Healer Suggestions Megathread

[ForsakenRoe]

I don't think it matters whether it's a white or time magic, we have four flavors of Cure1 and that's a White Magic. WHM can have a Regen, and AST have a Regen-equivalent, with a playstyle that revolves around manipulation of HOTs just fine. Just like how in past days, every melee had positionals, but MNK's gameplay was centered around the fact it had positionals on every singletarget GCD.

As a comparison, other MMO. Druid's healing paradigm is HOT focused. Doesn't stop Monk, Priest, Shaman, Evoker from having a HOT or two of their own. In fact, Paladin might be the only healer in that game that doesn't have a HOT, yet Druid is the 'HOT healer' regardless

[SnowVix]

make Piety a useful stat. right now, the prior tier's raid chest at item level 630 will contribute more to damage than the current augmented tome chest at 660 because of how bad of a substat Piety is.

[Post]

I dunno why they don't just make piety/tenacity equivalent to direct hit + that little bit extra role function. I mean, they keep adding materia and gear that's secretly punishing players that need it the most where DPS checks are involved, and that only amounts to a trap for new players.

Game seems surprisingly reluctant to lower a barrier to entry for one of the least interesting things about it: its gearing.

[ForsakenRoe]

If they were to do anything, I'd argue that they should split crit rate and crit strength into two stats (so crit isn't the biggest godmode stat every time), make DH be the 'DPS only stat', make piety gain damage at the same rate DET does now, and then just remove DET because it's boring as hell as a stat. That way you'd have:

Tank: Crit Rate/Crit Strength/Tenacity/Skillspeed
Healer: Crit Rate/Crit Strength/Piety/Spellspeed
DPS: Crit Rate/Crit Strength/Direct Hit/Skillspeed (or spellspeed for casters)

Maybe merge the two speed materias into a single 'Speed' type too, which would benefit certain classes like PLD or DRK, who have some spells that are locked at 2.5 because spells do not get anything from skillspeed.

I really don't like the idea we have now, of 'the DPS stat DHit' being melded on every class, I think it'd maybe be better for the roles if they each had their own unique stat that benefits only them. DPS are set apart because they can Direct Hit for more damage. Tanks are set apart because they can get extra tankier via Tenacity. Healers are set apart because their healing power and MP regen are boosted by Piety. DET is the flattest blandest most boring stat designwise

[ty_taurus]

If they were to do anything, I'd argue that they should split crit rate and crit strength into two stats (so crit isn't the biggest godmode stat every time), make DH be the 'DPS only stat', make piety gain damage at the same rate DET does now, and then just remove DET because it's boring as hell as a stat. That way you'd have:

Tank: Crit Rate/Crit Strength/Tenacity/Skillspeed
Healer: Crit Rate/Crit Strength/Piety/Spellspeed
DPS: Crit Rate/Crit Strength/Direct Hit/Skillspeed (or spellspeed for casters)

Maybe merge the two speed materias into a single 'Speed' type too, which would benefit certain classes like PLD or DRK, who have some spells that are locked at 2.5 because spells do not get anything from skillspeed.

I really don't like the idea we have now, of 'the DPS stat DHit' being melded on every class, I think it'd maybe be better for the roles if they each had their own unique stat that benefits only them. DPS are set apart because they can Direct Hit for more damage. Tanks are set apart because they can get extra tankier via Tenacity. Healers are set apart because their healing power and MP regen are boosted by Piety. DET is the flattest blandest most boring stat designwise

I think a fundamental flaw with how FFXIV's stats have been designed is that different stats are largely arbitrary. Whether your job scales of strength, dexterity, intelligence, or mind doesn't matter because you actively cannot build into any other stat, and those other stats have no actual use to your job whatsoever (unless you're a Summoner using Physick). Inversely, if we look back at D&D, for example, sure a bard wants to build charisma, but there are still uses for all the other stats. You can still be asked to perform various checks or saving throws of other stats, so building balance is something worth considering. The same is true if we look at having different sub stats as well. If tenacity and piety are reworked to be more desirable than DH on tanks and healers respectively (i.e. they provide a greater damage boost), then we're looking at the same situation: 3 different flavors of what is basically the same thing. The only difference would be presumably that tanks and healers now have additional damage reduction or MP regeneration as an unintentional consequence of building toward BiS.

