Quote Originally Posted by Deus View Post
While I GREATLY respect you for going out there and testing yourself (you are right that laziness is a factor), you need to understand that eyeballing effects and proving your conclusions to the community differ by a huge amount of effort, time, and complexity. You can make theories all day long but without data to back it up, it will always be useless. It will take hours and need to conform to thorough and rigorous precision and empirical process, or it will not be accepted. I have defined a lot of these guidelines here:
Section III: Empirical Testing Guidelines

We never got official answers on the damage formula for FFXI. Even 10 years later we STILL do not have a good understanding. Players of this game even now with this hardcore base are unable to understand FFXIV's stats system. With new players, especially this generation of competitive MMOs, they are not going to accept FFXIV's obscure stat system or attempt Forbidden materia craft. If Square Enix wants players to go the extra 10 miles exploring forbidden materia craft and contributing to the game's economy, they need to define the incentive to do so. Otherwise it will just be endless forum bickering over who is right and who is wrong with regards to weights in the damage formula, and people will continue to waste their time and money investing in their gear. Everybody loses. So devs, please work on getting a formula out there so we can get a better understanding how to compare all these parameters.
This is not my intention to say anyone in the community is wrong in this. I'm a little more testy when someone who more than likely will sit on their ass the whole time and not contribute to testing chimes in when they don't even have a place to do so.

Testing gets difficult for me in some ways because I get incredibly overwhelmed when I just deal with numbers. Which is kind of silly for a person who is dealing with something such as damage formulas. However, in my disability I've learned to take them [the numbers] and make visual objects of what I'm looking at in either scale or order and try to make sense of them in really odd ways. If that makes any sense to you, I don't know, but that's why I take so long. So, I actually get a lot of help mathematically through a friend of mine. In the past, I have been wrong here and there in my theories, but I have a strong feeling this is how it works.

I think maybe putting my theory out there for another to read and be curious about and test is a good thing. I certainly am not here to first anything. I'd just like people who are interested in how these stats work to be on track and know the proper times to use STR and the proper times to use ATK. If someone can beat me to it, that would be magnificent. Case closed and everyone is happy.