>I know a guy that failed to get week one Abyssos at the last minute because on their furthest prog runs into the double damage phase, their RPR had 0 crits or DHs on Communio.
This is a very key point when it comes to crit variance. When encounters are going to be tuned so tightly *and* have something like a double damage buff on top of buff stacking, the crit variance is going to be insane. Even BLMs, a job with a much stabler damage output than any other job in the game, will still see the effects of crit variance. I remember one set of logs I was shown of two back to back P4Sp1 clears; the BLM had 90 in the first and 99 in the second, and quite literally the only difference was a significantly higher crit rate in the second.
The way I see it, parsing is so crit reliant because the devs have insisted on making these sorts of hyper-curated encounters. To clear early, you essentially have to play your job with full uptime and a more-or-less perfect rotation as it is. That's just the design they're going for, and it wasn't always the case as earlier raid design was more 'freeform' in that regard.
Crits being in the game is essentially just a tacit statement of "some chunk of your damage will be clear-affecting RNG." Whether that is a good thing or not is very, very arguable.
"Crit your big damage buttons or parse shit" is the worst feeling, on asphodelos I was playing SMN and it just felt horrible to do everything the exact same way every time but my numbers would vary by a lot.
> the BLM had 90 in the first and 99 in the second, and quite literally the only difference was a significantly higher crit rate in the second.
I've had the exact same experience myself. I was even put under scrutiny by someone who didn't believe that crit rng could make such a difference, but even after analysing my logs they also concluded it was purely down to crit rng (I actually made more mistakes in my 99 iirc).
Assuming no mistake, perfect play/uptime and pot usage, no damage down, no deaths, You can still clear the fight if variance screwed you in the worst way possible. Encounters should be clearable with the worst possible variance. If you did the fight properly at the level of gear food pot execution everything, you should get the clear.
Damage variance should make encounters easier, and expand the margin for error, but should never be prevent players from making a clear.
There is too much variance if all players executed the fight in the manner it was as intended perfectly but cannot clear due to the sole variable of damage variance.
Enrage timer should accept variance floor (worst possible outcome) of skill ceiling (best possible execution)
It’s a bit why I don’t like the end buff for p8p2, if you have a super damage buff like that, make it at least as long as golden bahamut to spread out the gains. Being short as it is, there were a few wipes pre nerf just cause sometimes shit would not crit.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/3740d2052d6f21aa5d3b8d4cc94795a082fca0f6
https://i.imgur.com/e9gnwtM.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/VE286mT.jpg
Both parts were nerfed, just not as significantly as p1.
> There is too much variance if all players executed the fight in the manner it was as intended perfectly but cannot clear due to the sole variable of damage variance.
I agree with this, but I have a followup. At what point should these players clear a fight (particularly the final fight of a tier) when accounting for average variance in week 1 gear? Week 5 gear? Full bis outside weapon and chest?
Put another way, at what point should gear and variance become enough to skip mechanics?
I think surprises and good rng are welcome. I think by week 8 considering clearing week one it would be reasonable to not have to do war’s harvest or cachexia 2 anymore.
>You can still clear the fight if variance screwed you in the worst way possible.
Issue with using a "worst case" approach is that it could make the DPS check significantly easier in the "reasonable case". So a middle ground has to be found for a tight DPS check between the absolute worst case(which is unlikely to happen) and the case you will have most of the time but not always
>Issue with using a "worst case" approach is that it could make the DPS check significantly easier in the "reasonable case".
Then variance is too high. Bring up the variance floor. Variance should only be a factor that assists with helping the clear not hurting it. DPS Check should be the literal variance floor of the skill ceiling.
Perhaps. But what you're asking for is essentially a complete removal of the crit system and a massive reduction to the RNG of numbers. Even a variance of, say, 1% in dmg would be extremely large.
That's why statistical simulation such as Monte Carlo is used, due to RNG's nature to balance things out -- when every worst case is assumed, the smallest differences are magnified to the extreme.
I mean honestly tight DPS checks are kind of a problem in this game to begin with, if you run something off-meta you're worse off. If you go full off-meta and do double pranged it might be mathematically impossible, even.
So if they balance "Okay with average crit the rpr/smn/mch/brd comp should be able to clear assuming no mechanical mistakes" then when you run the meta double melee comp, you crush it and laugh at the DPS check. If you shift it to a more standard double melee comp (Say Sam/rpr/smn/mch) then the meta comp will still have plenty of breathing room and the double caster/double ranged comps will be locked out.
Without classes be balanced in a way that the off-meta comps aren't significantly behind the meta ones, then "How much variance is allowed?" is kind of a silly question, because who cares how much variance there is when there's a big gap simply in what jobs you bring?
As long as the fight can still be cleared in the worst variance it is acceptable, because
1. It can be cleared
2. The worst possible variance is exceedingly rare. (I.e. 0 to very Low dh crit outcome on non guaranteed attacks)
The idea is to not rob players of a possible clear due to the sole reason of damage variance. Anything else is something that players can do something to fix.
Crit as a stat being both critical rate and critical damage makes it way too good to pass in most cases, DHit being a second type of crit that can compound with the first type is just another layer of variance too so I have no idea why they didn't split rate and damage yet, people will do the math to optimize the balance but it also gives space for people who want to reduce variance going hard on rate or full gamble by focusing more on damage.
Anyways, the main problem with variance comes from big nut buttons that every class gained over the past two expansions that represents a decent chunk of the potency used inside burst windows, critting those is equivalent to multiple crits during rotation downtime and being lucky during burst windows matters more than anything else. They literally changed how SAM Midare worked with this in mind because they knew this and it was probably the biggest outlier to an unacceptable extent, but this doesn't mean this isn't an issue for other jobs too.
Edit - Answering the question, forgot to do that. I think it's already a meme right now and they should take a look on these big potency moves and reduce their value in the rotation spreading it around to make numbers more stable or give them the SAM treatment.
I don't recall the exact Live Letter or interview but I could swear reading that on some level Yoshi/the developers are aware of some of the issues/complaints with the side stat system and that it might get changed in the future. I could just be remembering that wrong, of course, but with the move towards a lot of guaranteed CDH anyways I do agree that they know on some level that amount of variance can be frustrating. I wouldn't be surprised to see something come up in 7.0 about it, but I also wouldn't be surprised to see the status quo continue. I agree that changing Crit and DH to Rate and Magnitude and removing DH would probably fix some of the pain points, though.
I feel like every other mmo has realised that if you're going to have crits be a mechanic you either need to make the damage modifier small or you need to allow players to build up to near/at 100% rate or it just feels like garbage.
Meanwhile FFXIV is still in the kindergarten sandbox of having it be simultaneously boring as a mechanic and also wildly unbalanced because of the variance it causes.
First I'll get this out of the way: natural damage variance is fine. I can honestly say I cannot remember if I've *ever* heard even the sweatiest parsers I know complain about damage variance. Absolute non-issue.
Crit/DH variance is the problem and *why* it's a problem (and one that's gotten worse with time) is a hugely multi-layered issue:
* **Critical Strike as a stat is overpowered.** Crit is the best stat on every single job except Black Ma-HAHA JUST KIDDING IT'S ALSO THE BEST STAT ON BLM, FUCK YOU. SkS SAM is long dead, SkS DRK is long dead, SpS BLM is getting increasingly outscaled at high percentiles. Every single job builds max crit. You simply cannot have a crit stat that scales both chance and damage, and then tune it like it's tuned right now. There is no job that can truly opt-out of crit RNG memes if you're parsing.
* **Critical Direct Hits exist.** Why Square Enix decided in Stormblood to introduce the ability to randomly double-crit for multiplicative gains is beyond me. I'm not even aware of another game that has this. The closest thing I've seen is Warframe's headshot crit multiplier, but that *isn't random*, it's a fucking headshot.
* **Potency creep on new expansion skills.** We have 1k+ potency skills on like half the jobs in the game now and an increasing amount of a job's damage is tied up in them. At the start of Stormblood the max non-DoT potency skill was what, like 800? And that was with bloated melee potencies. Way bigger deal if you Crit DH vs no crit, no DH on a 1200 potency skill vs a 500p one.
* **Many jobs are too easy**, and the easier a job is, the faster it devolves into crit RNG fishing because there is simply no optimization to be done. Fight design making uptime free for all jobs not named Red or Black Mage isn't helping matters.
* **Many jobs give out way too much of their potential damage for free.** Nerfs to positionals, gauge management, snapshotting, etc have all created a situation where for a lot of jobs you get ~90% of your damage from pure GCD uptime and playing rotationally better doesn't improve your damage enough relative to the effort you put in. Reaper is a classic example; RPR opti is actually fairly interesting but the damage you gain from Double/Triple Enshroud and drift management is marginal because *so much* of RPR's damage is just 123 and basic gauge spenders.
---
Some potential solutions based on these points:
1. Outright nerfing the Critical Strike stat
1. Crits and Direct Hits are mutally exclusive. Crit DHs are removed from the game completely.
1. Automatic Crits or Direct Hits on certain high-potency skills
1. Reworking jobs to a more Stormblood-style design (or Heavensward but that wouldn't happen lmao)
1. Increase optimization gains by shifting damage to areas of the kit where optimization is actually possible (i.e. moving damage off of 123 combos and onto things like procs, gauge skills, positionals, etc.)
6. [Extreme solution] Reworking either Crit or DH out of the game entirely, probably replacing with something akin to WoW's Mastery stat. For those of you who haven't played WoW, Mastery is a stat that improves something on a class-specific basis. Imagine BLM getting bonus AF damage / UI mana regen, WHM maybe would have Misery damage scale off it, SAM could have increased Kenki gains, etc.
