Quote Originally Posted by dspguy View Post
Secondary stats became dead when they removed Accuracy as a stat. There used to be a thought process around gear. You had to maintain that minimal accuracy and work your other gear around that.
That's also not good decision making, tbh. It was still a fixed process, just with one more extra step involved. A good secondary stat system would be secondary. Meaning that it either enables player choice (accuracy did not, and neither do the current stats except for rare cases where the same job can be viable at different SPS points but then you usually still look at a foregone conclusion based on the items you're wearing) or it enables item differentiation between jobs. The second they'd never do given how many items there are already and how many jobs, plus if anything it ought to be done like in GW2 then.

But more importantly the old system wasn't the former either. Accuracy would only be a sensible secondary stat if the tradeoff was big enough so that intentionally making your skills unreliable for a big payoff in average damage would be worthwhile.
Say you drop to 90% hitrate, but you do 130% damage on average. Now it gets interesting: At 10% miss chance, your combos and entire rotation becomes utterly unreliable. But in return your damage is far higher. But hey if you miss your 120s skill(s), you're probably below average again, and the same goes for lacking whole resources like missing out on your self-buffing skill a few times in a row, while the other skills of the filler rotation connect. Maybe you'll starve on resource. Maybe you'll overflow on it as your spenders keep missing. But hey on average your damage is higher, so if you want that, go for it.

But, even that would be really really difficult to balance. People would math the optimal miss-chance to accept, and then it's a fixed gearing pattern again.

For proper secondary stats, they need to damage-unrelated. That enables player choice.