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

[Grimoire-M]

Whew, long thread. I'll try to readdress my points later, but I think you've covered them well enough with your counter points already. I do have something to add though.

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.

The problem with that logic is all that matters for BRD is that they get more rate to trigger their procs. Given you intend to make every stat 'equal, but different', this would always retain an advantage, however small. As you note, readjusting the curve on crit rate doesn't change how the Crit Rate buffs actually work. They are a linear, static, additive increase to Crit Rate. A rework to the Crit stat is already highly unlikely, and altering the stat curves on Crit Rate/Damage to make it harder to stack Crit Rate just makes Crit Rate buffs the best raid buffs in the game period, because they still scale up with that damage boost, compared to the flat increase offered by Bard's Battle Voice no matter how Direct Hit you have.

But if we assume that the Crit stat was changed in the manner you describe, what do you do to avoid removing the Crit Rate raid buffs? Well, if you want to change the Raid buffs themselves, the only reasonable alternative is to simply make them buff the stat directly by some proportion. That would in effect ensure it's a linear increase, but retain the relative scaling issue for Bard (and to a lesser degree Monk) as noted earlier. However, we also have reason to believe this won't happen. Because of what happened with Attack Speed buffs and Skill/Spell Speed in Heavensward. SE simply changed the tooltips of every previous "Skill/Spell Speed" boosts to say Attack Speed in order to better reflect how they actually work, rather than fix the problem where Attack Speed buffs don't stack additively with Skill/Spell Speed. Instead they stack multiplicatively, and thus they actually devalue Skill/Spell Speed by their relative contribution. Even before factoring in Skill/Spell Speed's other problems this was the case, and I believe the reason this change was done specifically was because they added that DoT Potency effect in Heavensward (the same one you want to spread to Damage & Healing oGCDs), and wanted to make it clear that Leylines, the melee Attack Speed buffs, PoM, and the Enhanced Pet Actions trait that granted SMN/SCH "Spell Speed" randomly at the time, would not have any effect on any of those classes DoTs.

But, to be honest, the real argument here is: If you want piercing gone, why not change Bard's crit procs too? It's the same kind of problem. It creates class-specific synergies that encourage certain combinations over others. What significant benefit does BRD gain from having this ability relative to other classes? Is it interesting to have a stat that affects proc rate? Sure, it is, but as you've noted, it's not the concept itself, just that there are already a fair number of raid buffs to exploit and no signs they're going anywhere. Given how many loopholes it takes to make Bard work on Crit procs specifically, why not move all their Crit procs over to Direct Hit instead? Hell, I don't think it would be a bad thing to make all DPS procs scale off of Direct Hit. It would actually make it meaningfully distinct from Crit. It's already a linear damage increase because the only thing that scales from the stat is your Direct Hit rate, and it lets you tune how much of an increase it is depending on the procs of each DPS in question. Only one class has a Direct Hit raid buff at all right now too, and it also happens to be Bard's Battle Voice, which is a comparatively easy thing to change or remove compared to Litany/Chain/Spear. The only other class that has a crit-based damage proc of any kind is Monk. They have Deep Meditation, which is one trait that could easily be reworked or changed, and last I recall, isn't nearly as big of an issue. All you have to do is rework Battle Voice into a damage increase in some other fashion, change the tooltips on Bard to say Direct Hit instead of Crit, double check Deep Meditation, and give AST a card effect to replace Spire or Ewer that isn't Direct Hit. By doing that, you've pretty much solved the problem for good while also opening up design space to alter each DPS's Direct Hit Rate via personal cooldowns or buffs, rather than relying on their party to do that for them.