A QoL/Balance Shortlist for DPS (Tanks/Healers only as additional context)

[Shurrikhan]

The crit buff problem is this - so long as Bard generates an outsized benefit from certain party comps, relative to the benefit other jobs and namely Machinist get from party comps, Bard will always and forever be the 'meta' choice over Machinist if the jobs are correctly balanced.

If you use a rescaling stat benefit, i.e. the same one used on Skill Speed but for which we've found no evidence of yet in Critical Hit or Direct Hit, the exponential component is removed. All that's left then is their own proc benefit, rather than any advantage due to stats, as their Critical Hit stat would provide the same throughput regardless of the % floor provided by Chain Stratagem. And the only way to fix that, frankly, is to remove all Crit buffs, which seems a bit overkill.

As it stands, I'm okay with Chain Stratagem being strong towards Bard and Bard wanting a SCH. I just don't want SCH to be so OP that its presence is pretty well guaranteed; it should be a fun bonus to be slightly planned for and around, with notice made of the costs in not taking the AST or WHM.

Its for that reason I don't like ranged being so dependent on DRG, either. It feels too... obvious, or obligatory.

I haven't the faintest clue where you get that 40% notion from - your average HS/RA gcd would go from 175p to 192.8p, so about a 10% boost. Ballad is worth ~26.67 pps at 38% crit; current AP is hard to calculate for reals due to the broader 80 vs 90 second context re: EA and BL, but just naively looking at autos and HS/RA would place it at about 27pps at max stacks. So a bit better than MB but mostly at early expac crit.

If you add a 20% chance of dealing double damage (.2*2 = .4). That's a 40% buff to each HS that remains an HS. That's not 40% buff overall, just, as I said then and now, to HS.
Using SkS sufficient for a 15-GCD AP if instantly maxed out somehow, for numeric convenience:
20% 12 HS / 3 RA -> 3000 pot. 200ppgcd
40% 9 HS / 6 RA -> 3150 pot. 210ppgcd.
5% WS ppgcd difference through the RA <> HS exchange.
Added 16% Attack Speed = 210*1.16 = 243.6 relative ppgcd.
AAs contribute a native 33.3 pps or 83.33 ppgcd. That, too, would be increased by 16% to bonus of 13.33 and total of 96.66.
Former total: 283.33. New total: 340. ~20% increase to Speed-scaled damage.
21% GCD epot increase overall (far less full epot % increase due to oGCDs). Over 13 GCDs as per the earlier minimum paramenter, that would end up at ~737 potency.

In either version, though, that can only compete with 6 or fewer Bloodletters over Mage's Ballad, which seems rather low at current Crit levels.

Taking one job's section by itself, it looks like you're just arbitrarily adding SkS scaling to various skills. If there's a universal thing there it'd be better to just make that a separate point.

I'm just ensuring no double-dip. EA already scales with Skill Speed, and by having Bloodletter and RoD be similarly affected in rate rather than in damage, it reduces clipping issues and gives a little more punch to AP.

Though I think making SkS even more nonsensical isn't really the answer. The DoT/AA damage scaling is already hamfisted; I'd prefer some alternate solution.

I don't see how this version is any more nonsensical. At present, SkS decreases GCD speeds in arbitrary tiers, ranging from like 118 to 168 per .01 seconds, except in the tiers which are like 48 point. It's ridiculous. And it means that Skill Speed is shit until a certain amount, and then it's your best stat as long as your job has very low oGCD percentage, while still shit to everyone else. And then it increases DoT damage by 1% per like... 173 points(? I'll have to double check, but it's a little worse than Det). That's just awkward.

This way's just a flat 1% damage per 160 stat points, same as DHit, Crit, and Det. It's just that it affects what it can via rate and what it can't with damage. So DoTs, rate not affectable --> damage. Abilities, rate not affectable -> damage. Everything else -> rate.

The effort to make every substat desirable has largely just been an exercise in homogenization. DH, Det and Crit are simply math problems where you work out which one increases all of your damage by the most, plus a couple cases of job-specific factors with Crit (and WAR DH). SkS tries to be different but still ends up only being wanted when it increases near-all of a job's damage, at a rate akin to Det but self-scaling instead of diminishing.

I would agree if not for playing high-SkS jobs like SAM. There's a ton of gameplay (rotational breakpoints and such) hidden in that stat. I just wish the other stats could feel like they have a real presence like Speed can. Crit on Bard and Monk comes close, but, not as interestingly to me. But managing an extended rotation, a RoF prep string, or double-Tornado on Monk where you fully know if you had just 80 SkS less you would have lost 2 (de)buff overlaps and would therefore have done something non-optimal, because it's all so tightly woven... that feels honestly exciting. And yet the imbalance prevents most jobs from even experiencing the part that isn't actually homogeneous in its gameplay, just because of the "uniqueness" of its distribution -- how "special" its scaling is.

So, to me, a good stat is one you can feel and be excited to hit a new breakpoint in. A good stat system is one where you can feel said progression and you don't feel required to theorycraft or sim every stat, which generally means balance and transparency. As far as context goes, a well designed job should interact with many stat breakpoints, but feel beholden to none of them. And the list goes on.

