Question about damage Dex vs. (Str + Attack power)

[Murugan]

Nice post Muragan though it seems some inconsistencies.

Archer2 Heavy Shot did vastly more damage in the 3rd attempt, its not even a min-max at that point. Either both crit or both were stacked w/ Blood for Blood. The same with the Quick Nock that did 276, it was either a crit or a BfB and Archer 1 didn't ever get a crit on it to have a comparable "max". Overall Archer2 seems peculiar, attempt 2 he did not have Raging Strike up or something?

However damage is calculated one thing is for sure, there is a very wide margin in damage.

In the third attempt (on Pomburner) notice that Archer 2 only used Heavy Shot twice. It did not have the highest max damage, but merely the highest average damage. That average is skewed because again there are only 2 heavy shots from Archer 2 that fight.

On Whiskerwall Archer 1 is clearly ahead. Yes there are still some areas where it is inconsistent, but far less than in support of DEX/PIE.

Archer2 also has superior gear to Archer1, but sorta ties him? I guess is what the chart says overall. Moogle is just sorta a blah fight to do tests on because theres too many random factors and the sample sizes are often small. Also you did not test anyone with stacked STR, all 3 archers in that have similar gear sets.

Based on quick testing on patch day I did not feel it was worth testing STR at this time.

Also what the chart says is that Attack appears to play more of a factor the higher the defense the mob has, and that in general it appears to be more consistent with higher damage (when controlled for outliers caused by the wide margin of the damage formula)

My ARC stats are 298 STR, 271 DEX, 545 ATK, 240 PIE and I do 20k+ more damage than the 2nd highest ARC in the Moogle fight. Theres not really any way to tell if its my gear, skill, rotation, etc thats causing that due to how many different scenario's can unfold in the particular fight.

That is because you are focusing on the wrong numbers. Your total damage will be skewed if for example you hit Wide Volley and hit a bunch of Moogles (unintentially even), this contributes little to the fight unless as a group you are fighting them this way. The moogle will likely regen, and that extra damage and DPS you show overall may have actually meant very little.

This is not a comparison of DPS or Total Damage, this is a comparison of Max and Average damage. It is unaffected by how the scenario unfolds (except where you see invalid where I've had to invalidate Average results due to an archer hitting an immune Balloongle).

None of the abilities were used with buffs, there are no debuffs which could affect them. They are fighting a unique enemy (which should have identical stats every time), and they are wearing the same gear between the attempts. They are all using Ifrit's bow, with Cobalt Arrows.

The number of attacks is noted alongside the averages so that you can tell if the sample is smaller than usual (explaining inconsistencies in some areas).

I would like to know though is your damage %'s. My set up gets me 35-40% of my damage through LS/Barrage and the other 60% through WS's. It would be interesting if these high DEX set ups get 50%+ damage through LS/Barrage, then you could make a case such as:

DEX/PIE only increase LS/Barrage damage where STR/ATK increase WS damage. If DEX and PIE also increase WS damage then the ratio of a high DEX/PIE build should still get 35-45% roughly of its damage through LS/Barrage.

I have seen very little so far to support that hypothesis. As you see Archer 1's average light shot was higher in both fights with an Attack build.

That was my original assumption when I allocated my stats on ARC, is that DEX/PIE is only going to affect LS based damage moves (just LS and Barrage) and STR would have a more profound effect on WS's. Its already clear STR and ATK have a very marginal effect on LS/Barrage but it doesn't seem like anyone did a solid test of WS damage yet.

This would also lead to more variants of ARC to test to find out if its better to pump WS damage or LS damage, or find a happy medium between the 2.

Most people are testing theories on normal mobs. However if there are checks comparing the player against the mob, fighting a mob lower than you (with a much lower defense than your attack) would likely not show how useful Attack Power actually is in encounters that actually matter (which if we are talking about Parses generally means endgame encounters).

They may be encountering either the aforementioned issue with the large damage margin on attacks, or hitting the damage cap *which is possibly tied to weapon damage* (assuming there is one, and I am as a member tested it using Dated Red Coral Arrow and hit a max of 906 in damage with 15 additional points in both DEX and PIE alternatively).

Again I realize my sample is too small to draw definite conclusions, and I'd encourage others to contribute to the discussion with similar data to see if they can verify it. However, parsing against normal mobs means nothing to an endgame archer if it can't be verified that those results/conclusions actually translate to endgame encounters.

[carraway]

It's always interesting to see particular datasets; when I have time I'll take a closer look, but one thing I want to reiterate is that the patch notes were misleading. The assumption that different stats affect auto-attack/shot damage or weaponskill damage individually has never been corroborated and casual observation in 1.20 continues to demonstrate that that assumption is wrong. Even in 1.19., PIE affected WS and auto-attack damage for LNCs. Since 1.19, ATK has always affected minimum, maximum, auto-attack, shot, and weaponskill damage for all physical DPS classes.

