Double Attack - Triple Attack

[pahnphoenix]

Uh, return is the additional output and utility could be considered the "value" you ascribe to that. A percent change is, in FFXI, a quantification of marginal utility of X compared to Y. You know better than that.

i don't though(:. %DoT increases are the output, and if it helps to call them "stat points", that's fine.

honestly, i'd be unsurprised if i make a few mistakes here and there, but it's annoying to me that i can't get this larger point across. it's not like we discover this armor with double attack, observe that it produces additional attack rounds, and then decide how we want to attribute value. the game itself is a well-defined system, as is this whole business of gear/stat choice. in the "gear choice system" or whatever, we put in X stat, and we get back Y %DoT increase.

why %DoT increase and not DoT increase, or attack round increase? because that's not any system at all. stats are only commensurable if you look at %DoT increase as their output. it seems weird to look at it that way because you know how absurd it would be to start a business and be like, "i made 1% of my investment back yesterday, but i only made .990099% back today, what the fuck?" but this isn't a business. it's also not a factory. it's a system whereby you produce % DoT increases. that's the currency. that's all anyone can ever get back from an offensive stat.

i wonder if this is clear. and i don't mean "i'm right, what's wrong with you?" this is clear. even if i'm way offbase, i wonder if what i'm asserting is clear to you.

[Byrthnoth]

Everyone understands what you're saying Pahn. It's just that people disagree at the level we should define "marginal return" at.

Option 1: Number of swings - DA does not give decreasing marginal returns if it is defined this way. <-- This is where the guys who don't think it decreases would define it.
Option 2: Increase in percentage of number of swings - DA does give decreasing marginal returns if it is defined this way. <-- This is where I'd define it, because it lets the math be less complex.
Option 3: Increase in % Damage over time - DA does give decreasing marginal returns if it is defined this way. <-- This is where you'd define it

I took a few Econ classes in college and found most of their terminology to be subjective and best interpreted in the context of the particular problem/example/class. I had four different teachers, and each one used phrases like "marginal return" in a different way. It's understandable that there is a misunderstanding here. The terms are poorly defined.
You want to really hear some phrases with inconsistent meanings? Go ask two different Econ professors how currencies are valued against each other.

[CDF]

Well, yeah, here percent change could be considered both an alternative expression of change of absolute return and an expression of utility. But marginal return really refers to change of rate of return, not change of absolute return.

I don't get this "commensurable" deal. Attributes are just as commensurable in terms of changes in absolute damage per unit time because it is easy to convert these attributes to damage per unit time. Why "%DoT increase and not absolute change in DoT increase"? You can ignore all other things that are fixed when comparing two things because those things that are fixed cancel out with the computation of percent change. Cognitively, people grasp percent change more easily than absolute changes, too. This has nothing to do with production systems or whatever.

Anyway, economics is a discredited discipline, so I no longer give a shit. JK.

[pahnphoenix]

sorry to make 2 posts, but given these walls of texts, i don't expect cadsuane to see my characteristic huge edit.

cadsuane,

i didn't answer your latter part at first because i forgot to, and this time i'm not answering it because... well, i don't see it as a problem. "don't you think it's problematic that 5% is different than 3% + 2%?" no. not sure what else to say. re: trolling, no, we use the term to mean people who try to get a rise out of people. you think you've gotten a rise out of me because i use swear words, but that's actually just how some of us adults talk. we also call each other bad names without losing our shit too. if i write back, "i am getting really emotional here," or maybe if i make a huge post all in caps, then you've gotten to me.

speaking of emotions, time passes so fast. i used to be able to play the "don't you even know who i am??" nonsense, but i have a feeling that no one does know who i am. oh well. alla fame is so fleeting.

back to the topic, i do actually believe that you genuinely don't understand my point. if you've tricked me on that, i guess you can consider me trolled (if that's what passes for trolling these days). on the one hand, it's unsurprising to me that anyone would fail to get my point, because i'm explaining the whole "you need to appreciate systems" thing about as well as that 1st philosophy student who smoked a bunch of weed before the class. on the other hand, it seems just intuitive to many, many posters that the gains you get from offensive stats are % DoT bonuses.

