A lot of weird little details in FFXIV can be entirely misunderstood if you simply assume the game works in one way without ever testing it. This is actually a rather common problem. Here I demonstrate ten common to uncommon assumptions and claims, to show that they are incorrect, while also demonstrating how you can do the same for other mechanics.
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Music Used:
FFXIV Endwalker – Cradle of Hope
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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:38 (1) Provoke doesn’t generate Enmity
01:38 (2) Provoke doesn’t work if enemy is targeting you
02:08 (3) Determination doesn’t boost healing from Abilities
02:48 (4) Guaranteed Crits scale better with the Crit Stat
04:05 (5) Healing Magic Potency buffs boost ALL healing
05:19 (6) Physical and Magic specific damage buffs don’t exist
07:12 (7) DoT Snapshotting does not exist in FFXIV
08:55 (8) Reprisal must be up before cast starts
10:06 (9) Wait command Macros can take Decimal Numbers
11:32 (10) Tenacity increases Healing RECEIVED
12:33 Fun Fact
source
Okay, so Number 4 probably stems from Midare Setsugekka being explicitly adjusted to gain a benefit from effects that raised their critical hit chance (like dancers devilment). My guess is that it was expected that those adjustments would happen to all effects that were guaranteed crits.
When the interaction is no interaction…
that Reprisal one had me scratching my head. mainly because i was told "as long as its used before the cast is finished, then it works" when i was in a static. good to know it was true.
It's kinda wild to me that people think that about provoke. Warriors generate unga bunga amounts of enmity through their skills. We got one as the OT so I have to use provoke a couple times at the start of a fight. The alternative being make them use shirk with that long cooldown or ask them to toggle their stance. Both options are less efficient to me pressing a 30 second cooldown.
Tenacity increases healing restored from self-healing abilities, and I'm pretty sure i remember them saying so explicitly during a live letter before they added it into the game
Nice video! Definitely learned something especially about provoke! I am curious about some other abilities that could potentially be tested.
Like how much healing does the drk require when it has procced living dead cos i think most people believe the tank just need to be full to clear the debuff.
There's also temperance for whm does the buff effect move around according to the whms position or does the effect snapshot from when the spell was cast?
I used to think that persistent damage aoes (like salted earth or slipstream) followed the same snapshotting rules as dots, but several of my friends told me that isnt true and that they aren't affected by buffs at all because they are considered a separate entity than the player (who has the buffs). Not sure if that is true or not, but the part about dots in this video reminded me of the confusion i had over this.
Nice video! very usefull!
As an Auto Attacking Alpha Black Mage I feel called out by this video.
"Holy spam reduces overall stun duration" is the most frustrating one to me. It's so easy to test and see that, no, you get the full 7 seconds no matter what.
Im sure the Provoke thing isnt really because of ignoring the tooltip or assuming its incorrect, but rather because it was true. Up till stormblood provoke gave you the same enmity as the highest target+1
I’m happy to know that detail about Reprisal especially, I assumed it was the case because feint worked similarly, but it’s nice to have the confirmation that it is how it works specifically. I always learn something new with you Cae, no matter how niche you always impress me with your ability to crunch numbers and prove facts.
I think the crit misconception is actually just a miscommunication
I've heard a lot of people say that but it's always with the context that because they always crit, they benefit from the increased crit damage more frequently, and so have their average damage increased more. Or is this also not the case?
For number 4 its because they actually worded it very complicated during the LLs.
It basically was because DH is usually hardcoded 25% damage increase, DH chance buffs were useless and DH guaranteed hits got 0 benefits from having additional DH.
So the change was made that for guaranteed hits DH buffs AND the DH stat affect it.
Meanwhile crit buffs had the same problem, (which is the thing that got fixed) But the crit stat ALREADY increases crit hit damage guaranteed hit or not.
TL;DR DH and CRIT buffs affect damage output on guaranteed hits, DH got damage scaling similar to crit damage scaling on guaranteed hits only
"…Unless you're trying to make the biggest BLM auto-attack"
Unfortunately BLM Auto-Attack Always does 1 DMG and occasionally 2 damage, BLM is the only class that does not get damage from auto-attack AFAIK
Here's a good one for people to test. "You should not cast regen on a tank a couple of seconds before he pulls, because you can pull threat off of the tank by doing so." To test it, you will need a whm and a tank. Go to a dungeon, get close to a big mob pull, have the whm cast regen on the tank, then 1 second later have the tank pull by walking up to the mobs and just wait for 6 seconds with both the tank and the whm doing NOTHING. You will see that the whm does NOT pull threat off of the tank.
This was an update that many people overlooked in the patch notes a few months back. Regen gives ALL of its threat at the moment it is cast. What this means is if it is cast while there are no enemies, there will be no threat. This is also why I hate tanks that use their gap closer for pulling the first mob, because sometimes they will have pulled at the same time I cast my pre-pull regen.
The update happened back in patch 6.2, which was released 08/22/2022. The patch notes there state the following: HP restoration over time will no longer generate enmity with each tick of healing. * Please note the initial execution of these actions will still generate enmity.
Bro… Your Oath bars right end is not aligned with the end of your Hotbar. HOW CAN YOU EVEN PLAY LIKE THIS?
Good to know that DoT Snapshotting is a thing, and I am at least somewhat justified in reapplying my DoT's as Bard shortly before my buffs run out just to get those 4 or 5 extra ticks. Atleast I THINK those ticks are worth using Iron Jaws over Burst Shot or Refulgent Arrow in that scenario… would have to do the math at some point.