Now, I am all in favor of splitting critical hit into crit rate and crit power. This is is something we see often in modern games these days, and it works because there is a balance that you need to strike between the two, but I'd also personally like to see them reworked to just be flat percentage values rather than obscure numerical scaling. Gear already increases your vitality and main damage stat with item level, so having fixed substats where both an ilevel 130 chest piece and and ilevel 660 chest piece could both offer +2% crit rate as a substat is entirely fine in my book. I also would rather see skillspeed and spellspeed just merged into haste, because again, it's arbitrary for every job except for paladin and dark knight in which it's a mild annoyance, and you could also have haste be a fixed percentage as well.

Beyond that, I'm not really all that sold on any other stat as they currently function. Determination and direct hit feels superfluous, and tenacity and piety are just undesirable when competing with offensive stats. So what do you add from there? I've seen suggestions for a "mastery" stat that affects each job differently, which I think could be interesting and successful if done correctly, but I don't really have the means to go into all what that would entail right now. When I think of Genshin Impact as an reference example, it has a stat called "elemental mastery" which is similar to that and increases the power of your character's elemental reactions (When a wind character's attacks pick up another element, like fire, the extra fire damage dealt is increased with your elemental mastery). It also has another important stat known as "energy recharge" which increases how quickly each character's burst meter fills. It could be interesting to experiment with a stat that increases limit break generation (assuming a revamping of the limit break system), or something that speeds up gauge generation. Like maybe instead of a flat 20 seconds to generate each lily for white mage, they take 40 seconds instead, but that duration decreases as you build into this new stat, and maybe fully building into that stat has you earning lilies every 15 seconds.

Outside of that concept, I can also imagine having a spread of substats that are utility-focused rather than damage focused, and any job can spec them. These wouldn't be on gear innately and must be melded on, and would probably be the main source of melding instead of offensive stats, or only 1 offensive stat can be melded to gear and any other materia can only be utility.

Tenacity can be put onto any job to increase your defense and magic resistance stats, agility increases the duration of sprint and reduces the cooldown on it, and constitution which increases auto healing and the value of healing and barrier actions. If we reworked all jobs to have their utility and mitigation actions (things like curing waltz, feint/addle, mantra, etc) cost MP, you could also throw piety into that as well. You'd want to rework the MP usage of paladin and dark knight into aspects of their gauges to make this work, but both paladin and dark knight have very boring gauges anyway, so that wouldn't be a loss in my book. Black mage, though, I could see keeping its MP management the way it is, and have a trait that negates piety or converts it into something else, perhaps even twist it into something offensive like strengthening your blizzard spell damage. Would be interesting to have a job that breaks the mold, and black mage would be fitting for such an idea.

[ForsakenRoe]

If it were to be just one half, I think Crit Strength would be the better side of Crit to keep as a materia. Giving everyone a flat chance to crit of say 10%, would lend more feeling of strength to the crit-increasing raidbuffs like Chain and Litany. Plus, some jobs have guaranteed crit skills, so having Rate as a meldable stat would be very... not good for them. But I'd rather have them as two separate stats, and have both, so that decisions can be made. A Monk might want Crit Rate for more Chakra procs. A SAM, using the same gear, might instead want Crit Strength, because Midare and Ogi are guaranteed crits nowadays. WOW has only Crit Rate, with the base multiplier for a crit being just a flat 200%. I don't know about recently, but I remember a certain set of gloves in 8.2, attained through what is referred to as 'the Benthic Lottery' (buy a token for pearls, use token, get a RANDOM set of gloves with one of like 8 effects, thanks for the gacha Blizz), had an effect of increasing the multiplier to 215%. It was BIS, and by a long shot. So I assume having only one half of Crit would make any source of the other half (ie, melding Strength, but able to get Rate via Chain/Litany) absolutely balloon in effectiveness, to the point where DRG and SCH would likely just be mandatory picks

