Quote Originally Posted by MiniPrinny View Post
Final Fantasy XIV has a problem. And that problem is needless obfuscation of the means of potencies and secondary stats. As it stands, we are forced to attempt to reverse engineer the usefulness of our secondary stats. Due to this, we as players are, by design, lost in making intelligent decisions.

While potencies aren't as troublesome, after all, Benefic is flat out weaker than Benefic II, but we struggle to quickly understand how much weaker it is on the fly. Like, I know from math that Benefic is only .625 of Benefic II, but why must I do math to understand that difference. Why can't it be something along the lines of "Potency is equal to X% of your Attack Power, Attack Magic Power, or Healing Magic Power." There's no explanation of something so simple.

However, what is troubling is the secondary stats. Accuracy, Critical Hit Rate, Determination, Parry, Skill Speed, Spell Speed, and for healers, Piety are completely obscured.
Sorry, but math is required every time you need to find the difference between two numbers or their ratio. That's just how it is. Even if potency was displayed as a percentage of your attack power, you'd have to do a little math to find how much bigger. Abilities will not always have easy values like 50%, 80% etc. For example, undestanding how much smaller 47% of AP is compared to 61% of AP is not any simpler than understanding the difference between 470 potency and 610 potency.

Going to agree with you on the stat thing though. This game already has a wonderfully clean way of portraying ability power but lacks means to find the power of stats. It's... weird. Something along the lines of, "Critical hit rate increases the chance to deal double damage by 1% per every <your character level> points.", would be amazing for theorycrafting.