honestly, it weirds me out that some apparently educated people are so upset by % DoT increase as a unit. i mentioned this in the alla post of old... % DoT increase isn't "softer" or "more relative" than DoT increase. i get why this sounds flatly bizarre to people, but it really shouldn't. 1/2 = .5 = 30/60 = all kinds of things. it's not that .5 is the absolute one, and 1/2 is the relative one. it's also irrelevant that the way we got the % DoT increase was by doing division, or that the division involved is 1/100 for the first point of DA then 1/101 for the second.

there's a function. you put in offensive stats, it spits out a % DoT increase. you can compare what it spits out to what it spits out when you put in other offensive stats. it's that simple. *the whole thing would be exactly the same if the function spat out integers, but this one just so happens to spit out %DoT increases*. that's how the game of comparing gear (which is very simply extrapolated from the game of ffxi) works.

[CDF]

Well, I suppose this is the irreconcilable difference of viewpoint. There is nothing fundamental about %DoT. It is relative since there was all that stuff held fixed that was canceled out. That's why it is convenient to use (aside from the aesthetic/cognitive appeal of percentages, I guess).

Edit: There's a function, you obtain additional quantities of an attribute, you get an absolute increase in damage over time. Only you don't really give a shit about what the absolute increase is, so you turn to percent change in damage over time.

[pahnphoenix]

Why "%DoT increase and not absolute change in DoT increase"?

because you can't get any result at all in terms of absolute DoT increase when you look at DA abstracted away from ATT/haste/etc. there would be no point in a system where the terms were absolute DoT increase... even if you always considered everything in concert with everything else, there'd never be a way to give value to DA or haste or whatever in general, which is the point of the stat evaluation / damage maximizing game or whatever.

this is starting to sound like double talk, but i assure you it's not. if what i'm writing isn't making sense, it's either a deficiency in your thought/effort or (more likely) a deficiency in my explanatory powers. there's also the chance that what i think is true genuinely doesn't make sense, but if you follow that line not much longer, you'll realize that it would entail that i'm totally insane.

one last stab before i give up for tonight: in all the factory / factory worker examples, there's stuff you can measure in the factory that you simply don't. there's ways of expressing what you do measure that you neglect to because it's irrelevant. very specific things allow something like dollar bills or abstract dollars or credit or whatever to be returns on any investment of anything. crucially, none of those things are "it's measured in integers," or "it's inanimate." there's shit that makes money *money* and differentiates it from the dust on the money, or your happiness at receiving the money.

with DA, % DoT increases are all you're getting back, at least when the production system you're talking about is anything worth talking about. sure, i've actually gotten a distinct number of additional attacks from DA in my personal history, but knowing that number is of no use to anyone. ...it could be though. there could be a bizarre world where somehow it makes sense to talk about DA in terms of the absolute gain of attack rounds for pahn and no one else. in that world, the return one gets on investing in DA is attack rounds for pahn. but in our world, we get % DoT increases from DA, haste, ACC, ATT, and we use those % DoT increases to make the larger system of DoT production.

i apologize if this is boring. it's not an elaborate troll to waste your time.

---

edit:

CDF,

but there's a gear comparison/maximization system, and it's tacitly or explicitly employed by everyone who tries to make gear decisions. anyone who quantifies these can get onto the only workable system, which exists before and after them (its existence is brought about by how ffxi is setup; the whole "choose what you put in this slot, out of haste / DA / ATT, and by the way you by the item with gil or time or xxx"). inherent to this system is % DoT increase as the return for investments of DA or haste, just as its inherent to the system in the united states that i get dollars and not units of food, or units relative to how much power gets sent to my house. there could be a system where returns were measured in something relativized to how much power gets sent to a consumer's house... but one of my points above was that qua units, these things wouldn't necessarily be any "more relative" or "softer" than dollars. they'd be the hard units of that system.