Admittedly, it's not an easy situation to perfect or even make look particularly well-crafted, but I do think it tends to be worth the effort, and I don't believe that means that these cares take away from or gut gameplay in any way; I feel it augments gameplay, and that without that happening stats are pointless outside of making vertical progression even within the same tier in vertical progression (which likewise is pointless unless it feels good, and all MMO studies point to the contrary).

Sadly, every time I feel like I can grasp some way to give that excitement to other stats, or even to new stats (which, again, is weird for me, seeing as I hate requiring theorycrafting, or any customization you can't actually feel and that's how large stat counts have felt like to me every time), it keeps needing more than XIV's tech will allow...

I'd prefer that SE back off of this, and instead simply decide to be fine with having some stats being more or less wanted by different jobs.

Back off, though? I don't feel like they've even started. Their only change this whole expansion was to slightly buff Crit, which is now again the god stat.

<crazy half-serious half-baked ideas follow>

In this vein, I think they could rework skill speed to affect auto-attack delay instead of damage (if it makes NIN want it, that's fine), and even also reduce cooldowns a la the old Spear.

The delay component is already in the suggestions, noted under General Changes and those most relevantly affected (Ninja, via Ninki, and Paladin, via Sword Oath). So if that's crazy coming from you, and by all fair assumption you're more sane than I...

I want the Spear reduction, too, but I don't want Hallowed Ground to be snapshotted to, say, a 7% faster recast time just because AP-BV and Fey Wind were both up when it activated. If I could do a dynamic cooling rate, rather than something snapshotted, I would, but seems SE isn't capable of some things even WoW's done since, say, 2006... I've used that for some AST suggestions though, combining what I called Haste (ability cooling rate) with Speed (Attack Speed) in a revised Arrow Card in order to try to better keep things in sync while moving towards more noticeable and broadly useful and balanced card effects (across the cards, at least; those suggestions in isolation would have been very "**** WHM").

Then I'd turn to Direct Hit and delete it. Keep Direct Hits in the game, but make it a chance only accessible via skills like Battle Voice and Inner Release.

Sounds fine to me. Heck, I don't even care to keep the baseline stat. Just felt to me like they didn't know how to fix Accuracy and worried people would freak out if there were fewer secondary stats, so they stuck a mediocre and redundant stat into the mix.

We'd still have to deal with Crit and Speed synergizing on Crit-dependent classes, though, which can be a larger scaling issue that even Direct Hit and Critical Hit's impact's on each other. Doubly so once Speed's not shit. And, this will disporportionately affect those with augmentative breakpoints, such as Monk being able to push from one Bootshine per Dragon Kick to two per. But, I'm more or less fine with that as long as the alternative playstyles are still competitive.

Maybe swap Chain and Litany to DH buffs re: the crit problem referenced earlier. Then you'd replace the DH stat with proooobably one that increases non-GCD damage, kinda the reverse image of speed. That would obviously vary wildly in how desirable it is, but this is okay in my book.

Kind of like how you feel about AP, I'm not sure that is wholly necessary. I do think WHM ought to offer something more to Bard, and many others, even if not as directly through its core mechanic as Chain Stratagem does, but I kinda like that there is something that's a bit disporportionately strong.

To me, the best MOBAs are ones where everyone thinks their OP until they hit the really high levels and know their competition well -- the kits just really work and you feel powerful in your own ways -- and yet there's still a huge amount of compositional freedom. No easy task, I know, but it's what I'd like to see from our roster. I'd like to see SCH as sort of the "obvious" choice, but not always the best one, though that is probably going to require that our fights feel a lot less like striking dummies.

That reverse image of speed, on the other hand, is already pretty well encapsulated via pure Damage buffs, and purposely mirroring an already bad situation, especially where siphoning from the more moderate contrast already in place, doesn't sound like a good idea to me...

So you'd have the flat all-damage stat, the rng all-damage stat, the weird stat, and the stat that covers the weird stat's holes (while also amplifying certain parts of it). So long as there's no more than one undesirable stat for a given job, nothing too awful can result really, but you'd make your substats meaningfully different and interesting as a conversation piece.

Iirc, ARR stats were a bit like this, in that Crit was disproportionately good at the start and weak at high amounts, Speed was disproportionately weak at the start and strong at high amounts, and Det was just... Det, and favored by auto-crit jobs. Bard and SMN, of course, preferred Crit more than most, and SMN avoided Speed like the plague.

(Back then with Fey Light I could hit a 1.75 GCD on shits-and-giggles SkS DRG, Haste scaled so steeply... I thought that was the cap til I got Fey Wind and Enhanced Arrow together on a SkS Monk. Heck, SkS Ninja was viable despite its clipping and oGCD damage, though within reason vis a vis latency.)

If you mean something more than that, I think that could definitely work, but only if the way stats on the whole work were a bit different.

I've noticed this in a few RPGs with highly specifically functioning stats, almost all of them kind of... deexponential. The more you get, the less they're worth per point. And so you tend to pick and choose what you want to carry. But, they also tend to allow a lot more freedom of stat allocation, such as perhaps having the gear carry a "color" of stat, which can then be allocated across multiple functions as you please, or just a larger spread of equal-tier gear to choose from.

But if you just mean "well shit, they put Skill Speed on the Crit gear... Why you do this to me?" I can't honestly say I get a kick out of that "conversation piece", apart from maybe a tiny bit of schadenfreude after PuG who wiped us repeatedly gets both pieces... that stats for which are pitiful.