Diminishing Return on Stats

[Syrus_Draco]

Hey. So talking with FC and raid mates about builds and stats, and the topic of diminishing returns came up. So I am curious to know if there are any solid numbers saying "You get diminishing returns on Determination after X amount"

I ask this because, if you reach the diminishing return number, sounds like it would be most beneficial to add stats into other slots to maximize what you can put on your character.

[Alistaire]

People throw around "diminishing returns" badly sometimes. If you start @ 100 of a figure, add 10, that's a 10% increase. Add another 10 to 110 and if you use 110 as the base #, you'll get a figure of less than 10% increase. But it's not, any increase should be compared to the original base #.

So there is such a thing as linear returns and as far as prime stats, det/crit/acc, give linear returns. Until cap. I've heard #s thrown around for a crit cap that was 520 ish I think? Haven't heard of a det cap, and acc varies by job and is easily googled.

skill/spell speed are a different ball game, and are effectively increasing returns with a cliff at the end.

[Itseotle]

I've heard #s thrown around for a crit cap that was 520 ish I think?

I don't actually think there is a "cap" on crit, but there is a limited amount of crit you can get based on gear/food. "You can only buff a stat as high as the gear will allow it to go" sort of idea.

To elaborate more on the Skill/Spell Speed comment: These stats will lower the recast of your abilities by a very small amount, and it takes a lot to reduce the cooldowns by even 1/100th of a second. So instead of looking at Speed as a linear increase, you can see it as a "stairway" increase; that it rises sharply then stays flat for a long time. The other characteristic of Speed is TP/MP management. If you have high stats in Speed, your abilities execute faster, and your TP/MP drains more quickly. This can be a problem in longer fights, causing starvation where your DPS will plummet. And finally, the last point about Speed is that when you equip gear that boosts Speed, your not equipping gear that has other stats. For example you equip a ring that has +Speed and +Determination. You could equip instead a ring that has +Critical and +Determination. This matters when you factor in the above points. These ideas in combination are what Alistaire means when he says speed "returns with a cliff at the end". Too much speed is a bad thing, in general.

[Alistaire]

Yes, any "cap" is like that in this game; the stat will keep going, but stops helping after a point. Semantics. The difference is in knowing that just because your stat keeps going up, doesn't mean it keeps helping, where if you were looking for it to "cap" as in stop raising on your character screen despite you adding more into it...you won't see that here.

[MythToken]

Yes above posts are correct, there are absolutely no caps in this game whatsoever. Every single stat has been proven by all data mined by players and all info from SE itself, to be linear. Every single point of anything is just as effective as the last point you put into it.


The only thing that slightly varies from this is speed, in that it hasn't been proven to be beneficial to have more speed. However the stat still increases your speed at a linear pace.
Accuracy would also fall under this category while increasing your accuracy will still give you an increase in accuracy at a linear level, it has no benefit once you hit 100% hit chance.

[Almalexia]

People throw around "diminishing returns" badly sometimes. If you start @ 100 of a figure, add 10, that's a 10% increase. Add another 10 to 110 and if you use 110 as the base #, you'll get a figure of less than 10% increase. But it's not, any increase should be compared to the original base #.

If you go from 1% crit to 2% crit, that is a 100% increase in critical hits. However, going from 99% crit to 100% crit is a substantially lower gain. This, they told me, was diminishing returns - and it was bad.

Yet players require the same amount of statistical points to go from 1% to 2% crit as they require to go from 99% to 100% (against targets of equal level). In both instances, I am critting 1% more than before for the same price.

If that's the case, does this mean "diminishing returns" do not exist in any practical capacity until you reach 100% of a condition, or reach a cap arbitrarily set by SE? AND ALMA WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG? YOU BASTARDS?

[Mephistopheles]

That's not how diminishing returns works, 1% is still a helpful gain. From what I've gathered the only diminishing returns in this game in regards to starts is the middle areas for Determination and Piety. Main stats always give a boost, an equal boost at that.