As for Mastery, I assume the idea is taken from WOW Mastery stat. Some are good and interesting to play around (Resto Druid's is 'the more HOTs you have on a target, the stronger your healing on that target is'), and some are... Frost DK (your Frost damage is increased by X%). Based on that, I assume you'd have things like:

WAR: Your Fell Cleave/Inner Chaos increases the damage of your next Fell Cleave/Inner Chaos by X%
GNB: Your Continuation strikes deal X% more damage
MCH: Your Tools deal X% more damage
SCH: Your Aetherflow CD is reduced by X.Ysec each time you spend a stack (Quickened Aetherflow but scaling instead of a flat 5s)

If it were up to me, certain things would scale from Mastery instead of Crit as they do now/did before. EG, BRD songs from 'DOT tick crits' (now a flat chance), make that 'chance, scaling based on Mastery stat'. MNK Chakras, scale from Mastery instead of Crit. etc

As for Ten/Pie, my assumption/want is that Det's effect as it is now is folded into them (in the case of Ten, replacing it's current damage contributing aspect). As an example, the choice for healers would then be 'what Crit stat currently does to your Crit Rate', 'same but Crit Strength', 'What DET does to your healing/damage, PLUS what PIE currently does to your MP regen', and 'what SPS currently does to your GCD'. Since PIE as it stands is considered 'zero contribution to damage', a theoretical DET+PIE is equal to current DET. I imagine there would be two builds that come out of a design like this, a Crit focused build, and a SPS/PIE build where the focus is on getting more damage GCDs into the fight (cos of the extra speed) and supplementing that with PIE to keep up on damage. A less swingy, and more stable amount of damage output, which would be more 'reliable', but cannot reach the high highs that 100 parses would demand

[Renathras]

Maybe merge the two speed materias into a single 'Speed' type too, which would benefit certain classes like PLD or DRK, who have some spells that are locked at 2.5 because spells do not get anything from skillspeed.

One thing they could do (I was thinking about this with RDM) is make those Jobs that use both have some kind of trait. Like for RDM, "Converts 100% of Spell Speed from equipment and Materia into Skillspeed as well", and the reverse of that for PLD/DRK. Though I think combining them into a "Haste" Materia might just work better (though they might need to rename the Eureka/Bozja gear stat, but...who cares? Just call it "Ancient/Lost Haste")

I do think Crit needs to be Sundered. It feeds into itself too much. To a point, even base Crit does, a problem WoW had for years back in the day (and maybe still does, idk). The more Crit you have, the more Crit you want, because the higher your Crit chance, the more you want to get that closer to 100%. This is distinct from other stats. Like Haste (for Healers/Casters) has an interplay with Spirit/Piety (MP regen), since too much Haste makes you OOM and you have to counteract that. It creates an interesting balance. Likewise, a stat like WoW's Mastery or generic "power" stat (which is honestly what Det is in FFXIV) has a weaker effect, but a more balanced one.

For example, you could have Crit be a stat that scales worse and worse as you get more of it, leading to a kind of plateau at some point where you have to seriously question if more is worth it, alongside this, you have Haste/Piety builds as people try to balance their MP consumption but in return are rewarded with more responsive heals and a higher DPS, and then over on the side would be Det builds for players that prefer a more general use build, since it increases your HPS and DPS like Haste does, but does so sustainably without needing to balance against the higher MP consumption.

Those could generate interesting choices in builds. In practice, one always is going to math out better (such is the nature of choice), but like in Vanilla/BC WoW, you couldn't get enough Crit for it to be reliable. Haste and Det (Spell Power back then in that game) were reliable throughput stats. Haste was more risky and had to be managed against MP5 (MP regen), but if you did so well, you were rewarded with more responsive heals allowing clutch saves (no oGCDs; oGCDs, I'm starting to think, are one of the major cancers of FFXIV Healer design). Then you had Crit, which was also risky. When you got Crits, you could adjust your healing (rotation)/plan since you now didn't need an additional cure on that Tank. But when you didn't, you needed a second heal. It introduced more dynamic and more risk-reward for those interested in pursuing such a build. But for people like me who prefer things to just work, especially as a Healer and wipe preventer, I would usually go with Spell Speed and Spirit/MP5, because I preferred more responsive heals for SHTF moments and enjoyed a slightly faster cast rate for abilities in general (SmiteSmiteSmiteSmite..."I'm going to WAND you to death!!")

