Crit damage buffs should be reworked

[Drachelanze]

Adding more auto-crit abilities to the game devalues these abilities. You can already see a palpable difference between how much a Warrior and <any other job> benefit from abilities like Chain Strat, Litany, etc. The Samurai changes only highlight this issue again.

In my opinion, these abilities should be changed to affect critical damage rather than critical rate. Keeps an element of RNG, prevents a distinct lack of synergy, and isn't just turning them into another raw damage % CD. Their identity remains crit oriented.

Otherwise it just seems odd to me that a point was made to align everybody's buff windows, only to keep and then exacerbate an issue of some classes and buffs not playing nice with each other.

[Aco505]

Making direct hit and crit chance % buffs increase the critical/direct hit damage done would only make specific jobs better than others (e. g. a 6.1 SAM would benefit a lot, whereas a job without guaranteed crits will benefit depending on their crit chance).

However, this is indeed a problem, and it has been highlighted before in the case of WAR in this thread (https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...eds-addressing).

Having guaranteed (direct) crit attacks is alright as long these anti-synergies between jobs are not created. It is also quite odd that DRG and DNC, for example, provide these kinds of buffs while having (direct) crit attacks of their own that must be used within them, or that WAR is the only tank almost unaffected by these buffs.

The suggestion I propose in my DRG feedback post for EW 6.08 (https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-for-Endwalker) is to make direct hit/crit chance buffs increase the damage of automatic (direct) crit attacks and behave normally otherwise.

If we have Battle Litany up, and we use Life Surge on a Heavens' Thrust or a Leaden Fist Bootshine, the damage of the weaponskill will be buffed by 5%, with direct hit buffs working as usual. A direct crit attack under the effect of both Battle Litany and Battle Voice would be buffed by 5% twice.

Crit chance buffs would give a damage increase of half the chance, while direct hit buffs should provide one of 25% of the chance. Thus, a 10% crit buff like Chain Stratagem would increase the damage of automatic critical attacks by 5%, with a 20% direct hit buff like Battle Voice doing so by 5% for automatic direct hits.

A 5% damage buff for a limited time and number of attacks every 2 minutes (with the exception of The Wandeder's Minuet and Army's Paeon) should not be an issue, since it's a damage increase similar to other party buffs like Embolden or Trick Attack, with the only outlier being Devilment due to its nature as an individual boost to DNCs and their partners.

Making this change would benefit all jobs equally and avoid future homogenization issues in which the devs might feel that they have to change all buffs to flat % damage increase ones or remove (direct) crit attacks, which would make the jobs bland and uninteresting. Numbers could always be adjusted if needed to account for any potential tuning problems that might come up.

If they want to do things like avoiding huge damage variances while not creating anti-synergies between jobs, this should be the way to go.

[Drachelanze]

Excellent points and suggestions. I don't spend a lot of time on the official forums, so I'm glad to see this has been brought up by others somewhat recently. Hopefully they'll take notice sooner than later.

[Chopstix]

Hear, hear. This was my first thought once i saw the sam 6.1 changes.

Just have crit/DH buffs affect the multipliers instead if the chance is already 100% (tuned accordingly of course).

[deadman1204]

Why not look at this differently. Not all buffs need to be used at the exact same time. If crit buffs don't stack, then just don't use them all at the same time.

It still increases dps over the fight, you just have 1 ability that doesn't stack with the other is all. Not a big deal. So you have your burn combo, and then other dps buffs to use afterwards/before

[Aco505]

Crit buffs do stack, but when someone uses an attack that is guaranteed to be a (direct) critical hit, then the buffs are wasted on these attacks, because their chance to (direct) crit is already 100%. These anti-synergies between and within jobs should not exist because they only affect specific jobs, not all of them, thus creating an imbalance.

Buffs in this game are designed to be stacked, as their effectiveness increases exponentially the more of them you have at the same time. This is why it is extremely important that all buffs come out at the same time, so that burst windows are utilized as best as possible.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Man I don't know, other games already solved this issue.

Using Aura Kingdom as an example from older games, they basically introduced bonuses when overcapping a stat. Stats were capped at certain % thresholds, like crit rate at 100%, speed at 50%, defense at 80% etc. If you had extra of it, it would create a bonus for overcapping, like overcapping crit gave you a higher crit dmg % cap (crit dmg % was a separate stat) for instance.

For FFXIV, many issues could be resolved in simple way:

Crit > 100% => increase Crit DMG more
DH > 100% => increase DH DMG
GCD = 1.5s but more speed obtained by buffs or stats => increase DMG
Job has Weaponskills + Spells => Lv 1 trait that grants Spellspeed equal to Skillspeed (PLD, DRK, RPR) or vice versa (RDM)

[ExZachly]

I think after the last patch notes were read through on stream, YoshiP had said that the balance team is trying to reduce the variance of burst windows with the latest Sam changes and remove some skills so that in the future, more things can be added to each class. Applying these changes so that if a player were to have 100% crit/direct hit then the added buff such as litany would be for added crit damage is a great idea. Hopefully, this is a change that gets made so that devs can have an easier time with things in the future and it doesn't negatively impact the synergy of different classes.