We have a grand selection of 7 Substats, and most of them hardly impact how we play the game, unless your attacks producing bigger numbers has a direct impact on how you play of course!
Is the two minute burst meta a problem: https://youtu.be/QbiqQXBbkuc
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Music Used:
FFXIV Endwalker – Cradle of Hope
#ffxiv #endwalker
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:47 Why Determination is Boring
01:32 How Stat Requirements Scale with your Level
02:20 Why Critical Hit is Uninteresting
03:59 Why Direct Hit is mildly Interesting
04:58 What is a Soft Cap?
06:40 Why Tenacity is Underwhelming
07:50 Why Piety is Unhelpful
08:57 Why Skill and Spell Speed are Disappointing
10:59 Summary and Conclusion
12:36 Fun Fact
source
I think if Stats tied into each other we good find an interesting solution. Like why can't the Class Specific Stats actual Boost everything as well fulfill a niche or benefit from the other Stats being boosted. What if when you go to a Certain Piety Number you also get more Crits? At the moment my initial reaction is that Stats are just too simple
This is hardly different than other Final Fantasy games though. FF9 is super fun and famous yet the speed stat is literally useless. No matter how much speed stat you have characters turn order was the same.
Nice take.
Considering the game does not have a talent tree or something similar, I think it would be amazing if they revamped the substats to make at least this aspect of the game be about each player customizing its gameplay and creating different builds with real impact.
Right now, unless you're a raider worried about squizing 1 small digit to a dps counter to prevent enrage, sub stats are almost irrelevant and with no real impact, which is something really sad for an MMO/RPG.
I feel like a lot games have very boring stats. Even in GW2, where 100% crit chance on power builds is almost mandatory and cooldown reduction on all classes is assumed in all party comps, stats generally are just "get more of the thing your class does to be as good at it as you can be". Most interesting stuff comes from party wide buffa, but with those being assumed be up 100% of the time I don't think it's even that interesting in that regard.
I think that if you want stats to be interesting then you need temporary spikes that adjust your stats, like doing a skill combo to ramp up your crit chance so your biggest hit can be a crit. Keeping stats at flat values throughout a fight doesn't seem like it will ever make them matter that much.
My main issue with speed is that if it were suddenly made good, it'd be reduced to a stat that you accumulate to a very specific number for the sake of hitting a specific target. For example, as someone who primarily plays tank with gunbreaker being my comfort job for difficult content, I find myself exclusively using just enough speed to guarantee I have enough cartages to use double down within every no mercy. When leveling the job, I USED to think "Why wouldn't I want to stack as much speed as I can, more cartages = more burst strikes." now actually HAVING the job at 90 and doing extreme trials as of last week, the job is very different now that I have 3 cartages and Bloodfest gives 3 cartages every 2 minutes. Naturally, if I already have no issue using Gnashing fang every 30 seconds and gnashing fang + double down every minute, it leads to unbuffed burst strikes floating with typically a no mercy burst strike depending on where in my 1-2-3 I stopped to actually use Gnashing Fang. Now the chore of USING these cartages to insure I don't waste any becomes more difficult and then every 2 minutes I have 3 additional cartages for additional burst strikes. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to dump my cartages before the burst window just to keep bloodfest aligned but it wouldn't make a lot of sense to deny three free cartages. Yet, electing to use bloodfest after Gnashing Fang + Double Down results in an inconsistent number of buffed burst strikes anyways due to variance in fights and how tight of a window you have to use a GCD to spend each cartage. Bosses also don't exactly let you stand there and hit them, for one reason or another ALL of those cartages can manage to fall outside of raid buffs that aren't Searing Light or a bard song. If you could manage to use all your cartages in that very tight window there is then a tighter time to produce a cartage to keep Gnashing Fang from drifting from no mercy. If I elect to save a cartage instead of dumping them all to use Gnashing fang, but I could already produce more than enough to use Double Down and gnashing fang each minute, the issue is now that I make too many cartages to comfortably feel consistent in what I'm doing and so far, this is all ignoring whether its worth having all these bonus burst strikes floating about vs simply building the "do more damage" stats
This then leads to the thought "If I had more speed, I could use my cartages faster" but you also make cartages faster.. The problem feels somewhat cyclical. If you change how Burst strike specifically scales with speed, then there would be a target value that just lets you use a specific number of burst strikes guaranteed within buff windows. Even If you could give Gunbreaker the choice to use multiple cartages on a single burst strike then bloodfest effectively becomes a refuel after you use a No Mercy "multistrike" to use double down and the rest of your burst effectively making something of a Triple down skill that unintentionally leads to more stockpiling so you could use blood fest during two minute buffs to have a bigger burst rather than rewarding you for the bonus cartages you already made. It's not a very fun way to reward speed. It's a very cyclical issue because having more speed feels very similar to having more than one stack of a skill, although speed can have a value that makes a job comfortable or consistent which is the current personal target value you decide upon.
