So at this point I've been keeping an eye for the past few months on a variety of blogs, wikis, pages, info sites, and forums for ff14 only to notice something very confusing and odd for the ff online community.
No one really seems to be caring about how the game works, and what things do in FF14. Everywhere I look I see half naked characters at rank 40+ fighting, people wearing odd pieces of armor that, even though I and the rest of us have pretty much 0 understanding of the stat system of 14, can tell is an obvious sub-optimal piece of armor.
Clearly there's an issue here. In 11 when knew ambiguous food came out in an update within minutes people were already hammering out the details of these random objects effects.
http://www.eorzeapedia.com/wiki/en/Category:Foods
What is up with this? In 11 if you weren't eating food in your party you were called out and considered nothing short of a complete retard.
And yet for 14 we dont even have a handful of maybe effects for a few foods, we don't even understand how they work very well.
This is frustrating as as I level up and rank up I want good gear, but how do I know what piece of armor is better for my MRD? I don't.
So I've decided if no one else is going to do it I'll do it then. It's not the first time nor the last.
So, I'm going to outline a list of tests to go through, and use them as building blocks to complicated stuff.
First off, unlike FFXI, STR does not affect your attack mod. Piling 20 strength onto my character made this pretty apparent. My attack didn't budge at all. For now I'm going to asssume the same goes for the rest of the stats but it isn't hard to test at all.
So here are the list of tests to perform to get a basic understanding of ff14:
What is the correlation between the Attack stat and your damage to your opponent?
What is the correlation between the Strength stat and your damage to your opponent?
What is the correlation between attack and a physical weaponskill (I will be testing with great axe myself)
And strength? What if I swap out to dexterity? Is there some form of stat mod that weaponskills use much like 11? Or no?
What is the corrolation between the accuracy stat and your hit %? Is it linear?
Same for Dexterity?
What is correlation between Defense and damage taken?
Same for vitality?
I think this is plenty of work for now, so I'm going to start off with testing cor. of attack stat on base dmg.
I will be a naked lalafell wielding a 0% axe (in case weapon quality affects damage dealt, which wild stab in the dark says it probably does) I will spend the next few hours pooling all of my points out so I have fresh low stats. I will start by fighting wharf rats, as I wont get any kind of exp.
Things I am going to note:
Damage dealt
Accuracy
Crit Rate
Evade Rate
etc etc etc, basically everything.
At the moment it is easiest to work on my stat pool so I will start by testing str/dex/vit, using the first test as a baseline, probably 200ish swings, then raising str by 10 and repeating. I will repeat this increasing str by 10. Hopefully we should see some form of soft cap in damage.
Then once I flatline I'll do the same for dex, slowly increase it in notches of 10, I might even do these tests in notches of 5, keeping track of accuracy and crit rate.
Finally vit, keeping track of enemy crit rate on me and how much damage I take.
Once I get all the numbers crunched together I should be able to come up with some correlations on just how much roughly these stats effect your dmg taken and whatnot under these circumstances.
If someone can find a nice mage to heal them and is willing to help, performing the same test on a stronger monster to see if my values match the curve of your values would be appreciated!
I'm also going to assume for now that SE coded ff14 to match player -> enemy damage the same way enemy -> player damage works.
Otherwise this is going to be a headache.
I'll keep you all posted!