Sub-Stats: Variety and Tuning

[DrWho2010]

Nah. Gear is uniform becuase non-hardcore people don't have the time or energy to theorycraft the BEST solution or experiment with theoretical playstyles. the game comes down to the way it is due to player's own skill. If they can hack it yay - you get the best stuff. If you can't, well then keep at it with your schedule till you can or come back later when you're op 2 expansions down the line to get the shiny things or E/RP or whatever it is that other people do in the game. No need to make things overly complex. Keep that kind of stuff to single player RPGS.

[Kabooa]

Nah. Gear is uniform becuase non-hardcore people don't have the time or energy to theorycraft the BEST solution or experiment with theoretical playstyles. the game comes down to the way it is due to player's own skill. If they can hack it yay - you get the best stuff. If you can't, well then keep at it with your schedule till you can or come back later when you're op 2 expansions down the line to get the shiny things or E/RP or whatever it is that other people do in the game. No need to make things overly complex. Keep that kind of stuff to single player RPGS.

I'm well aware why it's this way.

For just about everyone else, you can literally just push all your points blindly into one or all around and trounce through the game as normal.

The game literally doesn't change for them.

[Shurrikhan]

Nah. Gear is uniform becuase non-hardcore people don't have the time or energy to theorycraft the BEST solution or experiment with theoretical playstyles. the game comes down to the way it is due to player's own skill. If they can hack it yay - you get the best stuff. If you can't, well then keep at it with your schedule till you can or come back later when you're op 2 expansions down the line to get the shiny things or E/RP or whatever it is that other people do in the game. No need to make things overly complex. Keep that kind of stuff to single player RPGS.

If that were the case, wouldn't it make more sense for the stats to be more tightly balanced in output, and less compositionally dependent in their performance, as not to have such wide deviations given that theorycrafting?

It would take only minute adjustments to achieve balance that would give hardcore theorycrafters far less of an advantage by making the stat interactions more intuitive (not to mention, transparent). Should we disregard those, too?

The breakpoint interactions of Skill Speed and Spell Speed are also far from minimal as is, and I mean that in a good way. There are stat values very, very worth achieving.

On topic / @OP :

All that being said, I don't see how these would make gameplay any more interesting.

The added movement speed, for instance, would have to be relatively minor at best, or it'd be obligatory among many a mid-skill group within certain fights to such a point that a party could make it to safety without having to know ahead of time which direction will be safe (standing instead just at center), while high-skill groups would still largely avoid it outside of slide-casting or fights with risky positionals. Berserk, likewise, may be useful to one class and worthless to another. Now, that in itself that bad, but poor optimization without player options for correction feels bad. It feels bad tier after tier that, say, a Summoner is subjected to Det- or SpS-high gear or a Warrior to DHit-Ten. And while it would make sense that the increased number of stats we can get "right", in due proportion, would balance this, MMO studies have usually found the opposite: satisfaction diminishes more with passive factors not optimized that it increases with passive factors that are optimized. That it to say, the negatives hurt more than the positives help. That won't be true for everyone, and I doubt it's true for you, but that is that statistical norm so far as we know.

Personally, I'd much rather see fewer but more gameplay-affecting stats. Aside from Critical Strike among Monks and Bards, Skill Speed and Spell Speed are our only gameplay-affecting stats. And both of those are notoriously ill-tuned: weak at first or among any oGCD-heavy job, strong at high amounts on jobs without oGCDs, and ever mutually exclusive to each other due to their high payoff breakpoints. Apply balance first, and then let's see what we can do with what we have, what we lack, and what might augment gameplay within actual damage categories. Damage augmentation shouldn't just be "hurr durr" stuff; breakpoint-affecting SkS certainly isn't, and there's no need for even a revised Determination to be, either.

But before we can really even get into those, we may first need to address the redundant or lacking systems stats might involve. TP and MP come first to mind; outside of hamstringing long-term physical AoE in a way casters are as immune to as old Sprint costs and adding a faint layer of attrition to (over-)healers, the two universal resource stats find good use only among the BLM playflow -- maybe PLD or DRK's. Similarly, why doesn't it matter at all when we deal our damage or how bursty it is. Our only current factors to make damage matter outside of the enemy eventually dropping dead are raid buff multiplicity and enrage-like add spawns. Is there more we can do with that?