So, about buffs over all in FF14

[jakers127]

Why are abilities used by classes for damage so weak? Like the new astrologian card buffs that increase someones damage by up to 8%...thats so unexciting, whats the point? I have always been bothered by this in the game. So if i hit for 1k damage, I'll now do an extra 80? Lol, why not 20% for a little excitement when a buff is activated?

Sorry to bring World of Warcraft into this, but thats a game that had its buff system down to where the buffs were worth while.

[Kabooa]

The strongest steroids are self buffs, and they range from 10-25%.

[Shurrikhan]

Why are abilities used by classes for damage so weak? Like the new astrologian card buffs that increase someones damage by up to 8%...thats so unexciting, whats the point? I have always been bothered by this in the game. So if i hit for 1k damage, I'll now do an extra 80? Lol, why not 20% for a little excitement when a buff is activated?

Sorry to bring World of Warcraft into this, but thats a game that had its buff system down to where the buffs were worth while.

I get where you're coming from. I, too, prefer that if a buff is going to exist, it ought to hit either some rotational, TTK, or visual breakpoint such that it actually, almost tangibly, feels like a buff over its use.

If an external buff (one placeable on a target other than oneself) would otherwise be overpowered if made to feel noticable, then it should come at shared resource costs with other skills or where there's an expectation of situational/rhythmic self-casting to reach what would otherwise just be normal personal output.
If the competitors for those resource (e.g. healing abilities) would be too weak or irrelevant by comparison, then that should signal a problem that already must be dealt with -- healing in current content should never feel outright irrelevant as a consequence of (poor) tuning.

[Kalise]

FFXIV is all about incremental increases.

Mostly due to the way that everything scales multiplicatively, rather than additively.

Like, you complain about Astrologian card buffs for 8% damage increase? Well, you add in a jobs self buffed 10% damage increase, something like Trick Attack futher buffing damage by 10%, a Summoner popping Devotion for another 5% damage increase and even the Astrologian popping Divination for a further 6% damage increase. and now you have someone who's dealing 145% their normal damage. So if you'd hit for 1000 damage, now you hit for 1450 damage. Which will then get amplified by Direct Hit and Critical Strike modifiers (With Crit modifier scaling based on how much Crit stat you have)

If buffs were made to feel "Worthwhile" stand alone in the current system... So the same scenario was 20% damage increase cards, 20% self buff, 20% Trick Attack, 20% Devotion and 20% Divination... Someone would, under all these buffs, be dealing a whopping 248% damage, turning that 1000 damage into 2480 damage, which would be insane and thus a balancing nightmare.

For such a system of "Meaningful buffs" to work, it has to be one of mutual exclusion. So that for example, a card providing a 20% damage buff wouldn't stack with say, Divination's buff or Devotion's buff or Trick Attack's buff or a self buff like Raging Strikes. Which shifts the dynamic of buff application from one of stacking buff effects together to spacing out temporary buffs to attain as close to 100% uptime as possible.

Which is a plausible alteration to make. But not one I think the developers would like to utilize (Mostly because it can create anti-synergy in compositions where you wouldn't want to bring class X along with class Y because they both provide the same buff that doesn't stack)

[Dzian]

Making them feel worthwhile wouldn't necessarily mean making them unable to stack. You could simply reduce there usage by default.
Stronger buffs with longer cooldowns. Make something like trick attack a 25% damage boost but put it on a 150-180 second cooldown for example. Which would in turn make it feel that much more powerful to use.

The tiny incremental increases in everything are I believe a big part of why so many people flat out ignore buffs, food, materia melds and the like. They have literally no visually noticeable effect and as a result of that they feel incredibly weak and unsatisfying.
Why meld hundreds of points of Crit when all it results in is a tiny 1-2% increase in crit rate that you would never actually really notice. and if you did on occasion notice a small increase it could easily put it down to luck.

It's the same with a lot of other skills that some players never seem to use. I see so many black mages never use ley lines because the difference in cast time isn't exactly massive. what is it .2 seconds??? or they move out of it for mechanics and never bother to go back because the increased cast speed isn't noticeable. Or so many players that never use finishers like Agatha or Assassinate because it's a button you might press once in a fight and it really doesn't do anything noticable...essentially its a wasted slot 99.9% of the time. Something that situational in use needs to pack some serious Ooomph!!

All of these things on the whole are probably core reasons why so many people think the gear, stats and combat are all so lack lustre...
How many people don't even look at stats for example. just equip the highest i level and completely ignore the rest because it really makes no noticable difference.

[Kalise]

Making them feel worthwhile wouldn't necessarily mean making them unable to stack. you could simply reduce there usage by default. stronger buffs with longer cooldowns. making something like trick attack a 25% damage boost but putting it on a 150-180 second cooldown for example. and would in turn make it feel that much more powerfull to use.