am i getting any closer to clarity here? it's not pahn who decides % increases are the kind of returns you get in this system. it's how ffxi is setup; it's the conversation you enter when you talk about the value of gear, and stuff like increasing/constant returns apply to it. it is incidental that constant returns are bizarre/borderline impossible in this system. you don't just change the definition of constant/diminishing returns (or 'returns' itself) just because you have a bizarre system. gear choice/acquiring/whichever exists as a production system producing % DoT increases, whether i like absolutes or percentages better than the other, or not.

[CDF]

Spare me the patronizing bullshit. You can get a result in terms of absolute DoT increase, but we want other factors abstracted away because it's convenient in terms of generalizing. It is precisely because of the damage formula is just multiplying various factors together (
("how FFXI is set up") that generalizing is possible, so %DoT from one factor is "independent" of the other factors, in general.

I simply do not agree with your exaggerations. The real case for dealing in %DoT is (1) convenience and (2) being able to generalize, not "% DoT is all you're getting back."

[pahnphoenix]

fair enough, but i think it's bizarre that you think salience is dependent on how i feel ("i feel like using percentages") when we're talking about a videogame. what's valuable and what's not isn't that subjective. it's not that i want a %DoT increase and you want an absolute DoT increase, it's that insofar as there's a system at all, it includes %DoT increases as units.

it's weird to speak of "convenience"... as if there's a wild world of ffxi to tame, and out of convenience we play the % DoT game. oh and by the way, it's the only sensible game to play, and yes this is a programmed game with well-established rules.

i'm sorry that you think i'm patronizing, but you're not getting my overarching point, and again i think it's because of me not you (you're getting points of mine better than cadsuane). if you started to say that we could measure [insert totally fucking irrelevant thing] about a business, you'd feel like an ass. it's not *just* that, say, money is worth measuring and the dust on money isn't. it's that you walked into that classroom/boardroom intending to *talk about money*. you all know what system you're looking at, and you know that money is the return for this one. you should walk into gear talk knowing that % increase is the return for this one.

absolute DoT increase works when someone asks me "here's all my stats, what does 1% DA do?" that's a different game we can play, and that production system is a different one from the one we talk about on messageboards.

---

ok, i'm done. if you're offended, my bad, but also too bad. if you disagree, or if you want to agree to disagree, i really don't care. i'm writing all this b/c i do find it somewhat philosophically interesting (i like philosophy of language), but it doesn't matter if no one else does. i'm not desperately clinging to anything; right/wrong doesn't matter to me. none of this changes anything, it's just academic. i care about shit that changes shit.

[CDF]

In a sense, comparing % change in rate of damage is exactly the same as comparing absolute change in rate of damage except for the difference of "frame of reference," so to speak. I already said why it is desirable to use one and not the other. I see the word convenience is weird to you, but ability to generalize is obvious enough. 5% is 5%, whether it's 5% of shit or 5% of something better.

[Cadsuane]

back to the topic, i do actually believe that you genuinely don't understand my point. if you've tricked me on that, i guess you can consider me trolled (if that's what passes for trolling these days). on the one hand, it's unsurprising to me that anyone would fail to get my point, because i'm explaining the whole "you need to appreciate systems" thing about as well as that 1st philosophy student who smoked a bunch of weed before the class. on the other hand, it seems just intuitive to many, many posters that the gains you get from offensive stats are % DoT bonuses.

honestly, it weirds me out that some apparently educated people are so upset by % DoT increase as a unit. i mentioned this in the alla post of old... % DoT increase isn't "softer" or "more relative" than DoT increase. i get why this sounds flatly bizarre to people, but it really shouldn't. 1/2 = .5 = 30/60 = all kinds of things. it's not that .5 is the absolute one, and 1/2 is the relative one. it's also irrelevant that the way we got the % DoT increase was by doing division, or that the division involved is 1/100 for the first point of DA then 1/101 for the second.

there's a function. you put in offensive stats, it spits out a % DoT increase. you can compare what it spits out to what it spits out when you put in other offensive stats. it's that simple. *the whole thing would be exactly the same if the function spat out integers, but this one just so happens to spit out %DoT increases*. that's how the game of comparing gear (which is very simply extrapolated from the game of ffxi) works.