I actually learned about the decimal thing for macros not working completely by accident after trying to be cheeky and streamline fishing macros by using <wait>0.25 seconds in between certain skill procs, only to have the "not yet ready" error appear every time. Same with the 0.5 second timer procs activating after 1, and that's when I realized that decimals just wouldn't work at all
I'd like to throw in a bonus misconception. DoT tick rate is 3 seconds. This comes up when I have to explain to ninjas that Doton is not a good single target ability.
I basically knew all these already but knowing some numbers behind things like provoke's enmity in potency is nice. Some of them amazed me that people don't know or don't bother to test themselves like DoT snap shotting is one of the easiest to just go test on a dummy…This honestly reminds me of my time in WoW, the game is much older than and has had some very drastic class/spec changes over the years and people just don't keep up, even with the own class…
So here's one I wanna know: when doing positionals, do you get the damage buff still if, say, you have to be to the right of the enemy, you go to the right, click the ability, then run back behind the enemy before the attack numbers (and thus animation) appear? I guess what I'm asking if that sounded confusing is when does it register the positional buff
So tenacity is even more garbage than we thought?
i really want to see the largest black mage auto attack ever conceived and if it can one shot any bosses
New Spell added: Bonk IV
I recall one you pointed out to me. That SCH Energy Drain had changed in the past where it no longer recovers MP anymore. Only HP still.
I appreciate that you didn't just disprove theories, but also gave a demonstration on how to verify claims yourself. It still won't convince some people, but you did your best by providing tools to verify it for themselves.
Nice detailed work
Another one, I'm curious to know if Overhealing draws aggro, I believe there was a change with healer hots recently that makes pre existing hots prior to combat not draw aggro, but does it update when the healer/tank gets into combat? and can a tank overheal (clemency, equilibrium or Aurora) generate threat? and I wonder how much threat it generates.
#7 (DoT Snapshotting doesn't exist) – Seeing that one mentioned, I immediately thought of Bozja or Zadnor being an excellent way to disprove this claim.
The meta "Cheese" strat for the duels has the player use a large combination of stacking buffs on Red Mage, like Lost Excellence (+65%), Banner of Noble Ends/Honored Sac (+50%/+55%), Chainspell with Spirit of the Ordained (+100%, as well as +20% from Spirit, though it's permanent), as well as the RDM abilities like Embolden (5%) and Manafication (5%).
After all that, you then use Lost Flare Star, a instant-cast 5s GCD that does 300 potency in an AoE, and applies a 350 potency DoT for 60s.
This results in a overall buff to your damage of about 6.5x, making the DoT have the equivalent of ~2.3k potency per tick, or ~46k over a minute.
Due to the large amount of buffs you have to apply at the start to make this work, the buffs start to fall off rapidly after you apply the Flare Star, yet the DoT remains insanely strong and handles majority of the damage needed in the duel.
If the DoTs didn't snapshot, the damage would immediately fall off and do a pitiful amount compared to the start, and the meta strat wouldn't be the strat to use.
For me arm length doesnt show a single buff or make if feel like the enrmy slowed down
@8:55 This came to be due to a misunderstanding of when certain attacks are considered "Resolved" by the game. It mainly stems from EX trial mechanics that have a mid-way gate attack (IE attack that generally accompanies a charge bar and adds that must die before charge bar is full). People failed to understand that if the action wasn't completed before the last add dies in some fights (Buffs, Reprisal if able to be applied, shields) then they didn't count towards mitigating the damage (IE Shield remained fully intact while HP deminished from the attack). Somehow, this then got muddied by word of mouth to include any action, when that isn't true. Aside from gate attacks of this nature, so long as the buff/debuff is applied before the cast bar resolves it counts toward mitigation/shielding as you've stated, but due to server ticks this means applying it before a certain point of the bar resolving since there is still transmission delay (IE applied at 90%+ cast bar may not count as on the servers end it was already "resolved" but was still transmitting in a delay to the client.) Thus, those who have low ping generally are good up to around 85~95% cast bar, but as the ping gets higher the cast bar resolution % changes on client end.
May not be as widespread but there is a misconception that invulnerability after getting raised will be removed when you move, when in reality it's dispelled when you do any action
Knowing that tenacity doesn't increase healing received honestly makes me think that's a bug. It SHOULD work that way because tenacity is for tanks and tanks need to be healed BY THE HEALER!
Even the devs must assume it works that way but simply never tested it and no players ever complained about it.
No.10 no1 uses tenacity anyway so doesnt matter :p
Not gonna lie I just realized that I should be applying dots when I have my damage buff on
I would like to add a tidbit to 8. During TEA, Brute Justice will place down mines that have to be soaked by players. The landmines are placed with an action that has a cast bar, then take a few seconds to manifest before players can run into them. The timing for when you want mitigation on Brute Justice (such as addle and reprisal) isn’t during/before the cast bar for the action finishes. Rather, it’s when the landmines are stepped on.
many of these things wouldn't be a misconception if people played BLU. core Mechanics of them are phys/magic, dot snapshotting, last minute mitigations etc
i really want to know what the biggest blm auto-attack ever conceived is now. the thought of a super jacked black mage yeeting someone into the stratosphere with a staff backhand is hysterical to me
A lot of these are easily proven false if people knew how to read.
I thought when they reworked the samurai draw slash they made it so all guaranteed crits got boosted by the crit stat on top of the usual amount. Maybe it only affects that oen samurai skill???
Increase all healing received would actually make TEN more desirable