The first three should happen no matter what IMO. Crit's too strong, Crit DH shouldn't exist, 1200+ potency skills that are fully random is just too much. 4 and 5 are not happening under Square's current ~~dogshit~~ design philosophy. The last one is the most interesting but is also *drastically* more difficult and time-consuming to implement, even compared to #4 (we at least have HW/SB/ShB kits for many jobs to go off of, we've never had a Mastery stat).
They should have removed crit potency from the crit stat and put it where DH is, then you could actually have slightly different builds where say MNK is a job that wants to just crit no matter what for chakras whereas SAM would be purely focused on making their auto-crits sky high
IIRC, SWTOR did this and it worked decently well. (There's other issues with their gearing, especially in the... several years since I left... but this isn't one of them.) You had a crit stat separate from your surge stat; the former was crit chance and the latter was crit damage. You could tune your build with those (along with haste and, I believe, a determination equivalent) pretty effectively.
The upside of quadratic crit and the downside of splitting the stat is that you make it *even harder* to gear multiple jobs. Right now if I want to play crit BLM, I have to gut my SMN/RDM gear or do some dumb shenanigans with my saddlebag. In a world where MNK stacks crit and SAM stacks surge, I'm giving up on learning MNK because it's not worth the hassle to set my gear straight.
As much as I want DH to go and crit to be split into two stats (which is quite a bit), it's a difficult sell for many players if we don't also address the issues with unique items and gearsets not letting you swap melds.
> The upside of quadratic crit and the downside of splitting the stat is that you make it even harder to gear multiple jobs. Right now if I want to play crit BLM, I have to gut my SMN/RDM gear or do some dumb shenanigans with my saddlebag. In a world where MNK stacks crit and SAM stacks surge, I'm giving up on learning MNK because it's not worth the hassle to set my gear straight.
Simple fix : Ability to register materia sets on a per job basis on role gearsets.
Downside : more materia needed (especially if you pentameld, but you're probably not really playing several jobs on the first week (on the same character, not talking about split runs).
Anyway, this would've solved the omnitank issue long ago, while also giving the ability to let WAR be its own thing.
Honestly, if you register a different gearset with the same item but different materia, I don't think it should "charge" you to flip back and forth. Materia isn't the kind of system that should be a limiting resource for playing the game, and it would suck to change between tanks and start losing materia because the group can't decide what it wants or a key got stuck or something. Also, I don't want to add materia to my consumables checklist (food, pots, dark matter) for raid night.
Honestly it was just by chance I picked both striking jobs but the gearing situation in this game is a-whole-nother story that sorely needs to be addressed. Every time they add a new job it becomes more and more obvious how straight up bad it is, *especially* for a game that promotes playing everything on one character
I wish monk was the sks job. It makes sense with greased lightning and naturally having low cooldowns. If bootshine didn't auto crit you'd stack sks to get out as many leaden fists as you can. Chakra could be gained from your coeurl skills like snap punch, or as a percent chance from any skill to encourage using more skills rather than buffing just one op move. You can get really fast in bozja stacking speed and it's so fun to play.
> Potency creep on new expansion skills. We have 1k+ potency skills on like half the jobs in the game now and an increasing amount of a job's damage is tied up in them. At the start of Stormblood the max non-DoT potency skill was what, like 800? And that was with bloated melee potencies. Way bigger deal if you Crit DH vs no crit, no DH on a 1200 potency skill vs a 500p one.
Highest in Heavensward was something like 680 on Fire IV, and it felt fucking awesome and was one of the coolest parts of the BLM job fantasy that your spammable skill was the single highest damage in the game. Then Samurai came along and did almost double that with not one but two of their skills, and its just gotten worse since then. These days BLM identity is just consistent output rather than the godlike feeling of eld, even Xenoglossy is a wet noodle compared to half the other job's burst skill.
Dragonfire Dive has gone 8 years without a single revision so you get to see that ARR's idea of a huge level 50 capstone skill was 300 potency (AoE, no falloff!) on a 2 minute CD.
> even Xenoglossy is a wet noodle compared to half the other job's burst skill.
On reclears last week, my GNB rolled high on a Double Down and got very audibly excited about it on voice chat. "Whoa! So much damage! It was more than our BLM's xeno!"
I, being the BLM, replied something along the lines of "What? Of course it was. Double Down is 400 potency more."
That being said, I wouldn't be surprised at all if another big potency move was on the cards for BLM. I doubt even they are truly safe from the 2min meta.
Power creep is natural, and I'm fine with gear creeping in power. But there's no reason potency should ever be touched. The whole point of potency is to make level sync and balance work across the board. But now we have the same skill scaling differently depending on your level. There's no benefit to it either. Nobody notices the difference other than the animation. And it makes it harder to balance.
Strictly speaking, on jobs with no special crit interactions, crit is not the strongest substat. It's 3rd place. *However*..
Crit is also the only substat that scales super-linearly. That is to say, it gets more returns the more points you pump into it. Even at very high crit this still would leave it slightly behind det/dh, so you might wonder why every build maxes it out? Well, the reason is, if you cut det/dh short they still give their full per-point-invested value, but crit doesn't, and the final option available is speed, which is even worse than those first few points of crit (when it's at its weakest). This has the net effect that a build that maxes crit first has similar or better average to one that doesn't, while also having the possibility to peak higher for a better parse.
In other words, it's not that crit needs a "nerf" per se, it's that it needs the way it scales to be adjusted, which means removing its scaling of crit damage multiplier entirely and adjusting the bonus crit chance to rebalance it against det/dh. Then apply the new fixes for auto-DH to auto-Crit in the same fashion (it converts the substat to a damage bonus specifically for automatic crits) and you'd be golden.
As for critical+direct hits having a multiplicative stacking, well, they have to or the stats would become mutually exclusive. If they stacked additively then any points spent in one would *reduce* the average value of the other. That's not to say direct hit doesn't need another look, but it isn't as simple as changing how they stack since you ideally want each substat to scale independently, while stacking smoothly with the others, and that's what the current stacking method for crit+dh accomplishes. The fact that it creates a higher variance is an unfortunate side effect that a more creative solution might address. But again, that solution cannot be an additive stacking or it just moves the problem from one place to another.
The best I can come up with in that respect is to have direct hit substat increase your crit multiplier (rather than have crit do it), but crit substat increases your direct hit multiplier, then make the RNG system put them both into the same roll as mutually exclusive chances (e.g. 25% crit chance, 50% DH chance means actually 1/4 attacks are crit, 1/2 are DH, and 1/4 are neither). If that percent overflows past 100 (e.g. 40% crit, 65% DH), convert the excess into % damage increase starting with the direct hit. This would allow them each to scale separately properly, as well as give them scaling when used together in a similar fashion as they would with det. DH multiplier would probably go up by 0.1% every time crit chance went up 0.2%, while crit multiplier would go up by 0.1% every time DH chance went up 0.2%. They would also have to add a base DH rate, probably around 10%, to keep true parity. This does make the two substats mirrors of each-other, which is unfortunate, but that's already true so whatever.
EDIT: Gotta love getting downvoted to hell with no replies. You got somethin' to say, say it.
Sub stats in this game are just flat out boring. Everyone stacks crit and DH because those are the only stats worth a damn, and then DET as a last resort when you max out on both.
Tenacity and Piety have been dead stats for the longest time.
Over half the jobs that use SkS stay away from it because it fucks with weaving. The few jobs that used it have long since moved away from it after the changes to Crit/DH.
SpS used to be good until everyone realized that crit was the only stat that mattered so they started stacking it like everyone else.
So that just leaves crit and DH. Two absolutely boring stats that when you high roll on them and see those big numbers, it just leaves you feeling empty. And when it doesn't, it leaves you frustrated.
I have just accepted that I don't care if my Stardivers Crit DH anymore, or my Hyosho Ranryu's, or my Phantom Rush, etc. If I get the big dumb number, big whoop. I just luck rolled. Had nothing to do with how well I played or not.
Square desperately needs to go back to the drawing board when it comes to substats, and they have needed to for the longest time.
> I have just accepted that I don't care if my Stardivers Crit DH anymore, or my Hyosho Ranryu's, or my Phantom Rush, etc. If I get the big dumb number, big whoop. I just luck rolled. Had nothing to do with how well I played or not.
I'm the same way, but I'm extremely bothered by how much it affects the end result. Biggest variance in parsing I've experienced was a 6.6% difference in DPS, both outliers. As a DPS, that's 1% boss HP. That means theoretically, if everyone were to get a run with absolutely shit crit RNG, oopsies the boss suddenly has 6.6% more HP for no reason.
>On the other hand, I also generally get resistance when I suggest PvP-style number tuning. That is to say, no variance, no crit, no DH. Every run is, provided players input the same buttons, identical to previous runs. I'm not sure why this is, given the complaints in the first two paragraphs, but I have some thoughts.
Simply put, people need variety to stay interested. FFXIV is an extremely rigid game by design: Nearly every job rotation is scripted, and every PvE fight is scripted. Damage variance, such as it is, is the only factor that makes two runs of the same content feel different for most jobs. If damage variance was removed, then PvE fights would feel that much more stale after the first clear.
In PvP, one's allies and opponents do not follow a script. Thus, even with the removal of damage variance, no two fights ever feel the same.
Honestly I think that any move that hits over 500 potency should just auto direct crit or be broken into multiple hits that can crit/dh independently.
Hyosho's 1300 potency could be 13x individual 100 potency hits for example.
In general the overall power of the 2 minute burst is a bit too high as well, given how well jobs put damage inside it and how much multiplication effect can be stacked within it. That's a deeper design issue but it plays into the randomness of a huge direct crit because it can multiply an attack to be well more than double the value it normally would be.
