livbleh: Because it gives you an exclamation mark next to your damage number, which makes that number hit extra hard!

noisyfireknight: Another point to Critical Hit stacking comes in the form of shield healers. Because a heal that also applies a shield has a double benefit from a crit. This is exacerbated by Scholar's Adloquium and Sage's Eukrasian Diagnosis, which gives an additional shield on a crit. (Scholar even more since you can force a crit every 60 seconds at max level.)

Dontreadthis0: the serious discussion and breakdown of the numbers followed by a 420 blaze it joke caught me off guard

michaelbowman6684: The real questions are "Why is Critical Hit the best substat in FFXIV?" and why substats as a whole are designed this way? Why specifically was Critical Hit designated as "top dog"?

literalsoup: I always appreciate the math-focused videos because it's a niche most creators don't touch given the way gearing in this game is almost completely linear. It's nice to get some perspective on the substats: namely that they only really do so much at the end of the day.

RagnarokiaNG: 199 determination being 1% damage feels like a deliberate troll...

soppo_404: crit chance is honestly a bonus of playing war. i dont have to care at all about my big hits critting

NucleaRoquwell: One little fun fact I like (loathe) about crit variance is that there is a sweet spot where it can make a higher mathematically average damage perform worse on average. Back at the very end of Monster Hunter World Iceborne there was a very weird situation where the meta greatsword set was not actually the set with the highest effective damage but was instead the set with the second highest effective damage. This was because the highest effective damage set had slightly below 100% chance to crit and it was enough that with the number of hits Greatsword usually did in a hunt you were pretty likely to miss one crit BUT didn't hit enough other crits to make up for it so on average you'd deal less damage in one hunt even though you'd deal more damage on average across your all your hunts. This meant that you were actually better off with the set that did slightly lower dps between hunts but more consistent dps in one hunt if you wanted the fastest average clear time.

Interesting to think about nowadays but YIKES it was hard to convince some players they were better off not using the fancy new toy they just got from the big black dragon, especially since speedrunners still used it (though they also used special sets to bypass the downside, but people never seemed to mention that, go figure) since obviously they are willing to rely on crit variance to get that fastest possible one clear.

invenblocker: Ah, the ever present crit/direct luck factor. We put all of our eggs in one singular Hyosho Ranryu shaped basket, and pray for the best.

tyruss1123: One thing I find interesting about the stat discussion is that the reasoning for max crit and the reasoning behind splitting remaining stats into a mix of determination and direct hit are essentially the same. For crit, it’s that higher crit damage makes crit chance scaling better, while higher crit chance makes crit chance better, so scaling both means the more you have the better it gets. And for determination and direct hit, higher determination damage makes direct hit chance better, while higher direct hit chance makes determination damage better, so you mix the two together.

MrCurtisChapman: TLDW: Because crit is basically 2 stats in one.

Catzillator: Because every end game raid doesn't punish not having otjer stats- swriously I remember when we need enoigh accuracy

InsertNameAqui1: On the topic of speed vs crit, as mentioned speed is the only other stat that scales faster as you gain more of it: in a 120 second window, going from 2.5 to 2.4 gcd would net you 2 extra gcds, while going from 2.1 to 2.0 would be ~3 extra gcds, so more speed = each point in speed is stronger, as is the case with crit.

As said in the speed video, though, there's anti-synergy, with speed not affecting ogcds, as well as the added resource gain (for the jobs that do get it) not offsetting potential misalignment issues, and so on. In a case where a job has no ogcd damage sources, or even not having a true burst, would there be a case for speed to come out on top? There's only one dps job in the game that comes close to that hypothetical, and that is black mage, where the only thing in a black mage's kit that doesn't scale with speed being the polyglot timer; no amount of speed will ever get you more than one xeno every 30 seconds, but more speed will get you more fire iv casts, which can mean more flare star casts.

Healers too can have something similar, where the bulk of their damage comes from their gcds, and thus speed comes out better than it does for other jobs. It still usually doesn't come out on top over crit, but high speed builds can reach similar averages to crit builds, though often slightly lower, and obviously being less subject to the potential highs of more crit. With the black mage rework, though... the balance has shifted slightly, to where high speed just barely out damages high crit, though of course we're talking averages since crit will always be able to reach higher numbers by virtue of just getting luckier and critting more.

Still. The game has generally moved away from these sorts of job designs, but it is interesting to note that should the stars align, speed can outperform crit.

retzerbil867: They also keep adding insanely high potency attacks or change multiple low potency attacks to one high hit making critical even more important

Setsuraful: I find for the casual player stats kinda work themselves out ok as long as you have a basic understanding of stat weights. I think most people are not overmelding or caring too much about BiS, meld crit when you can, if not meld det and those rare occasions both are unavailable melt d.hit. Doing this all the jobs I have at level 100 were sitting around ilvl 720 before the last patch, with very consistent stats across the board of roughly 20% crit chance, 10% det bonus and 35% d.hit chance. Which I would imagine is by design.

kaydub9565: It is interesting bringing up the "I'm unlucky" feeling. Tanks that feel cursed by lady luck could prioritize Determination followed by Tenacity and get more guaranteed damage on every single attack than any other class.

TheAngelLewis5: For me it's always been hard to not see it as nitpicking when the percentages are so incredibly low at a point by point basis. I think this is mainly because before FFXIV, I came from games like Monster Hunter or PSO2, where percent chance for dealing critical damage is a much easier thing to manipulate. Instead of pouring your soul into your gear so that you can net yourself a couple more percent to your chance, in monster hunter and PSO2 both, you have ways of having your base crit chance just be at around 20% or so, and then through various other actions taken during gameplay can have that number reach or even extend past 100%. So in those games working with crit chance was like, having a cake, where the "feeling" of dealing with crit chance, at least on gear in FFXIV feels like eating saltine crackers.

But I'm learning how to be "part of the crowd" so to speak here in FFXIV and play things in a way the game actually wants me to play.

Tingle457: There's at least one situation in the game where crit doesn't necessarily win out, and that's with blue mage. SpS/Det melds are fantastic for whoever gets to bring Mortal Flame/Breath of Magic.

g1Chikumo: I kinda wish the video would also have included how skill/spell-speed also stacks similarly to crit in a sense. As a 0.1 speed increase to your global cooldown is less impactful going from 2.5 to 2.4 than it is going from 2.0 to 1.9. but how crit still beats it out when factoring in how crit affects abilities while most abilities and even some weapon skills have set cooldowns that are not affected by the speed increase.

arknightsboi2050: In a competitive environment variance is awful. People who want raw skill tend to want their actions to always be the same and have the same result when the do their job correctly. On the flip side having attacks go BEEG is just fun especially if you arnt worried about becoming gold parser bob from nebraska.

apljack: "Most jobs have other big hitters that could also crit..."

looks back at EW Gunbreaker, Double Down, will never crit or DH on a clear.

muh4892: Math hurts my miqo'te brain...Miau...

gameplayerone3917: If speed was designed in a way that doubled the amount of gcds, would it equal or surpass crit?

Blustride: And here I thought I had sorted out my target gear set yesterday. Guess it’s time for some modelling

supaonyxian: As a wow player learning crit rating gives crit chance AND damage in ff14 is astounding. We have one gear way to increase crit damage by juat 3% and its considered extremely strong

Apr 02 2025

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