If speed is better or jobs are changed to compensate for players who want a speed build without being mandator then that speed build will simply have a target speed value giving every job two ways to play. It sounds very enticing but then the issue of balance comes into play. If a speed build is worse than the typical more damage build we currently have, skill speed is a more interesting stat that will still be broadly neglected. If speed is better than the current damage stat stacking then every class will just gain an ideal speed value to make room for the "more damage" substats mean hyrbid builds wouldn't really work either in this framework since you either build speed or you don't outside of very specific targets that may just fall short of the classes speed variant potential or just do less meaningful damage than the no speed variant.. but if this hybrid speed/damage build is better than a pure speed build or better than a pure damage build it now becomes the target speed minimum or maximum for that specific job depending on which build it's better than. effectively turning an interesting option into a rather boring requirement and even a draw back since now every bit of speed must be thought about as either a wasted stat or a part of a general target value NEEDED to have a viable amount of speed.
Ideally speed and raw damage builds would be equal in value (which still doesn't leave room for hybrid speed/damage builds).. but this doesn't alleviate the fact a speed build would have a target speed which is rather boring, it would still double the current way to play each job but speed then becomes an all or nothing investment. Don't get me wrong, speed is my favorite stat and I wish I could play every job at an incredibly fast pace, I like knowing my number of burst strikes may differ from another gunbreakers but that's a very simple resource. Some jobs with a larger meter can unintentionally treat speed a little like how black mage treated piety depending on how you change resource generation/usage to compensate for speed increasing the number of resource generating skills you could use (Ideally speed would have to lead to every job being able to store more meter to avoid over capping OR meter generating/expending skills would have to change how they interact with your meter depending on your speed to allow you to use a different number of enhanced actions during buffs). Even Dragoon, who's gauge is tied to two oGCD's may end up using more Nastrods and Star Divers than another Dragoon despite taking the same number of oGCD's for those skills to become available. You wouldn't reasonably be able to expect random players in duty finder to have any level of consistency at all despite being the same class.
Speed is a very difficult stat to balance but it feels far too neglected for such a unique stat. I'm no game dev so surely there is another way to make speed work.. I also like the feeling of burst and downtime in classes so I also enjoy the two minute buff window and how it gives a base expectation of coordination that is not a specific job to job synergy which would be difficult to keep all jobs viable in all content, however these two things don't exist well together because the only way for speed to be a stat that affects burst windows is if it fundamentally changes how a job interacts with the resources used during their burst since speed as it is only effects how a job preforms overtime for the most part.
My first thought is to massively buff the scaling of the stats and massively nerf the potency of abilities. Lots of play testing would be needed to calibrate the values so as to maintain balanced gameplay, but that would be a very easy and simple solution. These substats are not hard to understand, so teaching new players about them shouldn't pose much of an issue. Also, maybe make crit just affect crit chance and direct hit be crit damage.
One thing I wish was possible, but don't even know if it ever could be, is that optimization doesn't always come down to do more damage. It's always damage. Higher damage means more optimized. I hate it. But I don't think you can even make a game like this without that always being the best option all the time. I'm not a developer, nor am I smart enough to think of a solution, but I really really would like to live in a world where things other than damage could be considered optimal
I wonder what would happen if there was absolutely no way to increase damage output in this game other than your level and skill. Any substat would be utility and nothing contributing to damage. That also means skill/spell speed
Well… I am ok with it because l am playing another game that has a complex stats system. It took me a lot of gold to make sure my stats don't cap out.