The problem is Crit will always always ALWAYS feed into itself. The more you have, the more you want.

But it's EVEN WORSE when it also increases the Crit Strength, because now not only do you want more Crit Strength because those Crits you get a lot of being beefier is good, you also want more Crit chance, because you want to get those beefier crits more often. No other stat has exponential growth like that, and it devalues all other states.

I also agree DH should become a yellow Materia for the Red Jobs. And Piety could be Det without the damage (so just increases healing along with the MP thing) if they still want it to be a "choice", though honestly just being a slightly weaker Det (to not make Det meaningless) while granting the MP would work. But you're probably right that Det being removed is the easiest option.

.

Healers have always been the only role that has any real option. Tanks are "defense until you have enough of it, then damage until you run out of slots", and DPS as "damage in all the slots unless a point or two of Vit can keep you alive (except FFXIV removed that in ShB)". Healers are the only role that really has an option of if you want to go for speed, crit, or general power builds. But right now, Crit just wins against everything else so hard, it's ridiculous, and because we already have so much baseline power, we don't need more general power, so healers even stock Direct Hit at this point. Which is the most boring stat possible. "Occasionally makes spam filler spells do more damage. Yay."

I do disagree with making Crit chance flat, though.

Just as allowing people to alter their speed changes the "feel" of gameplay, so can Crit with a lot of people. WoW Fire Mage or Holy Paladin being heavily Crit based while their competitors were sometimes speed or general power based was interesting and gave them a different feel. Granted, you could just give some Jobs a higher crit chance and be done with it...but then we're replacing one "this is right, all else is wrong" Materia build with a second one that has no more choice or distinction, and I'm not sure that's a good solution.

[fulminating]

Things that don't really work well:

1) substats
. a) crit recursion
. b) elements
. c) meldable main stat
. d) tank main stat getting fixed at the end of hw only to be broken for stormblood
. e) accuracy
. f) piety/tenacity are jokes
. h) speed interactions
. . i) dot scaling is a bit underwhelming
. . ii) edge case paladin/drk where they have a mix of spells and skills
. . iii) hardly anyone wants speed
. i) direct hit tbqh - doesn't scale heals, doesn't appear natively on tanks/healers except for beast gauge related attacks

2) job identities - essentially the more balance they strive for the less they're permitted to exist. If every shape has to fit into the square hole well enough then just why bother?
. a) why add more jobs when there's such a narrow range of holes for them to fit into?
. b) roles and role identities are limiting. [role] has to be able to deal with x, y and z so must all have a, b and c capabilities.
. c) cutting away at the foundation of the job to add a new capstone skill causes issues with balancing in lower level content that potency bloat is being used to paper over.
. d) repeated reworks gut what differentiation there has been to present increasingly streamlined and alien palette swaps.
. e) there is a lack of diversity in damage type/profile. Surely they could have just buffed atonement instead of killing paladin's playstyle etc.

3) healer kits seem designed for a non-existent or at the very least other game (formerly 2a). Healing is not required nearly enough to justify either the power of the healing side or the anaemia of the damage side.

4) synchronised swimming doesn't quite seem like the best thing to have the raids aspire to. Why should failing a mechanic result in an instant wipe - it removes agency from the healers and the potential to save the run.
. a) "Oh gosh an 8 man raid where you beat up a lone guy standing in a circular or square room. How very unique. I'll put it with the others."

