DPS- Critical Vs. Direct Hit

[Meng_Qing]

I seem to notice I trigger Direct Hit more than critical. Question is, will direct hit be more useful in a long run than critical hit?

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Maybe this isn't the best way to describe it, but think of DH like baby crits. Higher than normal damage, but lower than critical damage. But! Higher chance/frequency than critical, and can stack with crit.

Simplified: Normal>Direct Hit>Critical Hit>Direct Critical Hit

I can't speak for RDM specifically, but it's a good stat to invest in.

[Meng_Qing]

Then would you take critical hit materia over direct hit?

[Kitfox]

Then would you take critical hit materia over direct hit?

Impossible to say before data comes out and stat weights are calculated, though classes that have crit based mechanics probably still want to stack crit.

[Claviusnex]

I was stacking Crit and SpS as the gear seemed to provide a lot of direct hit. Lately while I'm still favoring Crit but I am trying to keep Direct hit close in numbers as they stack when triggered at the same time.

[Galvuu]

I'll try give you a proper analogy.

DH sprints, CH is a marathon runner. At the start, stat points you put into DH give you more- he "runs faster". However, if you have a ton of stat points, CH will eventually overtake DH in the long run.

The mathematical reason for this is that CH follows a (to the best of our knowledge) quasi-quadratic function. DH is better approximated by a linear function. This means that for high values, CH will overtake DH in expected dps gain.
But just as quadratic functions grow faster for larger numbers, they also vanish faster so smaller ones- in the "smaller number region", DH wins. Atm we're in the smaller number region.
There will come a time where our gear has enough secondaries to hit the "breakpoint" where the expected CH dps return breaks even with DH. At that point, we'll start stacking crit.

[xNewbx]

On Bard's you'll still want crit no matter what. Your procs are a lot of extra damage and the higher the crit, the higher the chance of getting them. Also of course you crit for higher.

[Frowny]

Excluding bard, the consensus is 2k is the magic number roughly when crit will become good. Until then, as Galvuu mentioned, DH brings more.

[Sunako]

I remember some reddit post where somebody have calculated 37.5 direct hit would be 1%. Crit was something over 100 for 1%. I think it scale very well in early gear, but later crit probably gonna be better once we get more offstats.