What if Critical Hit was crit chance and Direct Hit was crit damage?

[Vandso]

I don't know, I don't like the idea of having two crit stats and one of them is worse. There's nothing really wrong with it, I just don't like it. I'd rather if one was damage and the other was chance.

[Mosha]

I don't know, I don't like the idea of having two crit stats and one of them is worse. There's nothing really wrong with it, I just don't like it. I'd rather if one was damage and the other was chance.

yeah it's kinda pointless when damage output is so regulated

[Jeeqbit]

It helps to know the history of Direct Hit.

Direct Hit used to be called Accuracy. In the past, there was not a 100% chance to land a hit. If you did not land a hit successfully, then your combo did not continue and obviously your damage took a big hit as a result.

You would stack Accuracy to reach 100% Accuracy so that you never miss. This was basically regarded as essential for raiding. But you know, it sucks to miss and felt like "why". Why does the default make you miss and make the game unplayable?

So they tried to do Accuracy in a different way, where the default experience doesn't ruin your ability to execute combos and things like that. That is how Direct Hit was born.

The idea of Direct Hit is that while the default experience is fine, if you stack it, then your hits can be more accurate (aka more direct), which they achieved by making it similar to crit.

But that created the obvious comparisons to crit and how it was almost the same on a fundamental level. I can see both perspectives of it, but I also don't see a lot of alternatives that aren't just the same thing.

Even in other games that have done lots of stats, they often end up more or less the same and you're choosing between things that amount to the same result: increasing damage, or making you take less damage.

[Jojoya]

Even in other games that have done lots of stats, they often end up more or less the same and you're choosing between things that amount to the same result: increasing damage, or making you take less damage.

Yet part of what can make a game interesting is choosing how you're going to increase your damage.

Crit Hit and Direct Hit are too powerful together when both do the same things. Make one the chance to crit and the other the crit damage modifier and you've introduced choice that doesn't currently exist. One job may benefit more from increased chance to crit while another might benefit more from increased crit damage depending on what abilities each job has.

Spell and Skill Speed are more stats that SE should re-evaluate. Your job type dictates which one will work for you so they could easily be a single stat. Or better if one lowers GCD and the other lowers cast/re-cast timers regardless of job type.

A place might even be created for Determination to be valuable early in an expansion when the lower stat budgets on gear make it less likely to valuable thresholds to be met in the other stats and even continue to be valuable when frequency of crits outweighs other considerations. That can't happen with Crit Hit and Direct Hit both pulling double duty.

There will still be the theorycrafters coming up with stat priorities that other players will blindly follow without understanding any of it. But players that pay little attention to the theorycrafters will have more distinct options in their stats choices than they currently have. Some of that feeling of homogenization would disappear.

[ty_taurus]

Crit Rate and Crit Damage/Crit Healing are very effective stats in other modern games and have a stronger balance because they are connected to one another. The power of crit is split between two stats.

I’d also take it a step further and have them be represented with flat % values instead of abstract numerical values. Like gear maybe offers an additional 3% or 5% crit rate (depending on if it’s there higher or lower stat on that particular gear piece), and maybe you add 8% or 13% crit damage/crit healing with gear. That value may stay the same between item levels, which makes the stat growth more controlled—i levels power creep content less because it’s just your strength/dex/int/mind that you’re building with ilevel gear. You could could do something similar with determination, attack speed, and the like as well.

[UkcsAlias]

Crit Hit and Direct Hit are too powerful together when both do the same things. Make one the chance to crit and the other the crit damage modifier and you've introduced choice that doesn't currently exist. One job may benefit more from increased chance to crit while another might benefit more from increased crit damage depending on what abilities each job has.

Its bad to make it a job thing that a diffirent stat is demanded. Its just a lazy way to have both of them usefull.

The current real problem however is the way these 2 stats stack, making it prefered to stack one to the extreme. An issue that also caused diablo3's damage values to become absurd with the proper gear (average gear vs perfect gear was a diffirence of several magnitudes, as in like dealing damage to the power of 2 compared to the average gear), its unhealthy to let numbers scale like this. It creates undesired power creep.

And this is where i think splitting the stats is better. Crit could still involve chance and damage both here, but DH should just be straight up crit damage. If we then make crit splitted into 2 substats per point, we can balance things further:

Lets say we use a calculation to which crit chance will near the 100% at a slower and slower pace. While making damage just scale linear.
This could mean that at 1000 points, crit chance is 10%, while at 2000 its 19% (each 1000 points grants 10% of the missing portion). Even if we then have 10000 points. Its just a case of 65.1%(0.9^10=0,349). It doesnt benefit from dumping endless points in anymore. And we can obviously scale that 0.9 value per expansion (so ARR could have been 0.5, HW 0.66 etc).
Crit vs DH can be a diffirence in which crit points count as 1. and DH as 1.5. Making DH prefered for raw damage.

It then gets to a point where you want to balance the values as much as possible. Which is a lot harder to calculate. And yes, im already going to assume online calculators will suggest which materia becomes best to meld for max damage. But for this we can still apply additional effects: the crit % is hidden, and has several stacks possible here. So an ability could be a single crit, double crit or triple crit. This makes it a lot harder to figure out the exact formula and values tied to each expansion. At that point those calculators are most likely going to be disrupted enough.