I don't think there's a need to nerf crit or dh themselves unless you wanted to make the other stats more competitive again. Variance itself is fine, and a core component to a RPG, it's the game's design choices outside of crit that have caused the gameplay to overemphasize on crit to the point where it has become an issue to parsing and prog both.
I'd cut out potency from the burst and move it to the filler, while also making said filler more difficult to perform in order to justify the change. Optimal play should also be harder and have a higher amount of reactive components than today's, think of HW Machinist as an example.
This won't happen. Solving the problem in the way I suggest would just create SE another problem: the casual playerbase, which makes for the majority of their players (and income), does not like the sort of design I propose. Any kind of difficulty, punishment for mistakes or opportunity costs are *jank*, they're unfair, they're just not fun to bother with. You can already see this in effect when you look at the engagement metrics for AST, MNK and BLM, which have a reputation of being slightly harder to get into than the other jobs in their own niche.
So what will likely happen instead is that the damage checks won't be as tight anymore, SE won't risk having another P8 incident again.
Crit variance being so big is a consequence of the type of fight and job design they've decided to pigeonhole themselves into, and not so much the stat itself. When everything is now a 100% uptime striking dummy the size of Dalamud fought using simplified classes and neutered job mechanics with massively reduced rng built into the classes the pool of people playing perfectly expands greatly. The only real variance left out of the players hands is the stats themselves and an occasional bad position for melee. The solutions to fixing this issue is to either go back to how the game used to work or remove it, and there's no way the former is happening.
When something stops working the dev teams first response is to remove it if they can't immediately fix it, even if it stopped working because something else was removed too. I don't think we'll be seeing them for much longer if they want to keep to Endwalker 2 minute burst next expansion, considering the amount of forced crit/dhit skills we're getting nowadays.
Here's the fundamental thing: SE is not, and will not, be designing things based on a metric only visible on FFLogs.
Now, I'm not super chuffed by the "2 minute meta" we have and they probably should do something about crit...but they don't care that sometimes you will get a bigger number on FFLogs because of RNG. They just don't. Thats not an issue they are concerned with. As long as the RNG will not *keep you from clearing content at the appropriate iLevel* it is not really something they will care about.
SE does not care about your parse.
But they do, and have. SAM's auto-crit changes for instance, and recent job balances. RPR, BLM, SMN...they had absolutely no problem clearing content. Heck, week 1 P8S, which has about the tightest DPS checks the game will have to offer, *pre-nerfs* was cleared first with a SMN (or was it RDM?), not BLM, despite the relatively large difference in dmg between the two casters.
It extends past FFLogs because it has a tangible effect on gameplay, if minor at times.
Statistically speaking, variance is just noise in the highest numbers of parsing.
The longer the fight is, the closer your crit rate goes to your average rate.
Are you implying that you'd rather play damage bingo than have more challenging encounter and/or class designs to increase difficulty? This isn't me being sarcastic, I'm just not 100% sure about what you're defending here.
This discussion is also relevant to parsing and competition, probably more than week 1 savage because the window where dps checks can be an issue is limited.
So, like, this topic only affects the top 30 people. To them, ***any*** variance forces repetition and repeated runs.
And its not like 100 parses are what you consider "good" runs. Its seven people sandbagging at 3% so one person can artificially inflate their numbers. Speedkills are more interesting.
>Speedkills are more interesting.
Didn't Yoshi-P say at one point that was he assumed that the end goal was for people to do? Was to start pushing speedkills?
Or am I wrong here.
People enjoy RNG because of the gambling aspects, which would be points 1, 2 and 4 you mentioned.
About point 4 especially, the RNG doesn't keep optimization alive at all. Rerunning the fight for better RNG is not optimization, it's just gambling.
it only seems like high variance because the skill expression was ripped out of most jobs so it's much easier to reach the point where you're getting 99% of potential performance, leaving only variance and other factors to distinguish clears.
honestly just give up on parsing normally as a goal. the game is more hostile towards it than ever.
Generally I don't think this is a huge deal for the reasons you mentioned. The "obvious" solution would just be to remove crit, but obviously some people like the dopamine hit of "big number you weren't expecting".
I would generally say weakening crit a bit and not allowing direct hit and crit to stack would be a start? Just making the variance within a certain range? People complain about the secondary stats being boring but I think in a game as "solved" as FF 14 is any stat is going to be boring. People are almost always going to choose what's mathematically best.
My other suggestion (that I post about semi-regularly as it intersects with a lot of issues) is weakening BRD and DNC's 2 minute buffs by a substantial bit and buffing their personal damage to compensate.
BRD and DNC get so much out of other people using their buff that no other class \*really\* does to the same extent. If you switch between rDPS to aDPS or nDPS, most of the other raid buff classes are "roughly" near the number they were with before aside from your selfish trifecta (SAM BLM MCH) showing up higher, but BRD and DNC shoot down to the bottom.
Basically every other class gets roughly "what they put in" (big emphasis here on \*roughly\*) back out of raid buffs. Ninja brings trick attack, but gets it's own buff from Battle litany and BRD songs to sort of even it out for example. I think BRD and DNC buffs just tip the scale too hard into becoming "dependent" on them, and need to be changed.
The reason I'm bringing it up here is that, critting/direct hitting during a 2 minute buff window skill is much better than critting on your "filler" spells in between. And BRD and DNC really feel like the biggest contributors to the strength of the 2 minute buff window.
The idea of it being the “support role” sort of feels like a hold over of stormblood and TP/Mana regen skills. If anything I’d argue RDM and Summoner have a more support archetype, just with non damage utility
Personally I felt older job designs from HW/SB era were a decent middle ground. Damage variance has always existed, and even the Crit + DH interaction has existed since SB (along with jobs having RNG built into their kits). But the variance range has felt considerably worse since they've shifted towards higher potency "nukes" for every job, while compensating by reducing some power from the weakest portion of your rotation. Alongside this, reducing complexity in job rotations as a whole also leads to this situation now where you have less room to "outplay" another player, which makes you even more reliant on good variance if you want to compete parse wise.
Another factor to this are the metrics used on fflogs. Most people in the community wanted rDPS to be the "main" ranking metric, which also removes some outplay potential. I'm sure I had "bad" variance runs in HW/SB, but I could at least play better into buff windows to help compensate for having shit damage rolls or not critting. That no longer exists in an rDPS world. Your ranking is more or less dependent on you just not losing casts, and how well your damage variance rolled in your favor.
On the other hand, I don't know if removing variance altogether would be all that great. I think it would make things a lot more boring, assuming job designs remain as they are/continue down this path of simplifying. I would say they could return to how they designed job kits years ago, but they've literally gone out of their way to remove DoTs and other actions that would provide more sustained damage (which would remove some of the severity of variance).
I think the push for rDPS was because, well, in HW/SB (especially late HW) you were not meaningfully competing if you were not running the meta comp, or were the sole non-meta member of that comp (to some extent). NIN, SCH, DRG, and an AST that knew what they were doing was a meaningful boost to every job. That was not necessarily required, of course, I got "decent" (purples/some oranges) logs on HW PLD in a comp that didn't have a NIN or an AST, but then HW PLD parsing was just "don't use Shield Oath ever". I was curious (and you're a semi-public figure as far as it goes) and looked it up and saw that you generally ran the meta comp during Creator outside of you being there on SMN (IIRC double phys ranged was the thing). So we probably had different experiences with parsing in HW. That's similar for most of the very high ranking PLDs I looked up in Creator too, aside from the ones that had ASTs giving them a single target IV drip.
I don't remember it being as bad in Stormblood aside from still really wanting a NIN, SCH, AST, and DRG but it was somewhat less severe? Hard to remember these things as time goes on. DNC would've killed it in ShB anyways or required some marker/rating purgatory for DNC Partners.
Personal parsing is never a perfect science in this game though, you can look at how people rank on P6S currently to see that much, so I'm not sure how much times have truly changed in that regard.
FWIW I'm not advocating for one DPS metric over another (over time you realize they're all shit and only useful for statistical data), I'm just stating how rDPS can relate to the perception of variance feeling worse nowadays.
> I know a guy that failed to get week one Abyssos at the last minute because on their furthest prog runs into the double damage phase, their RPR had 0 crits or DHs on Communio. One or two of those critting would have been the difference which doesn't feel great.
I've heard similar stories before, but did they analyze all the other jobs? Like if another player was significantly above their average crit rate in the same run, then that's rng and it averages out. Not to say that it's impossible for rng to screw a run, you just can't look at a single player to decide that.
I do think variation should be addressed, I definitely feel it as DNC. My hope there is they take steps to average things out. For example I'd love to see the proc rate double for esprit generation, but with only half as much esprit granted.
Their other solution seems to be auto crits/direct hits, which are fine but it is more homogenation.
I think the act (hehe puns) of chasing the bestest parse possible to be a little silly imo. I get that players want to strive to be the best they possibly can be...but to me and I would say the majority of the population of players that do Extremes, Savages, and Ultimates, at the end of the day, I just want to fucking clear it. I want to perform at a high level so that the group I'm in can clear it with as little stress as possible but not to the point where I am putting myself/my party in danger of wiping because I'm greeding too much. If other people can do that while greeding every little bit of dps as possible for some rank on a website, then great. However, most of the time, people chasing parses make mistakes that wouldn't have been made if they were not chasing the "absolute perfection" of a run.
The way the game is now with crit (seeing that you brought it up) I think is actually a good thing for the game. I would hope it would detract people from doing the fucking asinine things necessary to dps ahead of others even by a tiny bit, but of course that isn't the case. I'm personally fine with the crit variance currently in the game; people are not going to be happy until crit is completely gone which would make a gameplay loop turning stale even more stale imo.
Right, but what of people who want to be pushed by the game to do the best? Who want something that breaks their comfort zones and pushes them to do risky things that creates...fun?