5) 2 minute burst lmao. Who's it really for? If it's to make things easier for casuals then why include mechanics during it even in casual content. If it's to make raid balancing easier then who sent that without thinking that the enormous swings during the burst would cause more issues than it would fix. If it's their way of addressing E6S and the awkward burst there then jfc.

e: if you could pretend things indented properly that would be appreciated.
also the conclusion I forgot.
I just don't think they have the manpower to deal with it, seems like they spend all their time running from one fire to another with no time to think or plan ahead with the ever-increasing workload.

[ForsakenRoe]

stuff

So, WOW does actually have a flat 'it increases numbers a bit' stat, called Versatility. It makes tanks tankier, healers heal a bit harder, dps do a little more damage. But, thanks to... whatever wizardry they've done in the backend, Vers is not bottom of the barrel as a stat. In fact, some classes actually want it as their top priority. Most tanks do, for example. I think Windwalker does too, usually. More recently, they've added a diminishing returns system to try and get people to 'please stop stacking only your best stat, we beg', perhaps we need similar.

We could also do Crit Split, the other way around: have Crit Rate scale from materia, and the multiplier be a static value. ATM, it's base amount is 1.4x, so let's make it a 1.5x multiplier. Issue is, some classes have guaranteed crits in their kit. SAM, WAR, etc. This means that increasing crit rate has less value to them. If we have the system where 'going over 100% affects crit damage instead of crit rate' they had to add to fix the problem of their own making (after kaiten was removed), then we now have the Benthic dilemma: one specific way to increase Crit Strength. And having that 'you can only boost the multiplier by doing THIS' means that THAT becomes far and away the best. Crit Rate, on a class that has guaranteed crits in it's rotation, becomes Crit Str in those crits, and so the stat is by far the best for that class, removing the choice we're aiming to get. This is why my original desire was to have both halves meldable, so that guaranteed crit jobs could get the STR, and the jobs that don't have guaranteed crits (or too few for it to affect them) would want the Rate. MNK for example, while having a guaranteed crit on Bootshine, would stack the hell out of Crit Rate, not STR, because more crits means more Chakra procs. It'd also lead to potential build diversity on some classes. My original idea was from back when BRD had songs proc via crits. Two builds were imagined: One, a build where the player has stacked the hell out of Crit Rate, meaning loads of procs. The other, a build where they focused Crit Strength, and so instead, they have less procs, but the procs they DO get, hit way harder when they crit. A third build, where they just don't think too much about the Repertoire procs at all, and instead focus on their Refulgent procs, by building Skillspeed (for more Heavy Shot GCDs) could also be possible

Let's go back to Vers for my final point. It raises tank's tankiness. It raises Healer's healyness, and it raises everyone's damage numbers. That sounds an awful lot like DET, right? But there's a part missing: it doesn't affect how tanky a tank is. So, for tanks, Tenacity is more like Vers than DET is. So, if we merged DET's effectiveness into TEN and PIE, those two stats are now the flat 'Vers' style buff for those roles. TEN would be 'increases tankiness, damage output (and maybe even selfhealing a little)'. PIE would be 'increases healing power, damage dealt, and MP restore rate'. DHIT remains as it is, a flat 'you have a chance to deal 1.25x damage', because folding DET's damage boost into DHIT would just lead to DHIT being the new Crit for DPS classes (scales in two ways, not just one).

We can actually already see that this idea might work: AST, despite Crit being as godly a stat as it is, actually melds some spellspeed to its gear. It's natural MP economy is so damn high, that it cannot spend all of it's MP income fast enough. So by melding some spellspeed (not focusing it on gear, just materia), it's able to get more GCDs per minute, to dump more of that MP, and that's apparently more damage than just adding more Crit/DHIT and overcapping on MP constantly. I find that fascinating, and it gives me hope that a split Crit stat, into CritRate/CritStrength, would be competitive, but not overpowering, compared to a build that uses Spellspeed/Piety

2) job identities - essentially the more balance they strive for the less they're permitted to exist. If every shape has to fit into the square hole well enough then just why bother?