Imo, in RPGS (table-top and crpgs), you have systems that are called "crunch-heavy". Think Path of Exile and the enormous skill tree system they have. Or Pathfinder ("Mathfinder") if you want a TTRPG example. Players who like crunch gravitate towards this because it offers huge customization for their character. FF14 isn't this type of game. It's designed to be simple for players to understand gearing up their character, BUT, maybe more importantly, it let's the DEVS balance the jobs and game encounters QUICKER and EASIER. FF14 is more interested in telling its STORY then anything else. If you want an RPG where you can actually BUILD your character, this isn't it. You would need to change the fundamental game to do that.
But, off the top of my head, a solution I would add is "Talent Trees", rather then change the fundamental stats. This way, you could still keep balance relatively straightforward and quick, as you only really need to tweak the talents. The trees could also only open up once you get to "Level-whatever-xpac-this-comes-in". This way you don't need to retroactively "fix" encounters from earlier in the game. The trees could "switch off" when you level/gear sync for older content (i.e. roulettes).
Spell and Skill speed are fun stats! After all, Samurai, Monk, and Ninja are fun classes because they can go fast. The issue being is speed isn't strong enough right now and yeah, it takes far too much sacrifice past a certain point. As for the rest.. they seem like routine stats to do with performance. Tenacity and Piety need buffs; but maybe xiv could benefit from making them part of "secondary substats" – optional stats that won't impact damage but have other benefits more in line with personal preferences and comfort (wow has this system i think it was lifesteal,aoe reduction,move speed and something else). That way any fun the stats have don't absorbed into meta optimization, which square inevitably will keep reinforcing with content tuning.
Direct hit being better than accuracy is kinda not true IMO. It's expected on every DPS and they balance stuff around substats so it BASICALLY functions as "you didn't get a direct hit, so your expected damage output is less". You could think the same of critical hit too, really. Every hit that's not a crit or direct is contextually as bad as a miss.
They've made it FEEL less like a slap in the face because a number pops up, but if you don't get any you're probably not gonna hit a tight DPS check on new content (we found that out in P8S).
I really love your sub-stat videos. The game does such a bad job of communicating what my stats actually do, so I appreciate how you lay it out.
I pretty much agree – none of the sub-stats are terribly exciting though. I want tenacity to feel good on my tanks. I want piety to not feel like an empty slot when it's on half of my healing gear. I want speed to not feel weird and awkward.
But that being said, I'm still pretty okay with simple sub-stats. While I wouldn't mind them being more fun, I wouldn't want to swing so far the other way that I couldn't play SMN until I'd collected a full SPS set or something.
Good analysis. One thing I think they should do, which is already coded into the game, is to combine spell speed and skill speed into one stat and call it haste. We’ve seen it in stuff like bozja gear. Why can’t they just put it in the game? Do you think it would help jobs like drk and pld? Or would it throw off balance issues? Interested to hear what you think
I probably commented the same thing on the Tenacity video, but if thats correct then here we go again:
Tenacity is a fanastic stat, and every tank should build it …. if it actually scaled at ALL. It, and speed, are so abysmally slow and expensive to scale to decent levels they feel – or are – completely useless.
I have to struggle and dedicate entire builds for 6% (0.15 seconds lmao) cooldown reduction? And half of my skills dont even BENEFIT? Ive played so many games where things like 20% cast/CD reduction was normal on a SINGLE piece of equipment. If I could get even say, 24% Haste, reducing Geirskogul's cd to 22.8s, thats not suddenly super broken but it is drastically different from someone who prioritized det over speed. And it means I get 45.6s charge times on Spineshatter dive, or 2 casts ever 91.2seconds – and Dragonfire Dive would have the same duration for a cooldown.
Not only does Speed have negligible output in terms of % reduction, but it affects very few actions, and I dont understand *why*. "Well, because its SKILL speed, it effects weaponSKILLS, not spells or abilities!"
Yes but WHY is it so specific, it doesnt have to be.
Know what I learned from playing a game that could reach NINETY FIVE percent?
That 5% is still a lot. 360 second cooldown reduced by 95%? You could use it over and over, its a — Still 18 second cooldown actually.