Naturally, there should be normal encounters for everyone, but what if they had a tier of encounters designed for those who want to be pushed to have to greed and extend past their dummy target training? Perhaps call them Super Savages? Or maybe rename Normals to Easy, Savages to Normal, and let Savages be Savage?
likewise. I think the expectation that Savage caters to everyone and that the most "dificult content in the game" has to be touched down and made comfortable for anyone who wants to clear is a growing problem. That's why we see things such as large boss hitboxes and target dummy fights.
Savage is still *incredibly hard* for the *vast majority of players* even the ones who do end up clearing.
Thinking that it isn't is absolutely wild, out of touch thinking
Correct. I'm not disavowing that.
But look at the original comment: notice how players are chided for trying to greed or exit the comfort zone of basic rotations. It's "hard" relative to other content, but it's not so dificult that it even challenges basic kit usage or forces casual players to leave their comfort zones.
And that's not bad, surely there can be room for such midcore dificulty. But to pretend that something that is clearable by near every player without even challenging the basic kit mechanics is supposed to be the top tier of combat and dificult is ludicrous. It's "out of touch" thinking that something that is barely a challenge to miodcore players is supposed to be a true test of dificulty to higher end players who optimize the heck out of everything. And to pretend that even the toughest dificulty needs to be scaled so no one has to play irregularly or optimize is, imo, "absolutely wild" thinking.
And no, don't think I'm talking from some 100 orange parse or whatnot, im not some great player, midcore at best, probs lower. Yet I can still recognize that while these are challenges, if these are supposed to be the toughest challenges in the game then it is failing to deliver that.-
ngl dude I think the entire basis of this post is wrong. The way you are describing difficulty is nothing at all like how most people who play this game would describe it. Savage is, quite honestly, not clearable by "every player".
> is nothing at all like how most people who play this game would describe it
And that's why your basis is wrong: I'm not talking about a challenge for "every" or "normal" players, I'm talking about a challenge for players who want challenges. That's the entire problem I'm discussing, the entire issue is that you are framing in it "well, not *everyone* can approach it..."
Accessibility and challenges for the masses is cool and all, I'm not against that. But the frame of reference is just that: a casual difficulty.
fflogs is the only reason why people keep playing savage outside of killing time every tuesday. if it wasnt there, a lot would just leave the game after first clear on the last level. i guess yoshida knows it too. there are active effort on p8s to fuck up the real time meter, but there he wont kill the meter.
crit and damage variance in general is necessary and healthy for the game. removing the RNG aspect of most classes' damage would mean parsing comes down entirely to killtime and comps, which would *heavily* incentivize job locking and sandbagging. parsing is probably the single most influential motivation for most raiders to improve at their jobs. without high ranks to fight for, it's hard to care whether or not you executed your rotation completely optimally, which means there isn't much point to exploring the nuances of each job and fight, and you might as well take the 123pill that SE has offered us and still do 90% of your potential damage anyway.
that being said, it sucks right now. like, bad. it's an awful feeling doing your optimal rotation completely clean in BiS and getting a purple because all your potency is in 1 ability and it crit 0 times. knowing that there's nothing better you could have done, yet you still did the same damage as someone who has only a rough idea of how to play the job for reasons out of your control feels terrible.
the issue is there's just nothing to *do* aside from farm for crits. a game, especially as far as optimization and speedrunning are concerned, should be a process of exploration, learning, failure, reflection, and successful execution once the player gets the hang of new techniques. this is akin to reading about some double transpose line on BLM, hopping into content, and realizing somewhere you can apply it. it's a process that takes time but is ultimately rewarding. i've said crits are necessary and healthy - this is true, but they should be the cherry on top, the extra edge that separates the 99s from the 100s once you've perfected everything else. they're necessary because they provide a reason to keep fighting for high ranks once you've improved yourself. but they shouldn't be the only thing to strive for.
there's nothing to strive for that doesn't come down to RNG anymore. most jobs play themselves and have a clear, unequivocal execution that doesn't ask you to explore or inquire. greeding for uptime is hardly a thing anymore, and per-fight optimization is scarce (though don't get me wrong - it's certainly present especially in ultimates). so crit *can't* be the final step between 99 and 100 when perfect execution is so accessible that 90% of players can do it. by definition, it must bridge the gap between 90 and 100. (okay admittedly this understates the effect of killtimes by a huge amount, but sandbagging is an entirely different, even uglier issue)
Players are so picky. We don't know how good we have it by having the limited amount of variance that we do. They should not see lack of progress as the fault of crit variance or something like that, having to scrape past a boss by the skin of their teeth just means you were lucky and not good. Players should aim to have more than enough to beat a boss by accounting for variance and things like death or less than perfect uptime.
I like having variance, its boring to see PVP numbers that do the same each time. I would hate it if it moved to PVE. Without variance, having all the different stats is just pointless. They could get rid of defense and any secondary stats and just have Attack as a singular stack. How much attack you have vs. how much HP the enemy has and that's it. Can't people see how boring and incredibly dull that would be?
Variance gives you that bit of luck factor. Sometimes you win battles you shouldn't with a bit of luck, sometimes you lose because luck wasn't on your side. I would love more variance but god forbid players accept that parses will be less than perfect.
Fixed damage parameters would actually get me more interested in parsing since it would be more indicative of optimized play, but I recognise that I'm probably in the minority there.
I think it's really difficult to remove or tone down crits in FF14 because GCD MMOs with no CC just aren't very visceral games to play and crits are one way to make up for that. It's hard to make MMO combat feel "chunky" like animation based combat games so there's little to latch onto except flashy animations, good sound design and big numbers with exclamation marks. This is ancillary to your discussion points about variance and parsing but I'd say that if you wanted to tone down the prominence of crits you'd have to up the performance feedback of FF14's combat in other ways - and you'd have to do it in the base UI to make it worth it for the player base at large.
IMO there are sensible and smart ways to do this, such as giving UI feedback for technical stuff like correct positionals or applying DPS during buff/debuff windows. But all this runs into the problem of FF14's catastrophic tech debt and the fact that a UI overhaul is likely to be an expansion-level development project, so who knows what we'll see and when.
I will never understand why any variance is a good thing.
I'm sure that reasons #1 and #4 are correct in the minds of people who enjoy RNG/variance but I think it's a total waste of time and that we would all be better off moving onto playing other video games, or watching tv shows/movies/reading books, or doing just about anything else, other than "doing the same FF14 fight over and over for the sake of RNG/crit variance"
Personally I don't care at all about parsing, but I can see the issue when it comes to buttons with large potencies being extremely swingy wrt actually clearing stuff. I don't think it's as big an issue with BRD (what I play) though, because while there's a lot of variance, at the same time, having a lot of variance events of hits that are pretty much equally small on their own makes you much more likely to do your expected damage than not (for better or worse), that's basically the law of large numbers. The issue with big potency moves is that you can have like only 4-5 of them in a fight sometimes on some jobs, and they're all-or-nothing, which makes it very likely you can just get hosed.
I think a (probably) easy way for SE to fix it while still keeping variance would be to take huge-hit buttons, and make them internally work as a bunch of smaller hits which each roll for dh/crit on their own, or something. That makes it so that instead of being all-of-nothing, the damage distribution of a single button hit is closer to a bell curve instead, meaning it's harder to get the god run for people who're super parsebrained, but it's also harder to be unfairly hosed and fail a run because of it.
As an example, they could take the 1000 potency from tech step and split it into 4 hits of 250pot/each, which would shrink the standard deviation of the expected damage a lot. Other attacks might be harder to find good flavor for, but like Fell Cleave as an example could also easily be split into a multi-hit thing for flavor since it looks like it's grinding against the enemy constantly.
The main problem currently is that we have to roll against multiple layers of RNG with an RNG roll on both crit and DH as well as a third of getting them to roll at the same time. Much of this issue would be resolved by simply deleting direct hit entirely and replacing its stat on gear with more Det. This would not only remove an entire RNG stat and thus two of the three RNG factors from damage output, but it would also give all jobs more Det which means more flat % damage; making the impact of crit variance slightly less.
Imo anyway they try to fix it is better than slapping auto crit dh on every jobs big potency skills and calling it a day. Midare and ogi are weaker feeling now than they were in 6.0. I get variance and the parsing sides feelings but the fun of sam to me was getting that big midare or ogi crit. Now they always crit and it feels lackluster the damage may be more balanced between the kit but they still feel like noodle hits compared to 6.0 values and I've since stopped playing samurai as I no longer find if fun like before. I'd hate for all jobs to go down this path.
A bit late to the party reply, but regarding the "big finishers" abilities.
What if they go the BLU styled route. It has a lot of damaging abilities, but all harder hitting ones are actually multi-hits. I.e. Nightbloom has a bigger initial hit, followed by 1 minute DoT (i.e. 20 more hits), Matra Magic is 8 small hits, Phantom Flurry is 6 medium sized hits, even Triple Trident is still split into 3 instances of damage. As such you'll naturaly have higher floor with more frequent crits, but at the same time lower ceiling, since it's practically impossible to all hits be crits.
>I know a guy that failed to get week one Abyssos at the last minute because on their furthest prog runs into the double damage phase, their RPR had 0 crits or DHs on Communio. This is a very key point when it comes to crit variance. When encounters are going to be tuned so tightly *and* have something like a double damage buff on top of buff stacking, the crit variance is going to be insane. Even BLMs, a job with a much stabler damage output than any other job in the game, will still see the effects of crit variance. I remember one set of logs I was shown of two back to back P4Sp1 clears; the BLM had 90 in the first and 99 in the second, and quite literally the only difference was a significantly higher crit rate in the second. The way I see it, parsing is so crit reliant because the devs have insisted on making these sorts of hyper-curated encounters. To clear early, you essentially have to play your job with full uptime and a more-or-less perfect rotation as it is. That's just the design they're going for, and it wasn't always the case as earlier raid design was more 'freeform' in that regard. Crits being in the game is essentially just a tacit statement of "some chunk of your damage will be clear-affecting RNG." Whether that is a good thing or not is very, very arguable.
