Technically, why does RDM's Vercure heal more than SMN's Physick?

[Shurrikhan]

Rydia is the iconic summoner and her progression mirrors this. She can cast some white magic as a kid, but stops and only does black magic and summons when she comes back as an adult. Maybe this is intentional since summoners really only have access to Physik because they share the Arcanist roots with Scholar.

This whole thread stinks of, “gib buff” nonsense.

Even if it scaled with Intelligence, it wouldn't empower SMN, but rather give Physick just enough use cases to be worth having on one's bar instead of arbitrarily being worse at level 90 than at level 41.

Such would at least put SMN Physick on tier with other often-complained of skills like Shield Bash and Repose, buttons which likewise needn't be so rarely useful, rather than it being outright garbage over a hidden quirk of its coding.

That would be a reasonable and effortless improvement over its current situation, not because it's a buff (it any content with at least a modicum of difficulty, it wouldn't be), but because it isn't then a contradictory mess.

[ChonkGoblinSuprem]

It still stinks…. “I’m just asking questions bro.” is a really easy rhetorical escape hatch…

[LilimoLimomo]

It still stinks…. “I’m just asking questions bro.” is a really easy rhetorical escape hatch…

Except I'm not "just asking questions". I asked these questions with the intent to use those answers as a means to judge the quality of the UI/UX of the game, since I'm incredibly opinionated about that kind of design.

[Rongway]

I asked these questions with the intent to use those answers as a means to judge the quality of the UI/UX of the game, since I'm incredibly opinionated about that kind of design.

I don't consider it a problem with the UI because most problems I perceive with the UI in the matter of the character sheet or Action sets are due to the existence of unnecessary stats, the elimination of which would be a design decision separate from the UI. For example, the only ACN/SMN is the only remaining case where there is a meaningful difference between "Attack Magic Potency" and "Healing Magic Potency". It should just all be "Magic Power". Then we get to where Attack Power and Magic Power only make a meaningful difference on mage jobs because their auto-attacks use the physical Attack Power stat while all their entire Action set uses Magic Power, so just collapse Attack Power and Magic Power into plain "Power" or "Expertise" or something. And oh hey, we could do the same with Skill Speed and Spell Speed.

Such UX improvements mostly don't involve the UI, though once the stats collapse the tooltips for the Attributes can be simplified to just "Affects action power for [role list / job list]". But the changes would require the devs to make some design choices that they don't have any indication of wanting to make.

Keeping exact formulas and damage values private is a valid game design choice, and while many modern games have chosen to expose formulas and damage values in the UI, I don't care that this one doesn't. They just need to make sure Potency is a consistent and comparable measure within a job or role, and for that they either need to make Physick scale on intelligence or they need to remove it.

[LilimoLimomo]

I don't consider it a problem with the UI because most problems I perceive with the UI in the matter of the character sheet or Action sets are due to the existence of unnecessary stats, the elimination of which would be a design decision separate from the UI. For example, the only ACN/SMN is the only remaining case where there is a meaningful difference between "Attack Magic Potency" and "Healing Magic Potency". It should just all be "Magic Power". Then we get to where Attack Power and Magic Power only make a meaningful difference on mage jobs because their auto-attacks use the physical Attack Power stat while all their entire Action set uses Magic Power, so just collapse Attack Power and Magic Power into plain "Power" or "Expertise" or something. And oh hey, we could do the same with Skill Speed and Spell Speed.

Such UX improvements mostly don't involve the UI, though once the stats collapse the tooltips for the Attributes can be simplified to just "Affects action power for [role list / job list]". But the changes would require the devs to make some design choices that they don't have any indication of wanting to make.

Keeping exact formulas and damage values private is a valid game design choice, and while many modern games have chosen to expose formulas and damage values in the UI, I don't care that this one doesn't. They just need to make sure Potency is a consistent and comparable measure within a job or role, and for that they either need to make Physick scale on intelligence or they need to remove it.

I agree that it's valid to keep formulas and values private as a part of a game's design. What I disagree with is misinforming players. When looking at a Red Mage's stats, the UI tooltip explicitly states that Mind is the stat that governs healing; so if there's an exception to this rule where that is not the case, I'm of the opinion that it should be made clear to the player. The description of a trait or even the text of Vercure itself would be a simple enough place to provide this clarification.

[Rongway]

The description of a trait or even the text of Vercure itself would be a simple enough place to provide this clarification.