You give me a mental image: where other MMOs have healers fitting into different holes (ie: Holy paladin used to fit into the Triangle (tank heal focus) hole, and Druid fit into the Square (raid heal focus) hole), we've now got every healer fitting into the Square (heh) hole. The difference we get is that the blocks are different colours, not different shapes. Wow, I fit the red square into the square hole, and also now I can put the blue square in the square hole, epic and cool

As for PLD, I think the way they solved it is... kinda bleh? Like, it works, sure. But it's bleh. Here's how I'd have done it:

3 Combos
Fast-Riot-Goring-Atonement would be your standard damage MP restoration combo
Fast-ShieldBash-Royal-HolySpirit would be your higher damage MP spender combo
Confiteor-Blade-Blade-Blade would be the burst combo, once per 60s (Conf has a cooldown, make Req a GCD and have it trait upgrade to Conf at 80)
For lower levels, Req/Conf would allow for you to cast Holy Spirit 3 times without regard to it's combo requirement or MP cost (maybe have reduced MP cost, not removed, so you have to have 'pool MP for burst' to consider)

Yes, Shield Bash would become an interesting part of the gameplay instead of just being the side thing. Each of these 'blocks' is 10s. So you'd build a 60s rotation out of 6 of them. What has to be considered though, is that you have an imbalance between MP spend and MP restore. If you do 2 spends, 3 restores, maybe you overcap. If you do 2 restores and 3 spends, maybe you'll eventually run out of MP. So you'd be managing your pool so as not to go too high or too low. Additionally, and this is the part I think is what everyone misses: Lets say that in 30s, High Concept 2 is coming up. You can do 3 combos before it becomes untargetable. So you do 3 spenders. You no longer need to worry about 'oh I need to do a restore combo cos my MP economy' because the downtime means you'll be regenerating MP anyway. So being able to adjust your spending/restoring balance to take advantage of downtimes. Also, only using Atonement once, because I think using 3 back to back looks pretty goofy

Maybe it's not the best idea, I've not put too much thought into it. But surely people have to agree, it's better than Goring Blade's current incarnation

[Shurrikhan]

Some quick notes only for now, until I have time to edit:

So, WOW does actually have a flat 'it increases numbers a bit' stat, called Versatility. It makes tanks tankier, healers heal a bit harder, dps do a little more damage. But, thanks to... whatever wizardry they've done in the backend, Vers is not bottom of the barrel as a stat.

Versatility is virtually always the bottom of the barrel as an offensive stat. The only reason for it not to be is if one's other stats are arbitrarily crippled.* Otherwise, it's actually taken over comparable options more for its defensive benefits, slim though they may be, as it's more akin to Tenacity than to Determination.

* For Haste, this comes from frequent rotational skills not scaling with haste directly nor indirectly. For Critical Hit, this comes from auto-crits or such inflated base crit chances that it'd be more synergetic to affect their damage multipliers or window exploitation instead. For Mastery, it comes from that Mastery simply being terribly designed, at least in respect to the form of damage (e.g., ST or AoE, continuous uptime or frequent downtime) useful to the given fight or form of content.

If they were to do anything, I'd argue that they should split crit rate and crit strength into two stats (so crit isn't the biggest godmode stat every time)...

...DET is the flattest blandest most boring stat designwise

And yet, that crit strength is already exactly the function Determination brought to the table before Crit came to enhance crit strength in addition to crit chance in HW (mostly as a way to nerf Bards' scaling and Det priority on Monk, tbh).

If you wanted more Flare crits, you took Crit. If you wanted the biggest Flare crits possible or to have enough healing to guarantee getting people back to survivable eHP in n potency of healing without relying on crits, you took Det.

Yes, you could break that into 4 stats instead, such that you have base %Haste, %Throughput, %Chance_of_Bonus_Throughput, AND %Bonus_Throughput, but then you'd have two Crit multipliers with one of them having to be held in tandem with the other (though offset by raid buffs for their given static comp) instead of providing true choice.

That's certainly better than Det, SkS, Crit, DHit, imo, but also very little improvement over simply the old ARR Det, Crit Chance, SkS model (with Accuracy still removed, ofc). I would also consider removing Det entirely, in favor of just Crit, Break, and Haste to be even worse still, as it gives no luck-independent option, and essentially muddles Crit into your new sustain/low-risk option (after reaching the nearest/cheapest acceptable Haste breakpoint).