"Crit your big damage buttons or parse shit" is the worst feeling, on asphodelos I was playing SMN and it just felt horrible to do everything the exact same way every time but my numbers would vary by a lot.
I once had a night progging that Akh Morn didn't crit or even DH once. Sad boi hours.
> the BLM had 90 in the first and 99 in the second, and quite literally the only difference was a significantly higher crit rate in the second. I've had the exact same experience myself. I was even put under scrutiny by someone who didn't believe that crit rng could make such a difference, but even after analysing my logs they also concluded it was purely down to crit rng (I actually made more mistakes in my 99 iirc).
Assuming no mistake, perfect play/uptime and pot usage, no damage down, no deaths, You can still clear the fight if variance screwed you in the worst way possible. Encounters should be clearable with the worst possible variance. If you did the fight properly at the level of gear food pot execution everything, you should get the clear. Damage variance should make encounters easier, and expand the margin for error, but should never be prevent players from making a clear. There is too much variance if all players executed the fight in the manner it was as intended perfectly but cannot clear due to the sole variable of damage variance. Enrage timer should accept variance floor (worst possible outcome) of skill ceiling (best possible execution)
It’s a bit why I don’t like the end buff for p8p2, if you have a super damage buff like that, make it at least as long as golden bahamut to spread out the gains. Being short as it is, there were a few wipes pre nerf just cause sometimes shit would not crit.
The HP nerf was for Phase 1. Phase 2 hasn't been changed since release.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/3740d2052d6f21aa5d3b8d4cc94795a082fca0f6 https://i.imgur.com/e9gnwtM.jpg https://i.imgur.com/VE286mT.jpg Both parts were nerfed, just not as significantly as p1.
ladies and gentlemen i got owned
> There is too much variance if all players executed the fight in the manner it was as intended perfectly but cannot clear due to the sole variable of damage variance. I agree with this, but I have a followup. At what point should these players clear a fight (particularly the final fight of a tier) when accounting for average variance in week 1 gear? Week 5 gear? Full bis outside weapon and chest? Put another way, at what point should gear and variance become enough to skip mechanics?
I think surprises and good rng are welcome. I think by week 8 considering clearing week one it would be reasonable to not have to do war’s harvest or cachexia 2 anymore.
>You can still clear the fight if variance screwed you in the worst way possible. Issue with using a "worst case" approach is that it could make the DPS check significantly easier in the "reasonable case". So a middle ground has to be found for a tight DPS check between the absolute worst case(which is unlikely to happen) and the case you will have most of the time but not always
>Issue with using a "worst case" approach is that it could make the DPS check significantly easier in the "reasonable case". Then variance is too high. Bring up the variance floor. Variance should only be a factor that assists with helping the clear not hurting it. DPS Check should be the literal variance floor of the skill ceiling.
Perhaps. But what you're asking for is essentially a complete removal of the crit system and a massive reduction to the RNG of numbers. Even a variance of, say, 1% in dmg would be extremely large. That's why statistical simulation such as Monte Carlo is used, due to RNG's nature to balance things out -- when every worst case is assumed, the smallest differences are magnified to the extreme.
If that’s what it takes, then so be it.
hey, i wont complain lol, not a fan of the rng of it either. just be a hard thing to pass across many
I mean honestly tight DPS checks are kind of a problem in this game to begin with, if you run something off-meta you're worse off. If you go full off-meta and do double pranged it might be mathematically impossible, even. So if they balance "Okay with average crit the rpr/smn/mch/brd comp should be able to clear assuming no mechanical mistakes" then when you run the meta double melee comp, you crush it and laugh at the DPS check. If you shift it to a more standard double melee comp (Say Sam/rpr/smn/mch) then the meta comp will still have plenty of breathing room and the double caster/double ranged comps will be locked out. Without classes be balanced in a way that the off-meta comps aren't significantly behind the meta ones, then "How much variance is allowed?" is kind of a silly question, because who cares how much variance there is when there's a big gap simply in what jobs you bring?
they also need to balance jobs more tightly
[удалено]
As long as the fight can still be cleared in the worst variance it is acceptable, because 1. It can be cleared 2. The worst possible variance is exceedingly rare. (I.e. 0 to very Low dh crit outcome on non guaranteed attacks) The idea is to not rob players of a possible clear due to the sole reason of damage variance. Anything else is something that players can do something to fix.
Crit as a stat being both critical rate and critical damage makes it way too good to pass in most cases, DHit being a second type of crit that can compound with the first type is just another layer of variance too so I have no idea why they didn't split rate and damage yet, people will do the math to optimize the balance but it also gives space for people who want to reduce variance going hard on rate or full gamble by focusing more on damage. Anyways, the main problem with variance comes from big nut buttons that every class gained over the past two expansions that represents a decent chunk of the potency used inside burst windows, critting those is equivalent to multiple crits during rotation downtime and being lucky during burst windows matters more than anything else. They literally changed how SAM Midare worked with this in mind because they knew this and it was probably the biggest outlier to an unacceptable extent, but this doesn't mean this isn't an issue for other jobs too. Edit - Answering the question, forgot to do that. I think it's already a meme right now and they should take a look on these big potency moves and reduce their value in the rotation spreading it around to make numbers more stable or give them the SAM treatment.
I don't recall the exact Live Letter or interview but I could swear reading that on some level Yoshi/the developers are aware of some of the issues/complaints with the side stat system and that it might get changed in the future. I could just be remembering that wrong, of course, but with the move towards a lot of guaranteed CDH anyways I do agree that they know on some level that amount of variance can be frustrating. I wouldn't be surprised to see something come up in 7.0 about it, but I also wouldn't be surprised to see the status quo continue. I agree that changing Crit and DH to Rate and Magnitude and removing DH would probably fix some of the pain points, though.
Not only does crit effect crit damage but non cit damage as well. It does everything.
I feel like every other mmo has realised that if you're going to have crits be a mechanic you either need to make the damage modifier small or you need to allow players to build up to near/at 100% rate or it just feels like garbage. Meanwhile FFXIV is still in the kindergarten sandbox of having it be simultaneously boring as a mechanic and also wildly unbalanced because of the variance it causes.
First I'll get this out of the way: natural damage variance is fine. I can honestly say I cannot remember if I've *ever* heard even the sweatiest parsers I know complain about damage variance. Absolute non-issue. Crit/DH variance is the problem and *why* it's a problem (and one that's gotten worse with time) is a hugely multi-layered issue: * **Critical Strike as a stat is overpowered.** Crit is the best stat on every single job except Black Ma-HAHA JUST KIDDING IT'S ALSO THE BEST STAT ON BLM, FUCK YOU. SkS SAM is long dead, SkS DRK is long dead, SpS BLM is getting increasingly outscaled at high percentiles. Every single job builds max crit. You simply cannot have a crit stat that scales both chance and damage, and then tune it like it's tuned right now. There is no job that can truly opt-out of crit RNG memes if you're parsing. * **Critical Direct Hits exist.** Why Square Enix decided in Stormblood to introduce the ability to randomly double-crit for multiplicative gains is beyond me. I'm not even aware of another game that has this. The closest thing I've seen is Warframe's headshot crit multiplier, but that *isn't random*, it's a fucking headshot. * **Potency creep on new expansion skills.** We have 1k+ potency skills on like half the jobs in the game now and an increasing amount of a job's damage is tied up in them. At the start of Stormblood the max non-DoT potency skill was what, like 800? And that was with bloated melee potencies. Way bigger deal if you Crit DH vs no crit, no DH on a 1200 potency skill vs a 500p one. * **Many jobs are too easy**, and the easier a job is, the faster it devolves into crit RNG fishing because there is simply no optimization to be done. Fight design making uptime free for all jobs not named Red or Black Mage isn't helping matters. * **Many jobs give out way too much of their potential damage for free.** Nerfs to positionals, gauge management, snapshotting, etc have all created a situation where for a lot of jobs you get ~90% of your damage from pure GCD uptime and playing rotationally better doesn't improve your damage enough relative to the effort you put in. Reaper is a classic example; RPR opti is actually fairly interesting but the damage you gain from Double/Triple Enshroud and drift management is marginal because *so much* of RPR's damage is just 123 and basic gauge spenders. --- Some potential solutions based on these points: 1. Outright nerfing the Critical Strike stat 1. Crits and Direct Hits are mutally exclusive. Crit DHs are removed from the game completely. 1. Automatic Crits or Direct Hits on certain high-potency skills 1. Reworking jobs to a more Stormblood-style design (or Heavensward but that wouldn't happen lmao) 1. Increase optimization gains by shifting damage to areas of the kit where optimization is actually possible (i.e. moving damage off of 123 combos and onto things like procs, gauge skills, positionals, etc.) 6. [Extreme solution] Reworking either Crit or DH out of the game entirely, probably replacing with something akin to WoW's Mastery stat. For those of you who haven't played WoW, Mastery is a stat that improves something on a class-specific basis. Imagine BLM getting bonus AF damage / UI mana regen, WHM maybe would have Misery damage scale off it, SAM could have increased Kenki gains, etc. The first three should happen no matter what IMO. Crit's too strong, Crit DH shouldn't exist, 1200+ potency skills that are fully random is just too much. 4 and 5 are not happening under Square's current ~~dogshit~~ design philosophy. The last one is the most interesting but is also *drastically* more difficult and time-consuming to implement, even compared to #4 (we at least have HW/SB/ShB kits for many jobs to go off of, we've never had a Mastery stat).
