High potency skills and/or auto-crit/auto-direct-crit

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

There might be a small misunderstanding from looking at the problem in different ways. Breaking up attacks won't change the average damage done over many instances. It does increase the number of possible outcomes for a given attack and some of those new outcomes will deviate less from the average, but it doesn't change the min or max possible variance.

Splitting attacks into multiple parts will mean that any given damage log is more likely to fall closer to the average, but the top 1%/bottom 1% is still going to be biased by luck. If the desire behind breaking up attacks is a very, very slight increase in consistency then it might make sense, but I'm not sure if people will really notice. If the desire is to eliminate or reduce the luck factor inherent in the very best or very worst instances of a raid, the change won't do anything. Forced crits are a better solution in the latter case. They directly reduce variation.

The top 1%/bottom % is basically irrelevant in this scenario. Doesn't really matter if someone gets a god crit/dh once in a single run, it's about creating more consistent damage profiles for the 99% of runs, and tightening the expected damage outcome to a singluar point than allowing it to swing so insanely wildly as it does currently.

Take TOP for example, a fight with notoriously tight dps checks, coupled with short phases making 2mins become a far more important source of damage than in other fights. In phase 1, you only get 1 set of 2mins, meaning any crits/dhs within this single set of 2mins can lead to massively different damage spreads on the boss, purely because they make up a significant chunk of the damage done to the boss during the phase. A single Hyosho from a NIN can do anywhere from close to 100k to an upwards of 300k depending on no other factor than pure luck. My group can go anywhere from seeing halfway through the enrage castbar of phase 1 to having to hold for an upwards of 10s to make sure our 2mins are up for the start of p2 purely on nothing more than CRT/DH rng as a group, which is ridiculous design.


Heck, a variation of this problem was even occurring in TOP's P6 because the insanely high damage hits of Limit Break used to be subjected to a +/- 5% damage range, which meant getting unlucky on enough of the LB rolls would put your group 100-200k damage behind another group that just got lucky, which was the make or break of many groups that weren't ultra top tier when coupled with the phases's tighter than usual dps check. Square solved this by doing the exact same thing several suggestions in this topic are hinting towards - they simply tightened the expected damage values towards a singular point by lowering the possible variance on Limit break skills to +/- 1-2% instead, making LB damage's contribution far more consistent for the phase.

Splitting single huge attacks into multiple instances of damage would in fact creating a far more concentrated, consistent damage profile around a single expected value - purely because outside of a blue moon, no one will be getting lucky enough to hit multiple god rolls for each individual part of the multi-hit on their big skills, while the odds of getting equally unlucky will be insanely low as well. The mins & maxes may not have changed, but getting to them will be statistically rare. The expected average potency of the skill will be more centralized around an expected value instead of wildly ranging from 1200 to an upwards of 2500 depending on statistical odds that are relatively easy to achieve comparatively (6-10% for CRT+DH currently). You can even already see this type of damage philosophy and its expected outcomes on DRK contrasted to a tank like PLD. DRK's Shadowbringer is split into 2 individual 600 potency hits, when coupled with a huge abundance of 460 & 500 ish potency hits from their various OGCDs, makes it so their damage profile is far more spread out and getting the DH/CRIT rng on one skill doesn't influence their damage profile as heavily.

Contrast PLD, where they have such an insane amount of potency funneled into 4 skills that those 4 skills basically dictate the PLD's damage output that particular minute depending on how lucky the PLD gets. For a DRK to get a 'god' damage output, they have to win something like 40-50 damage rolls between all of their OGCDs, GCDs and LS's attacks, making each roll contribute far less to the overall damage profile. PLD only have to win 8 rolls across 4 skills, meaning each roll's outcome causes the final result to swing wildly, positively and negatively.

It's simple mitigation tactics. More rolls = each roll contributes less to the overall result = expected damage fixates upon a singular point than being in a very wildly swinging state and is far easier to be balanced around, while also giving that dopamine hit for the player of getting that ultra rare quad-dh/crit, or even just the dopamine of getting 2-3 parts of your multi-hit attack to crit.