My difficulty with the DA description you've put forth is that it as far as evaluating DA in a vacuum it doesn't amount to a continuous function or even give you unique values. I guess I call it relative which may be a bit imprecise; I don't mean to say that it's relative because the answer happens to be a ratio of two numbers expressed as a percentage, though it's true that I hate computing anything with percentages. What I mean is that I find the graph of decreasing percentage returns meaningless when I can draw the same graph evaluating DA in a chunk of 100% to show a straight line by regression or another one with chunks of 0.0000001% to show an even steeper rate decline.

Strictly speaking I can't say your greater point about FFXI gear systems necessitating comparison by DoT% is abundantly clear to me, since I just don't think that you're absolutely required to do it that way.

[Shinryuu]

ΔDamage = (ΔTP+ΔWS)∙ΔTotal

ΔTP = (ΔpDIF∙ΔDMG∙ΔDW∙ΔDelay)∙TP/WS-ratio
ΔpDIF = ΔAtt∙ΔCrit
ΔDMG = ΔfSTR∙ΔDMG

ΔWS = (ΔWSpDIF∙ΔWSDMG∙ΔX-hit∙ΔWSDA∙ΔWSTA∙ΔfTP)∙WS/TP-ratio
ΔWSpDIF = ΔWSAtt∙ΔWSCrit
ΔWSDMG = ΔDMG∙ΔfSTR∙ΔWSC

ΔTotal = ΔHaste∙ΔHitrate∙ΔDA∙ΔTA∙ΔKicks

Something like that. You'd calculate the appropriate returns for every variable. For instance, ΔCrit isn't simply putting in Destroyer's 6% coming from a non-Destroyers H2H, but calculating the increase in average pDIF this crit increase gives. Kick attacks, similar, count them as being half as effective as DA. Tada, the equation of the century. I rule.

[Shamaya]

Dmg/Time=
(Dmg/Round * #Rounds(ws->100) + WSdmg)
/ (wsRate)

That's the base equation I've used for awhile, essentially identical to yours. Course it expands just like yours.

[Shinryuu]

As far as I can see now the only thing my equation doesn't contain is the slight discrepancy between different delays gaining TP in a slightly different amount of time.

[Cadsuane]

As far as I can see now the only thing my equation doesn't contain is the slight discrepancy between different delays gaining TP in a slightly different amount of time.

Can be a big discrepancy actually. You can shoehorn it in there though.

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/ff.../3d/Tpgain.jpg

[Shamaya]

Yeah, calculating things like TP/hit, including storetp, are essential to the total formula. Fortunately it's no more complicated than most parts of the "total base formula." I say base formula because, of course, there's always that stuff we can't include (for a base), like utility from meditate (depends on %downtime / 3minutes) etc etc.

[Shinryuu]

Well actually it's already in there, after further looking at my own thing. "X-hit". More delay is minus TP damage, and plus "X-hit". Adding Store TP simply gives more "X-hit".

[apoptygma]

I just read this post for the 1st time today.
I'm no economical or philosophical major, but I gotta say.
This has been the most boring, drawn-out, merry-go round of crap I have ever read.
Took me 2 afternoons to parse my gear under various stat extremities.
And another afternoon to triangulate a happy medium for an optimal build.
When you have a perfectly good diagnostic application, trial and error will by far provide better results than speculations, graphs or hypothesized Dmg formulas.
Now can I have the 25 mins of my life back? Talk about diminished returns.

[Darkmagi]

Get the fuck out.

[Jeryhn]

Nice.

[Samonez]

fail