FF14's aversion to provide detailled information

[Millybonk]

It's really bothering me how a lot of descriptions are considered "good enough", when in fact they provide close to 0 actual information:

• "Road to 60" buff tooltip: "...experience...dramatically increased" = is that a value between 1 and n%?
• What is 219 defense as an actual percentage?
• What is potency supposed to be? It clearly isn't the actual number I put out when I use the ability. Is it a multiplier or something?

[HyoMinPark]

I don't have much to say about the others, but with regards to Trick Attack, the tooltip does explicitly state that the +10% damage taken only applies to a mob if the skill is executed from the rear - it's worded as "Rear Bonus".

[Millybonk]

Indeed, I just took a closer look.

[Hasrat]

It's... pretty standard for RPGs to not give raw value numbers or anything. Damage calculation is usually a set equation, with your provided numbers being one of few variables. Sometimes in some games, the equations get figured out. But for the most part it's not important. It's a Skinner box. All you're expected to need to know (and be satisfied by) is that bigger numbers are always better.

[Canadane]

You can see your % it increased exp in the chat log. This will include any buff to it including food and FC buffs and armoury bonus etc

[Rongway]

If there were a game that featured five tiers of swords, two tiers of arrows, and a boomerang, but you were given no information about them and it was expected of you to find out on your own that sword0 would take 8 hits to kill enemyA, sword1 would take 6 hits to kill enemyA, ... sword4 would take 1 hit to kill enemyA, arrow0 took 4 hits, arrow1 took 2 hits, and a boomerang never killed anything, it wouldn't be a big deal that you weren't told exactly how much damage each does.

Here, we get a lot of information to help us make informed decisions about how to put together an effective rotation. Just because an MMO is a more complicated game than the (totally-not-based-on-Zelda) hypothetical example above doesn't mean we need full disclosure of what every little number does. It's fine if they don't tell us the exact formulas or the exact % contribution of each point of everything. We have more than enough information; and if people want more information than they've given us, they can be clever and calculate things out on their own or ask other people who have done the clever work.

[Niwashi]

• What is potency supposed to be? It clearly isn't the actual number I put out when I use the ability. Is it a multiplier or something?

The actual amount of damage or healing you do with a given skill is based at the very least on a combination of that skill's Potency, your weapon's Damage stat, your job's primary stat, your target's Defense or Magic Defense when/if appropriate, and a small random multiplier thrown in. (I think the relative level difference between you and your target may fit in there as well, but I'm not certain of that part.) Then your Critical Hit and Direct Hit stats might boost it from there. The only way for Potency to tell you exactly how much damage/healing you're going to do would be if none of those other stats existed.

Potency is a way of measuring the skill's contribution to the final number. It tells you what skill is going to be better than another, and on a relative basis how much better. The numbers are linearly correlated to your final output, so a skill with twice the Potency will do twice as much and one with 50% more Potency will do 50% more.