Im really hoping that Dawntrail shakes up substats a little bit. I dont expect major changes, but if they reworked Accuracy into Direct Hit and removed elemental resistances and Slashing/Blunt/etc. affinity, they can adjust the stats again. CBU3 doesnt have to – and shouldnt – keep the stat system the same as it was for the last 5 years by the time 7.0 comes out.
10:52 blue mage? I have .95ish on some spells
man this makes me miss cleric stance and the old int/mind stat systems, its something II endlessly praised the game for back in the day. There were so many actions that made each class feel unique like esuna on sch being called leeches and the fairies actually being being different depending on which one you had out. now everything is starting to blend together and that makes me endlessly sad. maybe this means less coming from a non savage player but I kinda wish my fun mattered a lil more ig. Great video! I've been having fun learning more ins and outs of the game I've been playing for so long
Yeah, the Materia system was an complete faiilure.
As a Tank I should have a lot of Tenacity to reduce the damage I tak-
nope, crit > det.
Ok then as a Healer I should have a decent amount of Piety so I can have more mana to-
no, crit > det, maybe direct crit too.
What if I want to have a quicker GCD-
not good, specially on bad ping, try crit > det instead.
Everything is Crit, Det and Direct hit once both of the previous ones hit the cap on gear.
I think this is why WoW created the Mastery stat, Mastery does something different for every class and spec. Many of them are just damage increases, but some of them are interesting in how they do it, usually applying those increased damage to certain types of damage, like frost death knights deal increased frost damage for each point of mastery, while beast master hunters deal more pet damage. But then you have stuff like outlaw rogues have a chance to trigger an offhand attack that scales damage with mastery, or arms warriors dealing additional damage to targets suffering from their bleeds, so these things do incentivise how you use your abilities.
In FF's case perhaps this could be reflected in, say, ninja's trick attack applies a more powerful or longer vuln debuff the more of this stat they have or they deal more damage to enemies affected by their mudras. A paladin's defensive cooldowns are lowered. A bard's repertoires are more likely to proc or maybe even song cooldown is reduced by successful crits. A machinist generates more heat/battery or makes overcharge last longer. These are just ideas off the top of my head, I'm sure someone else could think of better options.
Since we're finally talking about all the Substats at once, I can finally post my idea about how I'd like to see substats work. I'll be honest, it's more fanfiction then anything concreate but it was fun to think about:
Critical Hit Rate: Increases the chance of a critical hit, Critical Damage is set 150%. Some abilities have a higher critical damage value, while some buffs increase Critical hit rate
Direct Hit: Direct Hits now trigger after X amounts of Weapon skills or Spells (I'd have it vary per job or by job category), Direct Hits deal 120% damage. And the Direct Hit Stat increases Direct Hit Damage. Direct Hits could also trigger special effects that grant buffs or resources. Or some jobs could have skills in their rotations that cause their next Attack(s)
(Sidenote, I'd have it that attacks either Critical Hit or Direct Hit but not both.)
Determination: Damage and Healing bonus to Spells and Abilities (Mainly to oGCDs) (Was thinking of Determination also increasing Critical Damage as well but decided to keep it simple for now)
Haste: Reduces GCD and Ability Cooldowns. Could reduce shorter cooldowns ( 30s or less) by half, While longer cooldowns could be reduced by 15-30s. How do you program that? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Tenacity: Increases damage of Weapon skills and Abilities (Only stat that does both other then crit), Provides damage reduction to all classes, but a greater reduction to tanks and gives each tank a unique defensive benefit. Here are just some ideas.
-Paladin: Increased Block Rate and/or Block Damage Reduction
-Warrior: Bonus Health Regeneration from Abilities
-Dark Knight: Grants HP Siphon to Attacks or damage reduction based on Blood Gauge
-Gunbreaker: Damage reduction when using a cartridge.
Piety: MP Cost Reduction & Increases the effectiveness of MP restoring abilities. (This would be paired with an increase in MP costs for most spells and it would be open to all classes), Piety could also have special benefits for healers. But since most of my experience is with scholars, I couldn't come up with good ideas for the other three.
This is leaving out what I would do to primary stats.
I would really love it if they incorporated a more class-oriented stat into the game, something like the mastery stat from wow. For those who don't know, it's basically like each class has a unique effect tied to it and increasing the mastery stat increases those effects.
