Is materia even that important? Or does everything just, for the most part, scale?

[KamikazeMan]

Scale to your level.....I ran out of space. I'm wondering if materia even makes a big enough difference to make them worth investing into.

Anyway, I was experimenting to see how big of a difference materia made with my healing. So with my Level 50 Conjurer I have a felt hat with Healing Potency+12 and a wand with Mind+35. I used Cura about 15 times and generally my cures were as low as 1128 and as high as 1500. I figured without my materia I should see a difference that would make the materia worth having right? Nope

Next thing I did was take off my hat and used a different wand (same wand, no materia). My heals did at least 1060 and at most around 1460(ish...can't remember the exact number.

So...my question is, are stats broken in the game? Am I missing something? I expected my cures to heal at least by 200+ HP with the materia I have. I'm a noob when it comes to materia so please help me understand.

[Viridiana]

So...my question is, are stats broken in the game?

Bingo!

/10chars

[viion]

I dont think its broken, so much to try prevent overpowering of like +200 mnd giving like 600+heal.

Or it could be broken idk.

[Rau]

I dont think its broken, so much to try prevent overpowering of like +200 mnd giving like 600+heal.

Or it could be broken idk.

If Materia would make the game <insert made up number> times easier, they should just make the enemies harder with materia in mind.

[KamikazeMan]

Except that most of my healing with and without materia is the same. It wasn't always a 100hp difference in healing. I think the game mostly scales the spell with your stats and increases it a tad bit with materia....at least with healing. If it's NOT broken then Healing Potency materia is virtually useless unless you can manage to get 2 HQ Healing Potency IV materia melded into a wand and hat (4 IV in all). It might have to do with the spell scaling that came with 1.20...maybe it knocked around the effect of certain materia.

[Deli]

I do think it helps. At least for mages... the int and attack magic potency is pretty clear to see.
However, don't blindly follow what other people do. and skill > all!
Such as + 60 attack magic potency give you 100 more dmg out of thunder (base is 700ish)
in the meantime, only give 100ish more dmg for thundara (base is 1350ish)
+60 int can expect 60ish more on thunder but 250 more for thundara combo
so int is good, but should con go int? I doubt it... there is no combo dmg for con...

[Kaeko]

Stats used to be broken in 1.18 but were revamped in 1.19. Many of the abilities and stats have been, again, altered in 1.20; however they are far from all "broken" as many on this forum assume.

The above poster Deli has graciously posted his data on the effect of MND and Healing Magic Skill on Cure/Cura. The tentative result is that if you were to place a +15 healer hand IV in your weapon and hat (+30 total), you would raise your Cura from about 1050 average to about 1150 average. This comes out to a rough 10% increase in your potency/efficiency. If you were to double socket some pieces, this effect would be even more noticeable.

The reason the OP has issues with his "eyeball testing" is that there is inherent variation in the amount of HP you cure in this game. The variation is roughly +/-5% of the true average, meaning your values can have quite a wide spread. If you consider the above example with 10% increase in potency, if you only cured yourself 2-3x in each set you may not even notice a difference. In addition, when the OP mentions doing 1500+ on a Cura, he's clearly spiked a "Critical" hit, it just doesn't appear in the log. These things need to be taken into account.

Beyond this, INT makes a huge difference on the damage of spells on higher level mobs. Alternatively MATK makes a huge difference on mobs at lower levels. These things are so obvious that you could even eyeball test them and notice a difference.

If you've gotten this far in the post and truly care about how stats work in this game, I suggest visiting BG forums. There is an ongoing stat testing thread there that may be of interest to some. While there is some good information on official forums, game mechanics and testing are not this forum's strong point. It is true some stats still don't "matter", but most do now. The community in XIV is very weak (due to the game essentially flopping and now currently attempting a revival under YoshiP). As a result, you will not find these formulas plastered on the main forums or on a wiki, but they do exist for those who care enough to check non-official forums.

[Tenshi]

If you've gotten this far in the post and truly care about how stats work in this game, I suggest visiting BG forums. There is an ongoing stat testing thread there that may be of interest to some.

Awesome advice, thank you.

[Jennestia]

I dont think its broken, so much to try prevent overpowering of like +200 mnd giving like 600+heal.

Or it could be broken idk.

Stats are no longer broken -- They've been fixed already; The problem is players don't know the exact soft and hard cap per level -- They're extremely high because the base stats are already pretty high (100+ per stat base) so until we figure out stat caps, people still say the stats are broken.

Even healing can critical, so there's just a lot of factors, plus there's the fact jobs are coming which will be further specialized so to say "materia doesn't matter" for example is incorrect because they certainly do matter, it's just the stat caps are unknown because through the limiting testings players have done it shows the benefit/diminish of + stats is pretty inconsistent at level cap (which is usually when diminishing returns are common) but not the benefit per level.

[Viridiana]

Stats used to be broken in 1.18 but were revamped in 1.19. Many of the abilities and stats have been, again, altered in 1.20; however they are far from all "broken" as many on this forum assume.

As much as I respect your contributions to theorycrafting in this game, I'm going to consider stats "broken" until the day Santa runs become impossible. I mean, Ifrit and Moogle are both allegedly balanced around single-materia gear, yet Ifrit was completable in Santa suits, and I have no doubt that a Moogle version will be up before too long. If the stats matter so little that you can complete current end-game while effectively naked, something is broken. . .