[ty_taurus]

It then gets to a point where you want to balance the values as much as possible. Which is a lot harder to calculate. And yes, im already going to assume online calculators will suggest which materia becomes best to meld for max damage. But for this we can still apply additional effects: the crit % is hidden, and has several stacks possible here. So an ability could be a single crit, double crit or triple crit. This makes it a lot harder to figure out the exact formula and values tied to each expansion. At that point those calculators are most likely going to be disrupted enough.

Like with what I was saying above, we could avoid that by making gear not progressively add crit rate/crit damage as your ilevel increases. You still gain more attack power, defense/magic resist, and STR/DEX/INT/MND, but if a gear piece has a crit chance dominant stat (the stat that you cannot meld currently) that is always an increase of 5% crit rate regardless of whether its an ilevel 130 piece or an ilevel 660 piece, you have complete control over how much the community can ever have and future proofs that aspect of stat growth. You still want higher ilevels because of the primary values as said, but it becomes about different sets with different builds, and is also just way more player-friendly in terms of communicating information. If you aren't a number cruncher, you have no idea what it means to have an extra 300 critical hit stat. but you know exactly what an extra 5% is. And it can be lower than that as well, or dig into decimals if needed for balance.

[Jeeqbit]

Skill/spell speeds need to be merged

Some jobs have both spells and weaponskills, so benefit from both. I agree it should be merged as well. It should just be called Skill Speed or Action Speed and work for both, changing effect based on if it's a weaponskill or a spell to consider the fact that casts affect your ability to do auto-attacks.

Piety/tenacity being more "utility" focused sounds good on paper but the benefits of them are so low

Tenacity is good, just not needed when tanks can survive some savage mechanics unmitigated that other roles cannot, so boosting the mitigation of cooldowns wouldn't help either. The most likely way they could get anyone to use it now is to make the damage equal to Determination's.

Piety right now could only be remotely useful if a healer is having MP management issues tbh. I don't want to say that veteran players don't have these issues because I'm not a healer main... but I don't have these issues personally. I even healed an extreme trial that can be a bit demanding on healers the other day and didn't have any issues and my build lacks Piety. Boosting max HP might be an appeal for healers that worry about dying, but even healers dying is less of a concern now that we have Red Mages and Summoners are more popular than ever. I'm not sure what else they could do for Piety that would make people want it other than just boringly increasing damage.

Piety and Tenacity could also be merged into a single stat that changes based on role

I don't agree with that because using that logic, we could also merge all the main stats into Mastery like happens in other games ie. Intelligence, Dexterity, Strength, Mind. I don't support that because it would make the stat system even more boring and is more hand-holdy than even casual players require.

I mean we have stats in single players games and people have always worked with them, we really don't need to go so far as to combine them all into one.

[Shougun]

Some jobs have both spells and weaponskills, so benefit from both. I agree it should be merged as well. It should just be called Skill Speed or Action Speed and work for both, changing effect based on if it's a weaponskill or a spell to consider the fact that casts affect your ability to do auto-attacks.

Tenacity is good, just not needed when tanks can survive some savage mechanics unmitigated that other roles cannot, so boosting the mitigation of cooldowns wouldn't help either. The most likely way they could get anyone to use it now is to make the damage equal to Determination's.

Piety right now could only be remotely useful if a healer is having MP management issues tbh. I don't want to say that veteran players don't have these issues because I'm not a healer main... but I don't have these issues personally. I even healed an extreme trial that can be a bit demanding on healers the other day and didn't have any issues and my build lacks Piety. Boosting max HP might be an appeal for healers that worry about dying, but even healers dying is less of a concern now that we have Red Mages and Summoners are more popular than ever. I'm not sure what else they could do for Piety that would make people want it other than just boringly increasing damage.

I don't agree with that because using that logic, we could also merge all the main stats into Mastery like happens in other games ie. Intelligence, Dexterity, Strength, Mind. I don't support that because it would make the stat system even more boring and is more hand-holdy than even casual players require.

I mean we have stats in single players games and people have always worked with them, we really don't need to go so far as to combine them all into one.

If PIE and TEN did something for the other jobs I'd agree but they don't so I'm not sure how it damages anything besides reduced clutter and actually increased opportunity. I don't think comparing it to main stats is quite right given main stats usually have purpose even in single player games, like even for the jobs that don't focus that stat. For example in D4 they do things for all jobs, or in DND like games there is a reason you might hybrid even just a little.

I suppose they don't have to be combined but given I have limited inventory id take more for less than more for more lol. Is it a roleplay concern? Might see that, given it reduces the concept of consistency of affection for QoL.

[ty_taurus]

If PIE and TEN did something for the other jobs I'd agree but they don't so I'm not sure how it damages anything besides reduced clutter and actually increased opportunity. I don't think comparing it to main stats is quite right given main stats usually have purpose even in single player games, like even for the jobs that don't focus that stat. For example in D4 they do things for all jobs, or in DND like games there is a reason you might hybrid even just a little.

The same is true for the main stats excluding Vitality. Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Mind all exist in a vacuum. Every single action on any given job scales to exactly to one of those stats. The only exceptions are that discipline of magic auto attacks scale off I think Strength, and Summoner's physick. It would make things a lot cleaner to merge them all into one singular stat: ability power, and then possibly remove auto attacks from disciplines of magic entirely if we do not want them scaling off autos as well. That also allows for a much more flexible gearing system that also results in less items to create.