For example: Holy Priests apply a heal-over-time with their direct heals (think Cure 1 or 2), this healing starts at a base percentage of the healing amount and increases per mastery point, something like this could be very easily tied into White Mage while still fitting the class design of being the "pure-healer".
Or for another example, Outlaw Rogues have a static 30% chance to strike the target an additional time when they attack, this damage of this additional attack is based on your mastery. Imagine what a mastery/speed focused monk or maybe even samurai build would look like!
I dunno maybe I'm just rambling at this point, but I really love this game and I currently hate the design direction that theyre choosing by constantly wanting to lower the skill floor to make it more accessible to everyone when they've got a dedicated pool of players who've been playing for well over 2-3 years and feel lile the game gets a bit stale once youre at that point. For those who are curious I've currently got 182 days and 10 hours or 4,378 hours according to /playtime
frankly, for a long time now i've felt the stat system as a whole is nothing more than legacy cruft, and could be discarded entirely in lieu of just basing everything off of item level
like, sure, materia is a thing … but also, is it really? it doesn't exactly enable anything past making certain gear take more effort to fully activate, and it does so in the least interesting way possible. beyond that, all the varying options for gear sets that let you pick from whatever stat spread most appeals to you are … basically entirely job locked, so your stat spread is picked for you. not that it really matters beyond giving different categories of jobs the teeny tiniest bits of flavor, specifically in what flavor of damage multiplier they aesthetically prefer, but that just further illustrates how the stat system is just there because it's always been there
and it's not just character substats, either. armor all has its prominent physical defense and magic defense numbers at the very top of the tooltip, and they sure are numbers alright. like i'm sure the fact that heavy armor tends to have more physical defense than magical and clothes tend to have more magical defense than physical is something that has let a player survive a fight at least once within the entirety of the game's lifespan, but also: when the hell do you even know what damage type you're taking in the first place. the feint and addle reworks clearly demonstrate that squeenix still perceive damage type to be something that matters, as if dark knight still dedicating a mitigation button to mitigate specifically magic damage wasn't evidence enough, but not once in the entire time i played did i have any idea what damage any incoming attack did. presumably, the mobs that slung spells as autoattacks did magical damage … probably, but beyond that? entirely beyond me
oh, and there's attack delay. i mean, sure, autoattacks are effectively just a very minor dot graciously granted to all jobs that aren't nerds, so it's not exactly anything worth paying attention to. but, hey, it's free damage, so if you have the chance to choose between a really slow weapon and a really fast weapon that are practically identical otherwise, the fast weapon is gonna eke out a bit more dps from all those extra attacks, right?
right?
yeah see the funny thing is, weapons don't actually have an autoattack damage stat. sure, they say they do, but it's not really its own stat. it's the product of the weapon damage and … the ratio between its attack delay and a universal base attack delay ( which, iirc, is 3 seconds, just like all other dots ). so your attack delay has absolutely no impact on your autoattack dps. now, you might think that means it has literally no function whatsoever, unless you really want to argue the difference between fishing for crits more often vs. having harder hitting crits on … your autoattack, but i'm happy to point out that, indeed, there is one point where attack delay has a tangible difference. one obscure, almost secret interaction where picking a faster weapon will result in a mechanical benefit:
paladin generates oath from its autoattacks. so a sword that swings faster lets you use sheltron slightly more often. y-yaaaay?
… there's a reason why i describe it as "legacy cruft." at one point, ffxiv … tried to be an mmorpg, and while i can't say i personally know if it succeeded at that, i can definitely say current ffxiv absolutely does not even try. at the rpg point, anyway. it's inarguably great at the mmo part, it's just … the gameplay part is something wearing a lot of rpg conventions, but only because they're hand-me-downs inherited from its older versions and they absolutely do not fit. and i have to say, it bothers me a lot more that all those stats are pretending to be anything that matters than it does that ffxiv isn't much of an rpg. i can't really say it loses much at all from being streamlined to the point where stats are mostly a historical curiosity … i just wish they didn't give the impression of complexity that isn't really there
I mean who can get excited about stats anyway.
