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.

[Rolder50]

Problem is that the stats we have barely do anything as is, further reducing them will just make it worse.

[Rithy255]

I think substats need a overhaul In general
Crit, DH being made into one being the chance and the other being damage seems good, I think the current crit/dh scales way too well.
Skill/spell speeds need to be merged, I'd like it if it was also on par with crit/dh scaling for most classes, as you could run a more faster build that's generally more consistent.

Piety/tenacity being more "utility" focused sounds good on paper but the benefits of them are so low, I think theirs possibilities of having special separate meld able stats for defensive, heal rate, utility ect. Could be creative with it like one stat boosting max HP with heal rate, or another boosting defensive cooldowns on tanks.

I also think you should be able to quick switch from melds and maybe even have meld sets but I doubt that.

[Raikai]

I'd really love if we had offensive and utility substats separated by left and right sides of gear, so you wouldn't have to choose.

Make Tenacity a mitigation substat useful by anybody and put in there, so people would take it without compromising damage substats. Make it compete with other utilitarian stats like movement speed, a stat that reduces the impact of your damage down/vulnerability debuffs, a stat that reduces your brink of death's duration/impact, etc.

SpS and SkS defnitely should be merged into one 'Speed', but that's minor when you consider that the idea of this stat doesn't play well with most of jobs, and ironically it's the one that is most tangible on a playstyle sense. Is much easier to notice faster cast bars than a minor increase in your numbers (Det).

Piety, probably should benefit healers a bit more... or they could just make MP regen something that needs more management and thought for healers. What if the oGCD healing also had a minor MP cost, I wonder if that could be balanced well.

Direct Hit is the only stat I can't see a way to salvage. Despite of the history of how it got there, it's just too similar to Crit. WoW does have a substat called 'Mastery' which affects each class (job) in a different way (eg. in XIV it could add more %chance to DNC procs) - I didn't think too much on this, but I wonder if that kind of thing would work well here, with how tightly on-leashes the combat system is.

[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.