The problem is Crit will always always ALWAYS feed into itself. The more you have, the more you want.

While I'm fine with getting rid of quadratic Crit stat (both chance and bonus under the same stat), this isn't necessarily true in practice, for the simple fact that XIV stat-scaling isn't always consistent or linear in their effects per point; you can have the multiplier for the effect per stat point deescalate at the same rate as it would otherwise rise, leaving its impact linear in practice.

The difference between that (tapered-scaling on a quadratic effect) and Crit providing chance alone is essentially just that Crit then isn't disincentivized by auto-crits or crit buffs.

Relative to splitting chance and power, the balanced but still-quadratic stat can also be for "better" (more shifts in preferred stats, wherein modern Monk has to choose between Bootshine-exploitation or sustained damage via non-guaranteed Chakra procs) or "worse" (if the two options aren't balanced, Crit is just made inferior on Monk... OR, if balanced, every job has equal access to every sub-stat, which can be "boring" -- assuming of course, that the Speed debacle were fixed).

No other stat has exponential growth like that, and it devalues all other states.

Similarly, depending on the scaling, Skill Speed also has exponential growth. This was most obvious when its % [of buffs-included pre-stats] GCD* reduction per point was linear, since a 0.1 second reduction matters a fair bit less to a DRG still at a 2.5s GCD than to a DRG already down to a 2.2s GCD.

But, again, such depends entirely on the stat's object (whether, say, it's affecting the natGCD or the GCD relative to just one effect-bracket above) and whether the scaling factor itself scales with stat value.

Granted, you could just give some Jobs a higher crit chance and be done with it...but then we're replacing one "this is right, all else is wrong" Materia build with a second one that has no more choice or distinction, and I'm not sure that's a good solution.

Fully agreed. We should be aiming to have more control over the more gameplay-visible impacts of our stats, not even less. Removing players' ability to affect their Crit chance would suck.

___________

All that being said, I don't really understand the point of trying to buff the offensive capacities of Tenacity and/or Piety in order to make them "not shit".

Tenacity and Piety essentially exist to accelerate the gameplay-devaluing effects of gear outside of the ability to beat Enrage despite frequent mistakes. Tenacity, if it actually has any impact at all, exists to let you and your cotank better mismanage your CDs. Piety, if it has any impact at all, exists to let you and your cotank better mismanage your MP or deal with your team mismanaging it for you (by taking fire-baths, playing bullet-catch, or otherwise seeking dirt-naps).

I'm not especially sold on the idea of their even existing, especially if available nearly for free (at little to no offensive cost relative to Det -- or, if Det were removed, relative to, Crit/Speed) but it seems like the solution we least should seek is to just have Tenacity and Piety each just be, effectively, Determination+SomeExtraCheese, rather than simply allowing their unique functions some actual impact (even if that might reduce the stat required to effectively soft-cap them).

Heck, I'm much rather just have only three Secondary Stats -- +%Throughput, +%Critical Hit Chance, and +%Haste (fixed, obviously)* -- and then cordon off, say, Piety, Tenacity, and Movement Speed as Tertiary Stats that one's free to sacrifice throughput for in favor of cheese.


* Now, how do you fix Haste, especially without making obligatory on the jobs that have the most GCD-dependent damage?

First, make MP scale with GCD speed; it doesn't particularly matter how, so long as it's 1:1. Then, either you scale the GCD-reduction of Haste job-specifically (which allows Haste the greatest palpable impact without becoming forced or barred... but is still a bit of a nightmare because different GCD thresholds provide significant breakpoints), or you homogenize it slightly by giving it impact on non-GCD-dependent damage equal to that of Determination and Critical Hit. (That, too, gets a tiny bit complex, though, because of gauge-based oGCDs that are on CD and/or are supplied in at least some way by CDs... but actually still seems pretty simple to work out starting from a given GCD balancing point.)