The problem is not in Vercure, though. Every physical job, including any with conceptually magical healing (PLD, DRK, GNB) uses Attack Power for their heals. Evey magical job except for SMN uses Attack Magic Potency for their heals, at least in effect: RDM does, outright, and healers mechanically use Healing Magic Potency but it is the same as their Attack Magic Potency in all but a few cases such as under Temperance which "increases healing magic potency" but could still just as easily "increases healing magic potency" if both attack and healing just used a single "Magic Potency" stat.

So the only job where mind truly "affects healing magic potency" in any meaningful way is SMN.

[Renathras]

Except I'm not "just asking questions". I asked these questions with the intent to use those answers as a means to judge the quality of the UI/UX of the game, since I'm incredibly opinionated about that kind of design.

I think it's mostly that FFXIV was designed and seems to have Devs that want it to be where you have some things passed by word of mouth and where people aren't mechanically min/maxing everything. A combination of wanting some mystery, some community, and people not to be slaves to parses.

...the latter one completely fails because some people want to be parse slaves no matter what. The rest is kind of interesting. Like that thread in General about damage types. All the BLU spells have various types - both elements but also the physical attacks come in slashing, blunt, and piercing varieties - and it's kind of interesting that those types are still in the game even now, though not overly relevant. Tested by using piercing attacks in Turn 2 of Coils - as you go through it, some of the node bosses you kill have resistance to some damage types depending on which route you go, so if you go to the right, for example, you get piercing defense up/piercing resistance. Using this, you can test if abilities like Fleche (piercing) actually have that hidden damage type by seeing if its damage (controlling for Crit and Direct Hits) does less damage.

Spoiler alert - it does do less damage, meaning those "hidden" damage types still exist.

A lot of this is from 1.0/ARR/HW era where they were going for more of a mechanics RPG thing, but they moved away from it due to min-maxing stuff. Specifically a WAR/DRK/AST/SCH/DRG/NIN/BRD/MCH comp being meta and so good that other Jobs were being extensively blacklisted. DRG had a piercing damage up thing and both WAR and NIN had a slashing up (WAR's cost them less than NIN's did, so WAR was the priority to apply it). With this comp, WAR buffed WAR, DRK, and NIN's slashing damage, DRG buffed DRG, BRD, and MCH's piercing damage, and NIN (Trick Attack [now Mug]), AST, and SCH buffed everyone's damage, along with SCH having the highest personal damage of healers since it could drop into Cleric, poop out a bunch of DoTs, then go back to healing (and also oGCD heal effectively even when in Cleric...at least I THINK they hadn't changed Lustrate yet and it was still a base 1/4th a Bene at 25% HP healing on the target...). Basically, they all buffed each other's damage types and such so that this was a very good comp to the point people were running 2 Melee + 2 Ranged phys and benching their Casters, and PLD, WHM, and MNK were also getting benched.

That's why they changed a lot of that stuff.

Not Physic, though. I think the Physic deal is they really aren't quite sure if they want SMN to have Raise or healing, but they don't want to outright take them away. Also Physic is useful when soloing lower level stuff. It can be decently useful in PotD (especially if you have some Mind) and it can be useful for soloing the ARR era FATEs if you're trying to get SMN's relic. So it's not USELESS, it's just...very niche. Absolutely it would be better if based on INT (contrary to the min-maxer position, it's not BAD to use Vercure or an INT based Physic, it just isn't optimal if you're doing high end content with a well conditioned team), it just doesn't because part legacy and part they don't want SMN to overlap even more with RDM in terms of the utility.

...of course, then they gave it Everlasting Flight and Rekindle, so... <_<

I think they want to keep it there in case they DID decide to use it in the future (same with damage types like Piercing still existing for those abilities that have it, even if it isn't used in a practical sense in modern encounter and Job design), but until such time as they do, they want it to be relatively irrelevant. Kind of an "installed backup" or contingency plan, maybe.

Or maybe not, but who knows? I prefer to think the best of people rather than the worst, personally.

.

The short version is probably "It's complicated".

[SaberMaxwell]

Even if SMN's physick did scale off of INT, it'd be very rare to see SMN casting it just like its rare to see a RDM using it for anything other than dualcast prep. Rarer still since unlike RDM, SMN has self shielding.

Also when I say "rare" I mean, outside of rpers and people who don't know better, "practically never." Even though it scales off of INT, vercure has all the power of cure 1 and yes, dualcast still costs a gcd so vercure x2 is still just casting cure 1 twice basically.

What I'm saying is it wouldn't even really be a buff so there's no reason to start gaslighting OP. Which is also a scummy tactic.

[ChonkGoblinSuprem]

You don’t know what gaslighting means.

[SaberMaxwell]

You don’t know what gaslighting means.

More gaslighting, nice.