Though, that still has issues. Since if they still stack, it still means that stack windows will be MASSIVELY OP for damage output and will put more emphasis on needing to perfectly align with stack windows and execute your perfect burst rotation during its window.

Burst windows are already a problem, for people with high ping and also for Tank balance (WAR has the highest DPS of all Tanks because boss downtime promotes Burst window exploitation over sustained DPS and WAR has the best burst CD)

but all of these things on the whole are probably core reasons why so many people think the gear, stats and combat are all so lack lustre...

I disagree.

Gear and Stats feel lacklustre because the vast majority of classes have a stat priority of Crit > Direct Hit > Determination. With a few classes maybe being Crit > Direct Hit > Skill/Spell Speed.

Due to how Crit triple dips in DPS boosting - It increases crit chance, it increases crit damage and crits generate more Limit Break. How Direct Hit is a massive modifier especially when a skill both Crits and Direct Hits. With Determination being the go-to last option (Since at that point there's only Det or SkS/SpS with tanks optionally having Tenacity but lulTenacity)

It makes stats alltogether feel lame if literally every class is just stacking the same stats, with the only major differences is certain classes maybe having a different SkS/SpS breakpoint they want to hit before they then go full on Crit/DH/Det.

While for Combat, it mostly comes down to the fact that most of FFXIV is still working on the archaic rotation based gameplay. Where you just simply use skills in a set order and if the macro system was more comprehensive could likely just be macro'd into a single button. Whilst most other games have evolved into a priority based gameplay years ago where skills are used in an order of priority based on availability, causing you to react to things coming off CD and manage resources more.

That is, when the game isn't neutering your skills so that you only have 1 nuke, 1 DoT and 1 AoE skill... *Cough*ShB Healers*Cough*

[Seraphor]

The tiny incremental increases in everything are I believe a big part of why so many people flat out ignore buffs, food, materia melds and the like. They have literally no visually noticeable effect and as a result of that they feel incredibly weak and unsatisfying.
Why meld hundreds of points of Crit when all it results in is a tiny 1-2% increase in crit rate that you would never actually really notice. and if you did on occasion notice a small increase it could easily put it down to luck.

Because all the little increases add up... and you are completely underestimating Crit.
Maybe at low levels it feels like nothing, but Crit scales almost exponentially.

It's the same with a lot of other skills that some players never seem to use. I see so many black mages never use ley lines because the difference in cast time isn't exactly massive. what is it .2 seconds??? or they move out of it for mechanics and never bother to go back because the increased cast speed isn't noticeable.

As a BLM, it most certainly IS noticeable.

All of these things on the whole are probably core reasons why so many people think the gear, stats and combat are all so lack lustre...
How many people don't even look at stats for example. just equip the highest i level and completely ignore the rest because it really makes no noticable difference.

The people who don't notice stats, or these increases, are people who don't care about performance, and those people don't matter when it comes to game balance.

If you boost buff effectiveness from single digits to double digits, you widen the performance gap between bad players and good players by the same amount.
This would mean balancing fights would be a night mare. In order to provide a challenge to the good players, bad players would stand even less of a chance than they already do. And I'm not talking about Normal vs. Savage, but the difference between a normal trial boss having 1,000,000 HP and 10,000,000 HP.
A fight that could take good players 5 minutes and bad players 10 minutes, would now take good players 2 minutes and bad players 30+ minutes.

[Gaethan_Tessula]

FFXIV is all about incremental increases.

Mostly due to the way that everything scales multiplicatively, rather than additively.

Like, you complain about Astrologian card buffs for 8% damage increase? Well, you add in a jobs self buffed 10% damage increase, something like Trick Attack futher buffing damage by 10%, a Summoner popping Devotion for another 5% damage increase and even the Astrologian popping Divination for a further 6% damage increase. and now you have someone who's dealing 145% their normal damage. So if you'd hit for 1000 damage, now you hit for 1450 damage. Which will then get amplified by Direct Hit and Critical Strike modifiers (With Crit modifier scaling based on how much Crit stat you have)

If buffs were made to feel "Worthwhile" stand alone in the current system... So the same scenario was 20% damage increase cards, 20% self buff, 20% Trick Attack, 20% Devotion and 20% Divination... Someone would, under all these buffs, be dealing a whopping 248% damage, turning that 1000 damage into 2480 damage, which would be insane and thus a balancing nightmare.

For such a system of "Meaningful buffs" to work, it has to be one of mutual exclusion...

Or the game has to be based around the design where you MUST buff or you will die. This is largely restricted to single player games, but SMT IMAGINE had the ability to buff and debuff stack and doing so was an outright expectation of the game. Trying to do content without somebody at least dipped into Enhancement and/or Curse of Wretched builds was a waste of time at best and impossible at worst.

Obviously FF14 is never going in that direction. Among other things, it places a mandatory importance on certain builds/jobs that Yoshi-P has said he doesn't want to see in FF14.