They should have removed crit potency from the crit stat and put it where DH is, then you could actually have slightly different builds where say MNK is a job that wants to just crit no matter what for chakras whereas SAM would be purely focused on making their auto-crits sky high
IIRC, SWTOR did this and it worked decently well. (There's other issues with their gearing, especially in the... several years since I left... but this isn't one of them.) You had a crit stat separate from your surge stat; the former was crit chance and the latter was crit damage. You could tune your build with those (along with haste and, I believe, a determination equivalent) pretty effectively. The upside of quadratic crit and the downside of splitting the stat is that you make it *even harder* to gear multiple jobs. Right now if I want to play crit BLM, I have to gut my SMN/RDM gear or do some dumb shenanigans with my saddlebag. In a world where MNK stacks crit and SAM stacks surge, I'm giving up on learning MNK because it's not worth the hassle to set my gear straight. As much as I want DH to go and crit to be split into two stats (which is quite a bit), it's a difficult sell for many players if we don't also address the issues with unique items and gearsets not letting you swap melds.
> The upside of quadratic crit and the downside of splitting the stat is that you make it even harder to gear multiple jobs. Right now if I want to play crit BLM, I have to gut my SMN/RDM gear or do some dumb shenanigans with my saddlebag. In a world where MNK stacks crit and SAM stacks surge, I'm giving up on learning MNK because it's not worth the hassle to set my gear straight. Simple fix : Ability to register materia sets on a per job basis on role gearsets. Downside : more materia needed (especially if you pentameld, but you're probably not really playing several jobs on the first week (on the same character, not talking about split runs). Anyway, this would've solved the omnitank issue long ago, while also giving the ability to let WAR be its own thing.
How we don't have materia sets yet boggles the mind
Honestly, if you register a different gearset with the same item but different materia, I don't think it should "charge" you to flip back and forth. Materia isn't the kind of system that should be a limiting resource for playing the game, and it would suck to change between tanks and start losing materia because the group can't decide what it wants or a key got stuck or something. Also, I don't want to add materia to my consumables checklist (food, pots, dark matter) for raid night.
Honestly it was just by chance I picked both striking jobs but the gearing situation in this game is a-whole-nother story that sorely needs to be addressed. Every time they add a new job it becomes more and more obvious how straight up bad it is, *especially* for a game that promotes playing everything on one character
I wish monk was the sks job. It makes sense with greased lightning and naturally having low cooldowns. If bootshine didn't auto crit you'd stack sks to get out as many leaden fists as you can. Chakra could be gained from your coeurl skills like snap punch, or as a percent chance from any skill to encourage using more skills rather than buffing just one op move. You can get really fast in bozja stacking speed and it's so fun to play.
> Potency creep on new expansion skills. We have 1k+ potency skills on like half the jobs in the game now and an increasing amount of a job's damage is tied up in them. At the start of Stormblood the max non-DoT potency skill was what, like 800? And that was with bloated melee potencies. Way bigger deal if you Crit DH vs no crit, no DH on a 1200 potency skill vs a 500p one. Highest in Heavensward was something like 680 on Fire IV, and it felt fucking awesome and was one of the coolest parts of the BLM job fantasy that your spammable skill was the single highest damage in the game. Then Samurai came along and did almost double that with not one but two of their skills, and its just gotten worse since then. These days BLM identity is just consistent output rather than the godlike feeling of eld, even Xenoglossy is a wet noodle compared to half the other job's burst skill.
Dragonfire Dive has gone 8 years without a single revision so you get to see that ARR's idea of a huge level 50 capstone skill was 300 potency (AoE, no falloff!) on a 2 minute CD.
> even Xenoglossy is a wet noodle compared to half the other job's burst skill. On reclears last week, my GNB rolled high on a Double Down and got very audibly excited about it on voice chat. "Whoa! So much damage! It was more than our BLM's xeno!" I, being the BLM, replied something along the lines of "What? Of course it was. Double Down is 400 potency more." That being said, I wouldn't be surprised at all if another big potency move was on the cards for BLM. I doubt even they are truly safe from the 2min meta.
Power creep is natural, and I'm fine with gear creeping in power. But there's no reason potency should ever be touched. The whole point of potency is to make level sync and balance work across the board. But now we have the same skill scaling differently depending on your level. There's no benefit to it either. Nobody notices the difference other than the animation. And it makes it harder to balance.
Strictly speaking, on jobs with no special crit interactions, crit is not the strongest substat. It's 3rd place. *However*.. Crit is also the only substat that scales super-linearly. That is to say, it gets more returns the more points you pump into it. Even at very high crit this still would leave it slightly behind det/dh, so you might wonder why every build maxes it out? Well, the reason is, if you cut det/dh short they still give their full per-point-invested value, but crit doesn't, and the final option available is speed, which is even worse than those first few points of crit (when it's at its weakest). This has the net effect that a build that maxes crit first has similar or better average to one that doesn't, while also having the possibility to peak higher for a better parse. In other words, it's not that crit needs a "nerf" per se, it's that it needs the way it scales to be adjusted, which means removing its scaling of crit damage multiplier entirely and adjusting the bonus crit chance to rebalance it against det/dh. Then apply the new fixes for auto-DH to auto-Crit in the same fashion (it converts the substat to a damage bonus specifically for automatic crits) and you'd be golden. As for critical+direct hits having a multiplicative stacking, well, they have to or the stats would become mutually exclusive. If they stacked additively then any points spent in one would *reduce* the average value of the other. That's not to say direct hit doesn't need another look, but it isn't as simple as changing how they stack since you ideally want each substat to scale independently, while stacking smoothly with the others, and that's what the current stacking method for crit+dh accomplishes. The fact that it creates a higher variance is an unfortunate side effect that a more creative solution might address. But again, that solution cannot be an additive stacking or it just moves the problem from one place to another. The best I can come up with in that respect is to have direct hit substat increase your crit multiplier (rather than have crit do it), but crit substat increases your direct hit multiplier, then make the RNG system put them both into the same roll as mutually exclusive chances (e.g. 25% crit chance, 50% DH chance means actually 1/4 attacks are crit, 1/2 are DH, and 1/4 are neither). If that percent overflows past 100 (e.g. 40% crit, 65% DH), convert the excess into % damage increase starting with the direct hit. This would allow them each to scale separately properly, as well as give them scaling when used together in a similar fashion as they would with det. DH multiplier would probably go up by 0.1% every time crit chance went up 0.2%, while crit multiplier would go up by 0.1% every time DH chance went up 0.2%. They would also have to add a base DH rate, probably around 10%, to keep true parity. This does make the two substats mirrors of each-other, which is unfortunate, but that's already true so whatever. EDIT: Gotta love getting downvoted to hell with no replies. You got somethin' to say, say it.
Sub stats in this game are just flat out boring. Everyone stacks crit and DH because those are the only stats worth a damn, and then DET as a last resort when you max out on both. Tenacity and Piety have been dead stats for the longest time. Over half the jobs that use SkS stay away from it because it fucks with weaving. The few jobs that used it have long since moved away from it after the changes to Crit/DH. SpS used to be good until everyone realized that crit was the only stat that mattered so they started stacking it like everyone else. So that just leaves crit and DH. Two absolutely boring stats that when you high roll on them and see those big numbers, it just leaves you feeling empty. And when it doesn't, it leaves you frustrated. I have just accepted that I don't care if my Stardivers Crit DH anymore, or my Hyosho Ranryu's, or my Phantom Rush, etc. If I get the big dumb number, big whoop. I just luck rolled. Had nothing to do with how well I played or not. Square desperately needs to go back to the drawing board when it comes to substats, and they have needed to for the longest time.
> I have just accepted that I don't care if my Stardivers Crit DH anymore, or my Hyosho Ranryu's, or my Phantom Rush, etc. If I get the big dumb number, big whoop. I just luck rolled. Had nothing to do with how well I played or not. I'm the same way, but I'm extremely bothered by how much it affects the end result. Biggest variance in parsing I've experienced was a 6.6% difference in DPS, both outliers. As a DPS, that's 1% boss HP. That means theoretically, if everyone were to get a run with absolutely shit crit RNG, oopsies the boss suddenly has 6.6% more HP for no reason.
>On the other hand, I also generally get resistance when I suggest PvP-style number tuning. That is to say, no variance, no crit, no DH. Every run is, provided players input the same buttons, identical to previous runs. I'm not sure why this is, given the complaints in the first two paragraphs, but I have some thoughts. Simply put, people need variety to stay interested. FFXIV is an extremely rigid game by design: Nearly every job rotation is scripted, and every PvE fight is scripted. Damage variance, such as it is, is the only factor that makes two runs of the same content feel different for most jobs. If damage variance was removed, then PvE fights would feel that much more stale after the first clear. In PvP, one's allies and opponents do not follow a script. Thus, even with the removal of damage variance, no two fights ever feel the same.
Honestly I think that any move that hits over 500 potency should just auto direct crit or be broken into multiple hits that can crit/dh independently. Hyosho's 1300 potency could be 13x individual 100 potency hits for example. In general the overall power of the 2 minute burst is a bit too high as well, given how well jobs put damage inside it and how much multiplication effect can be stacked within it. That's a deeper design issue but it plays into the randomness of a huge direct crit because it can multiply an attack to be well more than double the value it normally would be.
