Stat Testing - Part IV (Critical Damage Bonus)
In this article, we detail the damage bonus associated with critical hits for physical damage, magic damage, and cures. In addition, we talk about the gear and trait modifiers which augment this critical damage bonus - specifically critical potency (Savage Might), magic critical potency (Sagacious Might), and very briefly on critical resilience. I will also briefly talk about class abilities in the current v1.20 that involve critical damage bonuses, namely - Rampage, Thundaga (Combo), and "Enhanced Blindside" Trait. Due to length restrictions, I have chosen not to talk about critical rate in this post, and instead focus solely on the critical bonus once the critical has occurred.
Similar to previous posts, this testing was a collaborative effort with Seiken Valk. I would also like to thank Miko Neversleeps for MAR Rampage testing, and Anzu Mazaki and Katsu Kobashi for gear sets.
As with my other math-heavy posts, I have sectioned off the methodology and discussion sections so that you can simply skip down to the "conclusions" section if the math does not interest you.
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Conclusions
I have color coated the conclusions this time. Red conclusions indicate fundamental ideas and formulas regarding the critical damage bonus. Blue conclusions indicate that we are talking about efficiency, gear choices, and the all important "is X better than Y." Purple conclusions indicate we are talking about specific abilities or traits within the game that deal with critical damage bonus (e.g. Rampage).
(1) The critical bonus is a straight percentage increase in damage / HP cured. This percentage increase is
only affected by "Crit Potency" enhancements, "Crit Resilience" enhancements, and dLVL.
The critical bonus effect follows the same rules regardless of the kind of critical you are attempting to land - whether it is a physical attack, magic attack, or cure spell. Critical resilience is assumed to be the same as negative critical potency; however, this was never formally tested here.
(2) There is a cap on the critical bonus percentage increase at 175%. There is a floor at 115%.
To clarify, there will be a formula presented further down in the conclusions which may predict a critical bonus percentage of greater than 175% or less than 115%. The game will simply cap you at one of these 2 values. The calculated bonus is still important, however, because the + critical potency effects are applied prior to application of the cap and floor.
(3) + Crit Potency enhancement increases the the critical bonus by a fixed increase in %. This fixed bonus
decreases as dLVL increases. The enhancement is applied before the bonus floor and cap.
The key here is that the enhancement is applied prior to application of the cap and floor. This means that say you have 108% critical bonus at +0 potency. This is floored to 115%. Now let's say you add a certain amount of potency that brings your critical bonus to 114%. This value is still floored again at 115%, meaning your potency increase actually changed nothing. This is an extremely important concept at higher dLVLs.
(4) The baseline critical bonus (the critical bonus at +0 potency) is affected only by dLVL.
The effect of dLVL on the baseline critical bonus can be summarized graphically by the graph below...
(5) The table below summarizes the baseline critical damage bonus and the amount of critical bonus
added per point in + critical potency for each dLVL (range -30 to +10).
Blue means that the 175% cap will affect the calculated value. Red means that the 115% floor will affect the calculated value. The "Bonus to Potency Ratio" is the amount of critical bonus % you add per point in potency. As a sample calculation, for dLVL=0, let's say we have +10 potency. The baseline critical damage bonus is 121.43%. The additional bonus added by the +10 potency is calculated by 10 x 0.1729% = 1.729%. This gives a final critical damage bonus of 121.43% + 1.729% = 123.159%. "Wasted Potency" refers to the amount of + crit potency enhancement one would require to see any difference.
(6) For cure criticals, dLVL is calculated by [Target Rank] - [Caster Rank]. This means that for most endgame
situations, the only relevant dLVL is 0 (rank 50s curing other rank 50s).
If you take a R50 mage and Cura a R1 target, you actually will see the full 175% cap in play (and see a Cura critical that can exceed 2,000 HP). However, as stated above, dLVL=0 is really the only relevant endgame situation right now. The chart below illustrates the effectiveness of adding Magic Critical Potency on cure criticals at dLVL=0.
(7) To attempt to better answer the question "how good is Might materia?", the following graph illustrates
the overall % increase in damage when you critical hit at varying potency increases.
This graph specifically shows how much increase you get by adding +50, +100, +150, and +200 critical potency (as compared to someone with +0 potency or the baseline). Because the "return" or "effectiveness" of the potency stat varies significantly with dLVL, this graph charts the effectiveness of each of the 4 cases across the spectrum of "useful" enemy ranks (dLVL=-20 to +10). To give a sample read of the graph - if fighting an R52 enemy and your critical at +0 potency does 500 damage, it would do +15% or 575 damage if you had had +100 potency (purple line).
(8) The Rampage status gives 50% of the critical damage dealt back to HP. This HP return is capped at
20% of your maximum HP. This means if your max HP is 4,000 the most you can get back is 800.
(9) The Thundaga combo bonus grants a rough +175 magic critical potency and allows the critical to
break and exceed the 175% critical damage bonus cap.
This is the same effect as adding +175 magic critical potency from say Sagacious Might. It also allows the spell to potentially break the 175% cap. This was only small test, however, so this value may vary with other variables such as the caster's level.
That pretty much covers it. I think we were pretty thorough in covering everything that dealt with critical bonus in this post. The only two things we missed were specifically testing the effect of critical resilience and PGL trait "enhanced blindside" which adds an INT modifier to blindside criticals. Again, we intentionally avoided talking about critical hit rates in this post due to length restrictions.
XIV v1.21 is due to come out in a few days, which means the advent of new jobs and 2 new instances. A couple people have asked why we would go through this much trouble testing when the game is still in such flux. My personal response to this is that I believe the core mechanics of the game (the fundamental formulas of attack, defense, and resistance) have been implemented already with v1.20. If future changes are made, they will likely be small tweaks rather than complete overhauls (in which these previous tests may not be valid but still partially correct). This is of course still a gamble and only my opinion though. Either way, looking forward to v1.21 and the population increase it brings.
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