight Shot as a Buff Refresh
* Greater Number of skills between the static 18s timer of Venom/Wind Bite. (MultiDotting etc)
* More efficient Skill weaving due to higher SS Procs

CRT/SPD Compound together to create even better results.
- lower GCD = less missed BL procs due to double procing
- More SS Procs combined with a higher CRT Multiplier
- tighter IJ refresh without clipping
- More attacks under buffs
- Combination of more SS Procs and lower EA timer allows for double firing.

------------------------------------

Overall makes the class more fluid similar to Spell Speed for BRD.

[JackFross]

You should know me dervy, i go with my own bard instincts. Hmm and i can always be corrected, like with the diminishing returns you just did.

Also Reason that got me to reply to jacks post was him claiming weights being 100%, which they even you stated, cant be.

I didn't say they're 100% accurate in all situations - I just said that for a specific set of gear with defined stats on a certain Job, you can calculate the DPS output of those stats using the damage formulae and then retrofit that damage to the stats to define quite severely accurate weights for those stats at those particular levels. It's not literally 100%, but it's close enough to be within a reasonable enough approximation of how those stats are weighted.

Taking an aggregate of these different sets with varying stat values based on current gear thresholds gives a reasonably accurate representation of the value of each stat to a given Job, based on factors of said Job. It's far more number crunching than I myself am willing to do (since I prefer pure mathematics to applied), but saying "it's just a theory" is the same nonsense rhetoric used by creationists with respect to the theory of evolution. The stat weights are a scientific theory in the context of this game and have been calculated and tested rigorously to the point where it is folly to discount them as something that "good players" should not listen to or consider.

This can be backed up by Dervy's own admitted unwillingness to completely commit on MCH, BLM, or healer stat weights, because he's not completely finished crunching the numbers yet. He's not satisfied that anything he's come up with for those Jobs is accurate enough. Ergo: the numbers aren't bullshit.

The only point I was making in my first reply was that you said:
"Stat weights are dumb, don't look at those." - referring to weights which show Crit being nearly twice as effective as Det or Sks, which were approximately tied.

You then followed up with:
"Crit is clearly king because of Bard's synergy with Crit." - the stat weights corroborate this.
"Det and Sks is more of a toss-up based on preference." - again corroborated by the weights.

I just found it - and still find it - humorous that you would bash on the weights before explaining exactly why the numbers that were shown are a reasonable approximation of the value of said stats.


(Also thanks, Dervy ♥)