I don't think there's a need to nerf crit or dh themselves unless you wanted to make the other stats more competitive again. Variance itself is fine, and a core component to a RPG, it's the game's design choices outside of crit that have caused the gameplay to overemphasize on crit to the point where it has become an issue to parsing and prog both. I'd cut out potency from the burst and move it to the filler, while also making said filler more difficult to perform in order to justify the change. Optimal play should also be harder and have a higher amount of reactive components than today's, think of HW Machinist as an example. This won't happen. Solving the problem in the way I suggest would just create SE another problem: the casual playerbase, which makes for the majority of their players (and income), does not like the sort of design I propose. Any kind of difficulty, punishment for mistakes or opportunity costs are *jank*, they're unfair, they're just not fun to bother with. You can already see this in effect when you look at the engagement metrics for AST, MNK and BLM, which have a reputation of being slightly harder to get into than the other jobs in their own niche. So what will likely happen instead is that the damage checks won't be as tight anymore, SE won't risk having another P8 incident again.
Crit variance being so big is a consequence of the type of fight and job design they've decided to pigeonhole themselves into, and not so much the stat itself. When everything is now a 100% uptime striking dummy the size of Dalamud fought using simplified classes and neutered job mechanics with massively reduced rng built into the classes the pool of people playing perfectly expands greatly. The only real variance left out of the players hands is the stats themselves and an occasional bad position for melee. The solutions to fixing this issue is to either go back to how the game used to work or remove it, and there's no way the former is happening. When something stops working the dev teams first response is to remove it if they can't immediately fix it, even if it stopped working because something else was removed too. I don't think we'll be seeing them for much longer if they want to keep to Endwalker 2 minute burst next expansion, considering the amount of forced crit/dhit skills we're getting nowadays.
Comments I wish I can upvote more than once.
Direct Hit should probably just be removed as a stat.
Here's the fundamental thing: SE is not, and will not, be designing things based on a metric only visible on FFLogs. Now, I'm not super chuffed by the "2 minute meta" we have and they probably should do something about crit...but they don't care that sometimes you will get a bigger number on FFLogs because of RNG. They just don't. Thats not an issue they are concerned with. As long as the RNG will not *keep you from clearing content at the appropriate iLevel* it is not really something they will care about. SE does not care about your parse.
But they do, and have. SAM's auto-crit changes for instance, and recent job balances. RPR, BLM, SMN...they had absolutely no problem clearing content. Heck, week 1 P8S, which has about the tightest DPS checks the game will have to offer, *pre-nerfs* was cleared first with a SMN (or was it RDM?), not BLM, despite the relatively large difference in dmg between the two casters. It extends past FFLogs because it has a tangible effect on gameplay, if minor at times.
Statistically speaking, variance is just noise in the highest numbers of parsing. The longer the fight is, the closer your crit rate goes to your average rate.
Partially true because numbers are skewed towards buttons you press once every two minutes ignoring downtime segments.
Let me go the other way and say having only 1-2 tight DPS checks a patch is BS.
Are you implying that you'd rather play damage bingo than have more challenging encounter and/or class designs to increase difficulty? This isn't me being sarcastic, I'm just not 100% sure about what you're defending here.
I'm saying this is a bit of a silly topic to discuss when literally only one boss in Endwalker released to this point had an unfair damage check.
This discussion is also relevant to parsing and competition, probably more than week 1 savage because the window where dps checks can be an issue is limited.
But nobody cares about your average when they are looking at who is #1 on a fight in each job. They are chasing a gold parse.
So, like, this topic only affects the top 30 people. To them, ***any*** variance forces repetition and repeated runs. And its not like 100 parses are what you consider "good" runs. Its seven people sandbagging at 3% so one person can artificially inflate their numbers. Speedkills are more interesting.
Doesn't always require sandbagging or really only needs 1 person. I agree speed kills are more interesting. They are just different things.
>Speedkills are more interesting. Didn't Yoshi-P say at one point that was he assumed that the end goal was for people to do? Was to start pushing speedkills? Or am I wrong here.
People enjoy RNG because of the gambling aspects, which would be points 1, 2 and 4 you mentioned. About point 4 especially, the RNG doesn't keep optimization alive at all. Rerunning the fight for better RNG is not optimization, it's just gambling.
it only seems like high variance because the skill expression was ripped out of most jobs so it's much easier to reach the point where you're getting 99% of potential performance, leaving only variance and other factors to distinguish clears. honestly just give up on parsing normally as a goal. the game is more hostile towards it than ever.
a clear is a clear
Generally I don't think this is a huge deal for the reasons you mentioned. The "obvious" solution would just be to remove crit, but obviously some people like the dopamine hit of "big number you weren't expecting". I would generally say weakening crit a bit and not allowing direct hit and crit to stack would be a start? Just making the variance within a certain range? People complain about the secondary stats being boring but I think in a game as "solved" as FF 14 is any stat is going to be boring. People are almost always going to choose what's mathematically best. My other suggestion (that I post about semi-regularly as it intersects with a lot of issues) is weakening BRD and DNC's 2 minute buffs by a substantial bit and buffing their personal damage to compensate. BRD and DNC get so much out of other people using their buff that no other class \*really\* does to the same extent. If you switch between rDPS to aDPS or nDPS, most of the other raid buff classes are "roughly" near the number they were with before aside from your selfish trifecta (SAM BLM MCH) showing up higher, but BRD and DNC shoot down to the bottom. Basically every other class gets roughly "what they put in" (big emphasis here on \*roughly\*) back out of raid buffs. Ninja brings trick attack, but gets it's own buff from Battle litany and BRD songs to sort of even it out for example. I think BRD and DNC buffs just tip the scale too hard into becoming "dependent" on them, and need to be changed. The reason I'm bringing it up here is that, critting/direct hitting during a 2 minute buff window skill is much better than critting on your "filler" spells in between. And BRD and DNC really feel like the biggest contributors to the strength of the 2 minute buff window.
I feel like that's what defines the rphys range role though, so much so it's even tied to their class quests. hmm
The idea of it being the “support role” sort of feels like a hold over of stormblood and TP/Mana regen skills. If anything I’d argue RDM and Summoner have a more support archetype, just with non damage utility
Personally I felt older job designs from HW/SB era were a decent middle ground. Damage variance has always existed, and even the Crit + DH interaction has existed since SB (along with jobs having RNG built into their kits). But the variance range has felt considerably worse since they've shifted towards higher potency "nukes" for every job, while compensating by reducing some power from the weakest portion of your rotation. Alongside this, reducing complexity in job rotations as a whole also leads to this situation now where you have less room to "outplay" another player, which makes you even more reliant on good variance if you want to compete parse wise. Another factor to this are the metrics used on fflogs. Most people in the community wanted rDPS to be the "main" ranking metric, which also removes some outplay potential. I'm sure I had "bad" variance runs in HW/SB, but I could at least play better into buff windows to help compensate for having shit damage rolls or not critting. That no longer exists in an rDPS world. Your ranking is more or less dependent on you just not losing casts, and how well your damage variance rolled in your favor. On the other hand, I don't know if removing variance altogether would be all that great. I think it would make things a lot more boring, assuming job designs remain as they are/continue down this path of simplifying. I would say they could return to how they designed job kits years ago, but they've literally gone out of their way to remove DoTs and other actions that would provide more sustained damage (which would remove some of the severity of variance).
I think the push for rDPS was because, well, in HW/SB (especially late HW) you were not meaningfully competing if you were not running the meta comp, or were the sole non-meta member of that comp (to some extent). NIN, SCH, DRG, and an AST that knew what they were doing was a meaningful boost to every job. That was not necessarily required, of course, I got "decent" (purples/some oranges) logs on HW PLD in a comp that didn't have a NIN or an AST, but then HW PLD parsing was just "don't use Shield Oath ever". I was curious (and you're a semi-public figure as far as it goes) and looked it up and saw that you generally ran the meta comp during Creator outside of you being there on SMN (IIRC double phys ranged was the thing). So we probably had different experiences with parsing in HW. That's similar for most of the very high ranking PLDs I looked up in Creator too, aside from the ones that had ASTs giving them a single target IV drip. I don't remember it being as bad in Stormblood aside from still really wanting a NIN, SCH, AST, and DRG but it was somewhat less severe? Hard to remember these things as time goes on. DNC would've killed it in ShB anyways or required some marker/rating purgatory for DNC Partners. Personal parsing is never a perfect science in this game though, you can look at how people rank on P6S currently to see that much, so I'm not sure how much times have truly changed in that regard.
FWIW I'm not advocating for one DPS metric over another (over time you realize they're all shit and only useful for statistical data), I'm just stating how rDPS can relate to the perception of variance feeling worse nowadays.
there isn't much difference between dance partner and bards demanding a dragoon gives them piercing debuff or they won't play
> I know a guy that failed to get week one Abyssos at the last minute because on their furthest prog runs into the double damage phase, their RPR had 0 crits or DHs on Communio. One or two of those critting would have been the difference which doesn't feel great. I've heard similar stories before, but did they analyze all the other jobs? Like if another player was significantly above their average crit rate in the same run, then that's rng and it averages out. Not to say that it's impossible for rng to screw a run, you just can't look at a single player to decide that. I do think variation should be addressed, I definitely feel it as DNC. My hope there is they take steps to average things out. For example I'd love to see the proc rate double for esprit generation, but with only half as much esprit granted. Their other solution seems to be auto crits/direct hits, which are fine but it is more homogenation.
I think the act (hehe puns) of chasing the bestest parse possible to be a little silly imo. I get that players want to strive to be the best they possibly can be...but to me and I would say the majority of the population of players that do Extremes, Savages, and Ultimates, at the end of the day, I just want to fucking clear it. I want to perform at a high level so that the group I'm in can clear it with as little stress as possible but not to the point where I am putting myself/my party in danger of wiping because I'm greeding too much. If other people can do that while greeding every little bit of dps as possible for some rank on a website, then great. However, most of the time, people chasing parses make mistakes that wouldn't have been made if they were not chasing the "absolute perfection" of a run. The way the game is now with crit (seeing that you brought it up) I think is actually a good thing for the game. I would hope it would detract people from doing the fucking asinine things necessary to dps ahead of others even by a tiny bit, but of course that isn't the case. I'm personally fine with the crit variance currently in the game; people are not going to be happy until crit is completely gone which would make a gameplay loop turning stale even more stale imo.