[Kiara]

It's always interesting to see particular datasets; when I have time I'll take a closer look, but one thing I want to reiterate is that the patch notes were misleading. The assumption that different stats affect auto-attack/shot damage or weaponskill damage individually has never been corroborated and casual observation in 1.20 continues to demonstrate that that assumption is wrong. Even in 1.19., PIE affected WS and auto-attack damage for LNCs. Since 1.19, ATK has always affected minimum, maximum, auto-attack, shot, and weaponskill damage for all physical DPS classes.

Hi carraway,

Ah thanks. So in your last sentence "ATK has always affected minimum, maximum, auto-attack, shot, and weaponskill damage" you mean "whatever Stat SE is now listing in the patch notes that raises that class' specific Attack" to be what you're talking about right?

I'm still curious as to why SE made a separate entry under Strength that lists it affecting "Attack Power" but it's starting to seem like STR really doesn't do anything at all for ARC.

[carraway]

I'm talking specifically about the stat named attack power, but yes, all stats that affect physical damage output have done so across all types of actions, and as far as I can tell thus far, that hasn't changed.

[Davern]

Very interesting results. I was having problems with the parser but was able to eventually read the logs by manually removing them after each test. It seems dex does have an effect but nearly as much as atk does in equal ratio. I did 3 tests and Min/Max dmg as well as Avg. dmg all increased by ~6 when adding to my DEX or ATK stats. I did add an extra 2 DEX to my last test but that's because the atk gear had 2 dex on it so I couldn't really prevent that but 2 dex should have had a very minimal if any effect on the test. I'm currently lvl35 Arch fighting lvl30 bombs, I know it was mentioned that fighting normal mobs is useless but being so close to level I don't think I was hitting the damage cap by far since I've done over 732dmg on weaker mobs. I would ignore the dps as it's clearly off due to the way the experiment is carried out and total dmg may as well be off and I'm thinking this is due to the way FFXIV logs data, I.E. start, stop.

Results.

T1: DEX: 175

STR: 129

PIE: 136

ATK: 250

Atks: 49

DPS: 73.76

Crit: 10.20%

Min: 138 Max: 162

Avg: 150.97

CrtMi: 192 CrtMa: 207

DMG: 5728



T2: DEX: 145

STR: 129

PIE: 136

ATK: 250

Atks: 50

DPS: 53.83

Crit: 13%

Min: 132 Max: 155

Avg: 142.88

CrtMi: 182 CrtMa: 201

DMG: 5531


T3: DEX: 177

STR: 129

PIE: 136

ATK: 261

Atks: 50

DPS: 16.45

Crit: 20.90%

Min: 144 Max: 169

Avg: 156.37

CrtMi: 199 CrtMa: 224

DMG: 8194

Conclusion, while Dex does seem to have an effect on overall dmg, the ratio of DEX needed to Dmg increase is lower compared to Atk needed to increase dmg. It looks something around DEX5: DMG1 vs ATK2: DMG1. Not sure the cap on either though and I'm interested in doing or seeing someones results with STR, PIE and a lot more ATK. Would also like to see a more thorough experiment on normal mobs near same lvl since that is whats most important to me at this time as I'm solo lvling Arch.

[Davern]

Can someone help me make sense of this? Went back for a fourth test.

DEX: 155

STR: 129

PIE: 159

ATK: 250

# of atks: 51

DPS: 29.06 (irrelevent)

Crit: 3.92%

Min:131 Max: 154

Avg: 142.94

CrtMi: 179 CritMa: 203

Dmg: 5528


Somehow adding 10 Dex and 23 PIE gave me nearly the same results as Test 2, this isn't making any sense to me. Shouldn't I see atleast 3dmg increase within min and max or AT LEAST the avg?

[Murugan]

Double meld of attack materia on gloves continued to show a significant difference, especially on the Paladin moogle. (this was compared to a double melded Dexterity pair of gloves)

[Kiara]

Double meld of attack materia on gloves continued to show a significant difference, especially on the Paladin moogle. (this was compared to a double melded Dexterity pair of gloves)

Hi Murugan,

Nice find. Thanks for the info.

Do you have a rough estimate for how much increase you got with +Attack Power vs. +DEX Gloves you were using?

Thanks!

[Murugan]

Hi Murugan,

Nice find. Thanks for the info.

Do you have a rough estimate for how much increase you got with +Attack Power vs. +DEX Gloves you were using?

Thanks!

The ratio is about the same as in the first test you should notice an around 10-20% boost in damage on high defense mobs such as Whiskerwall when using Attack in the place of Dexterity materia (16 dex-26 attack).

[knite23]

Double meld of attack materia on gloves continued to show a significant difference, especially on the Paladin moogle. (this was compared to a double melded Dexterity pair of gloves)

i agree i have tested this also felt bracers 50+atk vs 30+dex gloves and a significant difference in ws damage also