Quote Originally Posted by BabyYoda View Post
The problem with RNG is that if it is impactful, it becomes hard to balance and luck affects performance too much. If it is balanced, it often has to be watered down until the proc barely matters.
Both sides of this are solved problems, the devs just need to actually look at other MMOs. Even older ones.

Yes, if you handle procs like they do on e.g. Red Mage, their only response is to trivialize and neuter until they no longer matter. That's lame. And I agree, if you gotta do that, just don't. It's no longer even a proc at that point.

But even ... how long ago was it?... ouuuf, 2007. Okay so back in 2007 World of Warcraft had already solved the proc-randomness issue by introducing their PPM system. Since Windfury and whatever that Retri thing was didn't work well with 1H vs 2H (more of an issue for Windfury), they introduced a PPM system where instead of each hit having say a 20% chance to proc something, you got 5 procs per minute. Got a slow weapon, higher chance per hit than on a faster weapon. This introduced the first step of easing proc randomness: One upside of a faster weapon (for procs with fixed values) was a higher reliability due to the high number of hits quickly evening out the chances and the procs coming at pretty reliable intervals. Want to gamble that you get extra hits during buff windows? Go for something slow, rake in the huge double/triple procs, but hey, might also get unlucky.

This was then fudged again, which AFAIK is still what they do today: They got a PPM-system, but it also "helps you". As you fail to produce procs, the chance actually goes up slightly. You can't be without proc for toooooo long. Likewise if you proc repeatedly, your chance goes down more than it would have to for the PPM number to be correct, in particular for the first 1-2 hits, so that chained procs and deserts of no procs become both very rare while the overall PPM is the same and the randomness is still felt over medium stretches of time.

And then, that's just one way of doing it. It's a very smart one, there's a reason most copy that. FFXIV somehow... just doesn't even bother with procs or randomization, which cuts off ~2.5 of 4 archetypes of RPG-class-design.