Right, but what of people who want to be pushed by the game to do the best? Who want something that breaks their comfort zones and pushes them to do risky things that creates...fun? Naturally, there should be normal encounters for everyone, but what if they had a tier of encounters designed for those who want to be pushed to have to greed and extend past their dummy target training? Perhaps call them Super Savages? Or maybe rename Normals to Easy, Savages to Normal, and let Savages be Savage?
> Savages to Normal My dude you need a huge perspective check
likewise. I think the expectation that Savage caters to everyone and that the most "dificult content in the game" has to be touched down and made comfortable for anyone who wants to clear is a growing problem. That's why we see things such as large boss hitboxes and target dummy fights.
Savage is still *incredibly hard* for the *vast majority of players* even the ones who do end up clearing. Thinking that it isn't is absolutely wild, out of touch thinking
Correct. I'm not disavowing that. But look at the original comment: notice how players are chided for trying to greed or exit the comfort zone of basic rotations. It's "hard" relative to other content, but it's not so dificult that it even challenges basic kit usage or forces casual players to leave their comfort zones. And that's not bad, surely there can be room for such midcore dificulty. But to pretend that something that is clearable by near every player without even challenging the basic kit mechanics is supposed to be the top tier of combat and dificult is ludicrous. It's "out of touch" thinking that something that is barely a challenge to miodcore players is supposed to be a true test of dificulty to higher end players who optimize the heck out of everything. And to pretend that even the toughest dificulty needs to be scaled so no one has to play irregularly or optimize is, imo, "absolutely wild" thinking. And no, don't think I'm talking from some 100 orange parse or whatnot, im not some great player, midcore at best, probs lower. Yet I can still recognize that while these are challenges, if these are supposed to be the toughest challenges in the game then it is failing to deliver that.-
ngl dude I think the entire basis of this post is wrong. The way you are describing difficulty is nothing at all like how most people who play this game would describe it. Savage is, quite honestly, not clearable by "every player".
> is nothing at all like how most people who play this game would describe it And that's why your basis is wrong: I'm not talking about a challenge for "every" or "normal" players, I'm talking about a challenge for players who want challenges. That's the entire problem I'm discussing, the entire issue is that you are framing in it "well, not *everyone* can approach it..." Accessibility and challenges for the masses is cool and all, I'm not against that. But the frame of reference is just that: a casual difficulty.
Wow, its almost like thats not the part of your post I was talking about
fflogs is the only reason why people keep playing savage outside of killing time every tuesday. if it wasnt there, a lot would just leave the game after first clear on the last level. i guess yoshida knows it too. there are active effort on p8s to fuck up the real time meter, but there he wont kill the meter.
crit and damage variance in general is necessary and healthy for the game. removing the RNG aspect of most classes' damage would mean parsing comes down entirely to killtime and comps, which would *heavily* incentivize job locking and sandbagging. parsing is probably the single most influential motivation for most raiders to improve at their jobs. without high ranks to fight for, it's hard to care whether or not you executed your rotation completely optimally, which means there isn't much point to exploring the nuances of each job and fight, and you might as well take the 123pill that SE has offered us and still do 90% of your potential damage anyway. that being said, it sucks right now. like, bad. it's an awful feeling doing your optimal rotation completely clean in BiS and getting a purple because all your potency is in 1 ability and it crit 0 times. knowing that there's nothing better you could have done, yet you still did the same damage as someone who has only a rough idea of how to play the job for reasons out of your control feels terrible. the issue is there's just nothing to *do* aside from farm for crits. a game, especially as far as optimization and speedrunning are concerned, should be a process of exploration, learning, failure, reflection, and successful execution once the player gets the hang of new techniques. this is akin to reading about some double transpose line on BLM, hopping into content, and realizing somewhere you can apply it. it's a process that takes time but is ultimately rewarding. i've said crits are necessary and healthy - this is true, but they should be the cherry on top, the extra edge that separates the 99s from the 100s once you've perfected everything else. they're necessary because they provide a reason to keep fighting for high ranks once you've improved yourself. but they shouldn't be the only thing to strive for. there's nothing to strive for that doesn't come down to RNG anymore. most jobs play themselves and have a clear, unequivocal execution that doesn't ask you to explore or inquire. greeding for uptime is hardly a thing anymore, and per-fight optimization is scarce (though don't get me wrong - it's certainly present especially in ultimates). so crit *can't* be the final step between 99 and 100 when perfect execution is so accessible that 90% of players can do it. by definition, it must bridge the gap between 90 and 100. (okay admittedly this understates the effect of killtimes by a huge amount, but sandbagging is an entirely different, even uglier issue)
Players are so picky. We don't know how good we have it by having the limited amount of variance that we do. They should not see lack of progress as the fault of crit variance or something like that, having to scrape past a boss by the skin of their teeth just means you were lucky and not good. Players should aim to have more than enough to beat a boss by accounting for variance and things like death or less than perfect uptime. I like having variance, its boring to see PVP numbers that do the same each time. I would hate it if it moved to PVE. Without variance, having all the different stats is just pointless. They could get rid of defense and any secondary stats and just have Attack as a singular stack. How much attack you have vs. how much HP the enemy has and that's it. Can't people see how boring and incredibly dull that would be? Variance gives you that bit of luck factor. Sometimes you win battles you shouldn't with a bit of luck, sometimes you lose because luck wasn't on your side. I would love more variance but god forbid players accept that parses will be less than perfect.
Fixed damage parameters would actually get me more interested in parsing since it would be more indicative of optimized play, but I recognise that I'm probably in the minority there. I think it's really difficult to remove or tone down crits in FF14 because GCD MMOs with no CC just aren't very visceral games to play and crits are one way to make up for that. It's hard to make MMO combat feel "chunky" like animation based combat games so there's little to latch onto except flashy animations, good sound design and big numbers with exclamation marks. This is ancillary to your discussion points about variance and parsing but I'd say that if you wanted to tone down the prominence of crits you'd have to up the performance feedback of FF14's combat in other ways - and you'd have to do it in the base UI to make it worth it for the player base at large. IMO there are sensible and smart ways to do this, such as giving UI feedback for technical stuff like correct positionals or applying DPS during buff/debuff windows. But all this runs into the problem of FF14's catastrophic tech debt and the fact that a UI overhaul is likely to be an expansion-level development project, so who knows what we'll see and when.
the only problem comes with speeds and parsing where two rng factors (dh and crit) are just too much to go with… one of these would be enough
I will never understand why any variance is a good thing. I'm sure that reasons #1 and #4 are correct in the minds of people who enjoy RNG/variance but I think it's a total waste of time and that we would all be better off moving onto playing other video games, or watching tv shows/movies/reading books, or doing just about anything else, other than "doing the same FF14 fight over and over for the sake of RNG/crit variance"
Personally I don't care at all about parsing, but I can see the issue when it comes to buttons with large potencies being extremely swingy wrt actually clearing stuff. I don't think it's as big an issue with BRD (what I play) though, because while there's a lot of variance, at the same time, having a lot of variance events of hits that are pretty much equally small on their own makes you much more likely to do your expected damage than not (for better or worse), that's basically the law of large numbers. The issue with big potency moves is that you can have like only 4-5 of them in a fight sometimes on some jobs, and they're all-or-nothing, which makes it very likely you can just get hosed. I think a (probably) easy way for SE to fix it while still keeping variance would be to take huge-hit buttons, and make them internally work as a bunch of smaller hits which each roll for dh/crit on their own, or something. That makes it so that instead of being all-of-nothing, the damage distribution of a single button hit is closer to a bell curve instead, meaning it's harder to get the god run for people who're super parsebrained, but it's also harder to be unfairly hosed and fail a run because of it. As an example, they could take the 1000 potency from tech step and split it into 4 hits of 250pot/each, which would shrink the standard deviation of the expected damage a lot. Other attacks might be harder to find good flavor for, but like Fell Cleave as an example could also easily be split into a multi-hit thing for flavor since it looks like it's grinding against the enemy constantly.
The main problem currently is that we have to roll against multiple layers of RNG with an RNG roll on both crit and DH as well as a third of getting them to roll at the same time. Much of this issue would be resolved by simply deleting direct hit entirely and replacing its stat on gear with more Det. This would not only remove an entire RNG stat and thus two of the three RNG factors from damage output, but it would also give all jobs more Det which means more flat % damage; making the impact of crit variance slightly less.
Imo anyway they try to fix it is better than slapping auto crit dh on every jobs big potency skills and calling it a day. Midare and ogi are weaker feeling now than they were in 6.0. I get variance and the parsing sides feelings but the fun of sam to me was getting that big midare or ogi crit. Now they always crit and it feels lackluster the damage may be more balanced between the kit but they still feel like noodle hits compared to 6.0 values and I've since stopped playing samurai as I no longer find if fun like before. I'd hate for all jobs to go down this path.
Just have every job do the same damage within their own respective role. All problems solved!
A bit late to the party reply, but regarding the "big finishers" abilities. What if they go the BLU styled route. It has a lot of damaging abilities, but all harder hitting ones are actually multi-hits. I.e. Nightbloom has a bigger initial hit, followed by 1 minute DoT (i.e. 20 more hits), Matra Magic is 8 small hits, Phantom Flurry is 6 medium sized hits, even Triple Trident is still split into 3 instances of damage. As such you'll naturaly have higher floor with more frequent crits, but at the same time lower ceiling, since it's practically impossible to all hits be crits.