Quote Originally Posted by hydralus View Post
I'd prefer if they got rid of crit/direct hit. Why should damage output have a luck variable? It's so strange. "Well it evens out in a long fight" okay sure why not just make it a general damage output increase, then. What, for 'gameplay depth'? There's no depth to either hitting a higher number or not based on an unseen force. At least with skill/spellspeed changes you could actually see some alterations to some rotations.
It's to provide variance in psychological feedback, and somewhat of an RPG "staple".

The human brain will pick up on it pretty quickly if all your numbers are hitting for the same amount over and over again, and it begins to feel conspicuously "artificial" and "gamey". Same reason there's the artficially-induced 5% damage variance even on non-critical attacks.

That's not to say that FFXIV has ever been a breathtaking simulation of reality, but the "staticness" of lacking crit spikes tends to make numerically-based combat feel more stale and uninteresting; generally, people who aren't parsing and competing with logging tend to have "fun" seeing their numbers randomly get "lucky" and bigger, because it satisfies something similar to the same complex that causes people to engage with other forms of gambling — the promise that sometimes, something more rewarding and exciting happens, if you just keep doing the same thing, and/or execute this-or-that sequence correctly.

At the end of the day, XIV is an extraordinarily simplistic combat system; it doesn't even include most of the modifying factors that RPGs traditionally have, like hit chance, enemy avoidance / armor mitigation / resistances, elemental weaknesses, etc etc. So, the substat systems serve to provide some remaining illusion of variability and "unpredictability" to the combat experience, especially for more casual players who aren't mapping out Savage timelines down to the GCD.

You could strip all of it away, and just put all gear upgrades down to mainstat alone, but the "hit rhythm" of your numerical pop-up feedback would begin to feel extraordinarily predictable and "flat".

Now, whether that's actually "bad" in a game where the "absolute repeatability" of its choreographed combat has become somewhat of its "design identity"... that's up to each individual, I guess. But it is the reason why RNG stuff like Crit/DHit continue to linger around stubbornly.