Anyone notice tier 1 nukes outdamaging tier 2?

[Neptune]

Yesterday I was doing like 597 damage with Blizzard 2 and 610 with Blizzard in Camp Broken Water leves. Anyone else notice that?

[Aiko]

Yeah...I've noticed...

Currently, higher tier spells do not offer nearly enough of a damage increase to justify their higher MP cost and recast timers.

At least the devs are aware of the issue and are working to simplify the damage formulas, or at least that's what Naoki Yoshida said in his interview with Core:

Our Lead Battle Director, Matsui-san, is currently undergoing--they're basically going to change the equations for how stuff is calculated, all of these attributes. As they balance each of the classes with the new balance system, they're going to go through and check each action. And then see how that needs to be adjusted, and reassign each attribute as they go along.

Since it's going to be such a huge undertaking, it's going to happen in steps--it's not all going to change in the next patch, but over the next few patches we hope to change it. But we want to reassess everything, so it's not like we're going to be looking at one broken thing, we're going to be changing pretty much everything.

One of the reasons that you have some of the things not affecting something at all--like Shell not working on a lot of spells--is because right now a lot of the calculations for that stuff is too complex. Because it's so complex, it's difficult to balance. They want to make it simpler, not just so the players know what's going on--having to have some super program going on in the background to understand the calculations--but also so when the devs do balancing, it's easier for them to balance.

[Amineri]

From what I've been able to tell, the tier 1 spells have a higher chance to crit, and a lower chance to be resisted (either in full or partially), and so on average, in the end, the tier 1s do a little bit more damage.

When neither resist nor crit factor in, I've noticed that the tier 2 spells seem to do about 15% more damage than the tier 1s.

[Laughlyn]

lol... the amount of time it takes to cast & try aniling the AM spells is useless to the t2 spells.
I can cast 3-4 t2 spells & still outdamage my AM magic with less time it takes to cast AM.

So...ya, AM is pretty much useless & waste of time / mana.

[Peregrine]

If you're fighting higher-level things, the tier 2 spells do more damage than tier 1s. IIRC FFXIs system was somewhat like that, because the functional damage caps and potencies of the different tiers was different. A high potency, low damage cap spell works well on high-level mobs. A low potency, high damage cap spell works well on low-level mobs.

It's a way to keep tier 1 spells relevant once you get tier 2s.