I like your videos, mate. But FFXIV's job design as a whole ain't that deep in the first place. There isn't even any sort of customization or buildcraft. I think you might quickly run out of video options for that category…
This game's combat frankly only shines through the encounter design, and unfortunately not through its playable jobs.
Jobs lack customization options to spice them up. Each job has a single very obvious rotation intended by the devs (minus odd cases like PLD pre-rework). They are very slow by design (you're never pressing more than 3 buttons every 2.5 seconds). And to top it off, the game isn't exactly the most responsive due to technical limitations (you can never execute more than one action at a time, hence queueing up to half a second in advance, which can feel a bit weird at first if you're used to super responsive or action combat).
I love raiding in FFXIV. The encounters can be incredibly fun. But the jobs themselves are frankly pretty mid compared to other MMORPGs. They just look cool visually.
Just my opinion though.
While I agree that the current substats are boring and barely worth paying attention to, more interesting stats come with a bunch of risks.
The most obvious one is of course balance: If stats are different enough to create different playstyles within a job, the playerbase is going to want their preferred playstyle to be comparable to other playstyles of the same job, effectively creating several sub-jobs. When all stats feel the same this isn't an issue. Balance wise there might also be some odd build that manages to outperform expected metrics, which solving might fuck over other builds or jobs.
There's also the gearing issue: either all jobs that share gear need to require the same substats or you need to create even more gear to accomodate them.
It probably means they'll add more more chance based effects (when you crit/when you land a hit) which while I would enjoy as I liked and kinda miss the whack-a-mole playstyle of some wow builds does make the game slightly less accomodating for some players, and meshes poorly with current encounter design as it adds even more things you need to pay attention to.
And it creates a system which invites players to "solve it", and makes it possible to build "wrong" more than you can today, which may bring with it an increase in elitism and expectation to stay up to date with forum discussions for your build and job.
I played WoW for years and it struggled a lot with these pitfalls, and while I really liked it's gameplay (before it started going downhill) I don't think it's the right direction for FFXIV.
It would take a revamp of the game, and jobs, never gonna see it, but would be interesting to have substats which affected proc rates.
Say, something which improved dnc rate of feather and the random 3/4 parts of the combo.
Or stats which changed guage generation. Stuff which would drastically alter play more than just "hit same buttons faster"
In general it would be terrible, and I'm sure people would hate jobs being like that. But it's fun to think about
To be honest it would be really easy to make them more interesting. Like adding procs based on crit (like the fire 3 proc or getting a double dualcast proc on jolt crit), raising speed value so people can use it to get more stuff under buffs, adding 60% dh on some spells so you can hit the soft cap ( eliminating determination because a stat that is just like primary but worse is kind of awful), making rampart and 30% mits mitigate 3-5x your tenacity value instead, and cutting base mana regen so people need to use piety.
The issue is that in the end people would just look up the best build online and copy it anyway, and it would add more problems since you probably need different builds based on team composition. For as much as I would like to feel better by gaining some stats, I don't know if giving up the ease of logging in, getting in any group and be optimal whatever the team comp is worth it.
I just have one question for the devs: why can't I be a heavy machinist gun? gimme usefull skill/spell spees plz T-T
That seems to be the truth.
Anything that isn't named "Critical Hit!" in this game and makes your damage go BIG BOLD BOOM sized and jump right at your face (in the middle of battle with things exploding around you. BLM glee) is indeed shallow.
Even Determination doesn't seem to do much on its own, other than just giving some bonus % damage on your bases and its cap feels like the lowest out of them all (??).
Ooooh, deeeeeeep
Make abilities scale with speed >:3
I think there are 2 options to make stats more interesting.
1. Crit and direct hit procs in job design. I'd lean towards mostly direct hit procs just cause crit is already so much better than everything else but both would be an improvement.
2. Abilities that scale with specific stats. A healer ability that scales with piety, a tank cooldown that works off tenacity, something for determination, any of these would do a lot to make stats more interesting though I doubt SE would add these as they've very careful scaling going on. But like, even just a defensive CD that came back faster with your tenacity or maybe on hit with better scaling tenacity would do a lot
the old AST card Arrow used to increase the targets speed, quite significantly too. you could very easily push a MNK to the 1.5s limit and it was FUN AS FUCK.
