Why does this game hide essential character info?

[Nora_of_Mira]

Being able to actually know the stat thresholds in games like WoW was really helpful as some stats like skill speed are genuinely useless until you hit the next breakpoint that actually lowers your GCD.

this is still the case, which is why The Balance exists to do all the testing and number crunching for the community.

[Fhaerron]

they're deliberately not going to explain in detail what the mathematics do under the hood as that sort of information players would then use to exploit the game deliberately. And even keeping it secret has not stopped players already doing just that.

So the fact that I know that I have to meld Direct Hit on my PLD to get the most DPS out of my gear is an exploit?

How?

[Dzian]

It's generally because the numbers don't actually do anything anyway. They get higher as you level sure but they don't actually do anything..

A level 50 blm with 350 spell speed has pretty much the exact same cast time as a level 60 with 800 or a level 70 with 1100 or a level 80 with whatever a level 80 blm has.

It's been the same forever even things like crit. The number keeps on going up and up and up but the crit rates essentially stay the same....

Its just some number that arbitrarily gets bigger but doesn't actually do anything

that's why you never feel or see any increases because there generally aren't any. which I would say is one of the reasons so many players are so sick and tired of the treadmill.

In FFXI they did also hide the effects of stats, but the difference was in FFXI people knew exactly what stats did. They knew exactly how much stronger Stoneskin would be with 1 extra point of mind. Or exactly how much 1 vit would increase chakra. Or that 5 accuraracy would increase there hit rate by exactly 2.5%

[Nora_of_Mira]

So the fact that I know that I have to meld Direct Hit on my PLD to get the most DPS out of my gear is an exploit?

How?

on the flip side of the argument, they could be hiding exactly how useless Tenacity is and hiding it is the only reason it's not 100% ignored.

but in reality, its more so that stats as such as Tenacity/Determination affect different values whereas Crit/DHit are pretty straightforward in what they increase. Players are always smarter than the devs anticipate, so I can only assume they're hiding lacklusterness of these substats.

It's generally because the numbers don't actually do anything anyway. they get higher as you level sure but they don't actually do anything..

a level 50 blm with 350 spell speed has pretty much the exact same cast time as a level 60 with 800 or a level 70 with 1100 or a level 80 with whatever a level 80 blm has.

it's been the same forever even things like crit. the number keeps on going up and up and up but the crit rates essentially stay the same....

this is...very not true.

[Haprimac]

Besides what OP already mentioned, I'm annoyed that skills like Peloton don't tell me how much faster I'm moving. Would be nice to know how different the speed is on monk's Fists of wind vs ninja's passive runspeed trait vs Peloton etc. And all the other skills that just say "increases damage" or "increases healing". Why do they have to be so vague? Is it really that hard to say "Peloton, increases runspeed by x%"?

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

So the fact that I know that I have to meld Direct Hit on my PLD to get the most DPS out of my gear is an exploit?

How?

I thought there was a point where crit overtakes direct hit for tanks in general for dps gains. Is that not the case?

[Gurney]

It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.

Also in 11 we did not have to worry about gear being outdated every few months, ex: Rajas ring was a lvl 30 ring but was the best TP ring to use even at lvl 75 and up. Yes each job had several type of gear sets to use depending on what they were doing. I had 80 inventory slots and when I played my PLD I only had 9 slots open to hold things due to all my gear sets I would use. Theory crafting in 11 was really part of the game if you did a lot of end game things, and you could go to BG and FFXIAH to find info on the best gear setups to use.

[Nora_of_Mira]

I thought there was a point where crit overtakes direct hit for tanks in general for dps gains. Is that not the case?

the problem is that tank gear never has any native direct hit, so literally any direct hit melded is a DPS increase.

[LineageRazor]

Because dealing damage in this game has become so vastly simplified, and there are no "conditional" situations to worry about (like, this mob is vulnerable to fire, or that mob has extremely high evasion), if the exact results of the handful of stats that remain were spelled out so clearly, there'd be little or no reason to go after other pieces of gear. If the game did the math for you, and it became obvious that upgraded tomestone hat increases your damage by 2.526 DPS, while raid hat increases your damage by 2.521 DPS, there'd be no reason to go after the raid hat (except possibly for glamour).

But they want you to chase the raid hat. They want you to chase ALL the hats. So, they do their best to obfuscate which hat is BEST hat - and because there's no conditional situations, one hat will always BE Best Hat. Sure, folks will crunch the numbers and figure out the details - but it's a relatively small number of players who actually scour the Internet for that kind of thing. The bulk of players will have no idea, and just chase the stats they THINK are best. ("Oh, boy, with all this skill speed my MNK's gonna punch like E. Honda!")

It's a fundamental flaw in the design of the game. They want folks to keep playing, to stay subscribed, and to participate in as much of the content as possible. However, they've removed most of the REASON to participate in all of the content. Why were folks still farming Sky Gods in FFXI a decade after the content was added? Because in certain situations, gear from there was STILL the best to have.

[EaMett]

It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.

This is also what I remember. Also it's not like you have plenty of gear options. You're mostly picking between two sets at cap level, while leveling higher ilvl is pretty much the way to go, always, since stat impacts aren't meaningful in rainbow gear.

Min/maxing is also something that should take a bit of effort and distribute players across skill tiers. Obfuscating stat weights in a really simple gearing environment (2 to 4 sets at most, often times only one viable build, on rare occasion two viable builds) is a way of creating this distribution.
I really don't mind. It just means you have an opportunity to create a bit of a gap in optimizing between you and others by taking 30mn to read up on third party theorycrafting.