Double down and lionheart changes

[Reginald_Cain]

This is a pet peeve of mine in FFXIV in general: Double Down shows us hitting the enemy twice. But we only hit it once. We can see that. There's a combat log. There's not even fudging of the scrolling combat text (like many games so, multi-attack abilities technically only cause a single hit but it's shown as a flurry of small damage numbers to the player for the feel).

Same with those other skills. Dark Knight C&S. I wish these abilities would actually cause multiple instances of damage...

Ninjas dream within a dream used to
Blue mage matra magic does
Bards barrage on single target (but not aoe???????) Does
. They've done it before I don't know why not anymore... if it's about stopping damage variance then make every numeric value of each strike do fixed equal damage. Is that even hard? Stares at blue mage 1000 needles doing fixed damage.

[Absurdity]

Ninjas dream within a dream used to
Blue mage matra magic does
Bards barrage on single target (but not aoe???????) Does
. They've done it before I don't know why not anymore... if it's about stopping damage variance then make every numeric value of each strike do fixed equal damage. Is that even hard? Stares at blue mage 1000 needles doing fixed damage.

I'm not actually sure if those were multi-hit, and I unfortunately the logs are too old to check.
What I mean is that sure, they were displayed as multiple instances of damage, but did the game actually register them as such?

Because the "black magic we don't talk about" can do that exact thing right now, display an ability as multiple separate hits with their own individual damage, but the game itself still just registers it as a single attack.

But we do know that Barrage actually does make Refulgent Arrow a multi-hit with 3 separate damage instances, so they can clearly do it...sometimes.

[Carighan]

They've done it before I don't know why not anymore... if it's about stopping damage variance then make every numeric value of each strike do fixed equal damage. Is that even hard? Stares at blue mage 1000 needles doing fixed damage.

Yeah plus if you do this as a dev usually for performance reasons your game logic (or in this case the server) only processes a single hit for a large amount of damage anyways. But what gets shown to the player are 4 individual damage hits that sum up to this large number. A purely visual thing where the individual numbers are then timed to when the attacks visually connect.

[Absurdity]

Yeah plus if you do this as a dev usually for performance reasons your game logic (or in this case the server) only processes a single hit for a large amount of damage anyways. But what gets shown to the player are 4 individual damage hits that sum up to this large number. A purely visual thing where the individual numbers are then timed to when the attacks visually connect.

Having them actually register as separate hits would be the better option if possible, because at the same time it would lower the crit variance problem we're having.
Instead of a single 1500 potency hit you would have let's say 4 hits for 375 potency each and a crit roll on each of them.

But it would increase the processing load, so yeah it's probably not going to happen.

[Carighan]

Having them actually register as separate hits would be the better option if possible, because at the same time it would lower the crit variance problem we're having.
Instead of a single 1500 potency hit you would have let's say 4 hits for 375 potency each and a crit roll on each of them.

It's also unnecessary. Law of large numbers. Yeah sure, in a particular buff window you might use a single Double Down and it's annoying if that doesn't crit. But there are thousands of Gunbreakers using Double Down in tens of thousands of buff windows every day. And even a single player uses it more than once in a particular fight, nevermind a whole evening. It balances out.

Now as to whether the buff window has become too important, and hence critting inside it too valuable vs the crits you get outside of it, that's a separate issue. Also easily solved (even without de-emphasizing the window) but it needs a separate fix, and increasing server load for every ability showing multiple hits feels unnecessary to me to try fix it, tbh. I mean, they could always just fudge crit chance if that's a problem (meaning it's not actually the percentage you see at any given moment).