Having come from WoW, where the substats are busted as hell and balance is a goddamn nightmare that results in dead classes, I'll take substats that are boring and could use adjustments to make them more usable, than running simulations as to what the highest DPS would be with a given set up. I can't go back to the days of comparing two pieces of gear and asking whether haste or crit would result in higher damage, when both stats also determine how fun the classes is to play when haste makes you able to fight at any reasonable pace and crit activates abilities. (Monk being the only one to get an ability trigger off a crit is more than fine by me, especially when they can guarantee a crit)
You don't want skill speed to be capable of lowering the GCD to 1.5, or crit to go to 85%, or tenacity to block 30% damage… Because then the devs adjust to those levels, as do the players, and everything gets significantly worse if you aren't at those levels. The start of every Warcraft expansion has the player blowing through the first level, and gradually getting weaker and weaker as the stats start leaving the scaling range, until suddenly you are max level and starving for haste so you can play the game. You do not want these eggs.
The only stat I could accept that would be more relatively fun would be like, a stat that increases ability RNG proc chance by a certain percentage every time the chance is rolled to guarantee a proc eventually/proc more often, which'd be like the Monk's ability but not leave people lacking it feel like the game is so based around it that it is unplayable without it.
I've mentioned it on another video comment before, but I personally think that the best thing they could do is just remove gear stats and use automatic scaling. Focus on alternative reward structures. But as I think that is extremely unlikely, I think the next best option would be to be considerably less conservative with the stats. The problem being that their encounter and job design is extremely tight. So it really comes up to a decision point between fine-tuned balance – the upsides of which are allowing, for the most part, all jobs to be valid for progression at the cost of feeling stale and underwhelming – and looser balance with more impactful secondary stats – which would allow for potentially more player agency as new build types open up, but would upset that balance, which can have many downstream negative effects.
At the end of the day I just don't think that FFXIV is a game that holds that much stock in allowing players mechanically interesting "build" choices. It would take basically an entire restructuring of the game from top to bottom to change that. And honestly I don't think that it needs to be that, because it seeks to do a specific thing, and it does that thing well. The developers recognize that MMO players will, at the end of the day, seek to optimize their characters. This goes from the boring simplicity of the secondary stat design, to the 2 minut meta – something I think might be doing more harm than good, sure, but even if we went back to the old ways people would still seek to create those burst windows. And by that logic, even if they raised the impact of secondary stats, I don't believe that they are interesting enough on their own to really believe that things would not just lead to people trending toward the meta.
I think my problem is less with the stats on equipment than the reward structure in general, if I'm being completely honest. The game has remarkable freedom in comparison to others to play multiple jobs on one character (as opposed to the usual structure of one character, one class), but they have an archaic weekly reward cap that makes gearing multiple jobs in a timely manner unfeasible, and by the time those limitations are raised the current expansion is basically already over and the new one is on the horizon. I've felt the game has needed a shakeup for several expansions, but it doesn't happen. Which is a bit disappointing, but not a deal breaker for me.
The problem is the more interesting you make stats, the more variables you add that take away balance, or at least ease for the dev team to keep that balance. But unfortunately this makes stats very boring, there's no interesting interactions. In wow I would stack haste, which many times was the best stat, but even when it ceased to be I preferred playing faster so I would favour it where I could. I mained Monk this tier in FF14 so I did need sks but its not the more the better, its start your gearset with this amount and trade out pieces while keeping that amount.
Meaningful choices are the backbone of RPGs.
Traditionally speaking, western studios have focused more on putting said choices in their narratives, whereas eastern ones have focused more on putting the choices in their character/mechanical systems (owing to their roots in Wizardry).
As far as FXIV goes, BLU is probably the only job with any meaningful choices to make, and only because of its spellbook…
As long you keep up with level and item level (excepting minute differences from materia) , you're basically an identical replaceable cog: none of your decisions mean anything.
You end up at the exact same spot in the narrative, with near identical stats, with identical skills, with identical strategies in combat, with NPCs that at most include a throwaway line to something you did ages ago if their scripts deviate to acknowledge it at all.
Not that I really expect different from square, but it's like they forgot to put the RPG in their MMOJRPG.