[Amoteas]

Wouldnt diminishing returns to crit be like this if it existed; At 200 crit rating 14 rating increase crit with 1% and at like 500 rating you would need say 20 to increase crit with 1%. Just random numbers for an example. Like above posters have said, stats seems
linear.

[EasymodeX]

So instead of looking at Speed as a linear increase, you can see it as a "stairway" increase;

It's not. That's only a reflection of the UI truncating numbers. A guy on reddit showed the detailed tests of Rez (8s base spell) and the cast time appeared to be reduced in 0.1s increments at the same ratio as a 2.5s base spell was reduced. E.g. the SS formula is probably a straight % reduction in cast time, with the game UI truncating.

These ideas in combination are what Alistaire means when he says speed "returns with a cliff at the end".

No. The cliff at the end of SS is because you cannot attack faster than you animate. If your animation takes 1.5 seconds, then your SS is essentially hardcapped at -1.0, whic is what, +1050?




But there seems to be a large amount of random imprecise / misinformation. Here are the facts:

1. There are two concepts. Diminishing returns and then something vaguely referred to as marginal diminishing value. Sometimes people emphasize the former by adding more words like "real DR, hard DR, formulaic DR, statistical DR". The latter is simply an economics concept of value comparison.

Formulaic diminishing returns is when the formula itself dictates that stacking a stat becomes significantly weaker. An example of this is an armor formula damage = damage / (1+armor). The damage reduction % in that formula has diminishing returns (but survivability does not, go figure).

The only real DR in this game is the value of %crit for River of blood procs. River of Blood has a %crit chance to proc every DoT tick. In a normal situation, the player has 2 or more DoTs active. All DoTs tick at the same time. Successful RoB procs on one DoT will eliminate RoB procs of the other DoTs, since you can only get RoB proc per tick. The statistical result of this is that RoB has diminishing returns from %crit. In other words, if you double your crit%, your RoB proc rate will NOT double. It will increase by an amount less than double.


Marginal diminishing value is the general result where stacking a stat becomes poorer from a value perspective. This is the basic concept of +10% crit when you have 0 base crit is worth +5% DPS. +10% crit when you have 60% base crit is worth +3.7% DPS. The more crit you stack, the less useful stacking crit is. This effect has a slow decay (each +1% decays the value by 1%).

Note: wannabe-smart people try to repeat the fact that crit rating -> crit% is linear and say it has linear returns. You know you're dealing with a pseudo-intellectual troll when they spam that every response as if it matters.

No one gives a ****. What matters is the value. Value in this case is DPS, because no one really cares what stat is giving them DPS -- they just want results. The marginal benefit in results does, in fact, diminish by stacking a single stat.


2. Spell Speed / Skill Speed has accelerating returns. Technically they're not exponential, like mathetmatically exponential. However, SS actually has accelerating (better than linear) returns. More SS makes SS more valuable. Pretty nuts.

However, the benefit of the acceleration requires a LOT of the stat to be stacked -- much more than is reasonable without killing your TP bar, or mana bar for most classes. BLMs are the only class that can meaningfully make use of stacking SS, and even for them there is some de-synergy since their UI phase has fixed ticks (mana regen ticks are not accelerated by SS, so they have to wait for the ticks regardless of how much SS they have).

For all other classes you can kiss your resource pool goodbye before you reach the SS levels where you start to really get strong DPS benefit from stacking the SS.

[Viridiana]

Marginal diminishing value is the general result where stacking a stat becomes poorer from a value perspective. This is the basic concept of +10% crit when you have 0 base crit is worth +5% DPS. +10% crit when you have 60% base crit is worth +3.7% DPS. The more crit you stack, the less useful stacking crit is. This effect has a slow decay (each +1% decays the value by 1%).

While I see how this could be construed as diminishing returns, in another sense, it isn't really. If all your other stats stayed the same and you only increased Crit, then each % increase would give you the same increase in total DPS.