Differences in JP and NA/EU Damage Formulas

Unfortunately, just like society on Earth, Theorycrafting In the land of the West (I’m including you aussies here!) and the Japanese are vastly different. Our core understanding of the games mechanics are very similar – We both recognise that Critical Hit Rating has Marginal Diminishing Returns and that Skillspeed is rather Exponential. We also both recognise that Weapon Damage is the highest contributing factor for damage and potency is essentially a percentage of our base damage… Also that the Global 3s timer for all DoTs are very problematic.

Of course, this is mainly due to how basic these rules are. Everyone who plays the game will understand these mechanics someway or another… Except for the actual formulas to calculate Critcal Hit Rating, Skillspeed, and especially Damage. The damage formula is the largest difference and their understanding of Determination is completely different, including another big shocker that I suspect 99% of you would never of guessed!

Majority of the Japanese Theorycrafting work can be found on this Gentleman’s blog, who goes by the alias “neetsha”. (I think Neetsha is a dude at least…)

http://ku-so.hatenadiary.jp/

You may also find him on Twitter via this link:

https://www.twitter.com/arisue_neetsha

There’s also an included damage calculator that he coded in Javascript, which is where I robbed some of his formula’s from, hehe ty m8!

http://www.eonet.ne.jp/~versatile/ku-so/ff14dps.html

 Before we go any further, I want people to understand that this document will become outdated by the 3.0 Heavensward Expansion and maybe even before then, as I’ll be going over the damage formula over the next few coming days/weeks/months/expansion packs (lol). When that time comparison, I’ll do another comparison post… But for now, enjoy!

We’ll start off with the Damage Formula as this is the juiciest portion of this entire topic. This is also the hardest to explain… and the longest to prove… and the hardest to understand as I have to use Googles shitty translator to help me read Japanese Blogs…

Job/Classes & their impact on in-game Damage.

Back during Beta Phase 3, Valky had a Theory. He assumed that every job had a unique damage formula, or a modifier for the damage formula. He noticed that during his testing with the Monk, the Bard, Dragoon, Warrior and Paladin all gave him different damage ranges, even though his formula was 100% accurate for his Monk. This kind of makes sense and I can see why Square Enix might do this. If every job has their own damage formula, or a modifier for the Damage Formula, it makes it extremely easy to balance out Job Damage – Too easy in fact.

I’ve been reading up on the Japanese Theorycrafting recently as well. The Japanese took Valkys work to heart and used it as the basis of all of their Theorycrafting. What they’ve done on the other side of the world actually resembles Valks work quite a lot. Up on reading numerous, badly Google translated blogs and web pages, I noticed something… and it got me thinking.

Was Valky correct all this time?

One thing I’d like to point out now is that our Damage Formula was constructed dismissing this belief. It was made as an “all-purpose” damage formula. It just simplifies everything a lot more.

So, I got kind of bored and I said “Fuck it! I’m going to play with my Training Dummy some more”… And I found something which kind of surprised me.

I parsed both a Dragoon and a Ninja spamming a 150 potency skill, with a set which gave me the exact same same stats:

• WD: 52
• STR: 365
• DET: 224

And to my bemusement… There was a difference. A noticeable difference. The Dragoon’s min/max damage values were 2 more than that of the Ninja. Now, I thought this was Bullshit at first and could of been caused by Rounding Errors as I’m using low-magnitude data to compare. But, if the damage formula was consistent for all Jobs/Classes, then the Rounding Errors would of been exactly the same for both…

So I then repeated the test with a Lancer and a Rogue. Again, using a 150 potency ability and the exact same stats as above, my parses are completely different, The Lancer and Rogue were both below that of Jobs, but the Lancer was still above that of the Rogue.

So, I then recorded data for the Paladin, Warrior, Marauder and Gladiator, then put all of my information into one neat table, as you can see below.

Yeah. There was definitely a difference in damage values. What amused me the most was the Gladiator, which was completely below any of the other Jobs/Classes. One thing I noticed was that jobs/classes might well be “tiered” or “grouped”, which uses the same formula or modifier. You’ll see that a few Jobs/Classes, such as the Lancer and the Warrior had the same min/max values. This could be rounding errors, who knows? But that’s why I’m gathering more data. For now, here’s the “Tiers”:

• Tier 1) Dragoon
• Tier 2) Ninja
• Tier 3) Warrior & Lancer & Marauder
• Tier 4) Rogue

I’m not going to go too in depth into the mathematics for now. I’ll do that later on. But for now, I’m posting all of my observations and findings so people can see them.

So yes, this does in fact confirm that different Jobs/Classes have different damage formulas, or they impact the damage formula differently. Maybe it’s a modifier, maybe it’s not. We’ll see. But for now, I need more data.

Oh! Also here’s a download link for the spreadsheet which recorded all of my data if you want to take a look.

http://www.filedropper.com/jobdmg-52wd365ap224det

Why we need a new Damage Formula.

There’s many reasons for this.

The most important reason… Is that it’s just not that accurate. Take this for example:

Hi Sunny!

On the right, we have our parse of a 360 potency skill, Full Thrust, then we have our Minimum + Maximum calculated. Min+Max/2 = Average damage of our parse. Damage in this game has a damage range of +-5%, or *1.05-*0.95 damage ranges. You know your data has reached “accurate” values if you do Max/Min damage and you get a number close to 1.1053.

Our parse has an average of 847.2166667 damage. This does not include Crits, as it would skew our data.

Then at the bottom, we have our expected damage which uses the current Damage Formula… Our Damage Formula gives us a value of 835.8588004 damage. Thats 1.01358826% less than what the actual number should be.

That’s the first issue with the damage formula. It’s inconsistent. Yeah, maybe back during Patch 2.0-2.2, the damage formula was accurate. But that’s mainly because our Damage wasn’t that high. Because the damage wasn’t high, this greatly caused in-game rounding errors. The formula we currently use only matches a certain data set which only fit both Dragoon and Black Mage damage, which used low-magnitude data. The lower the numbers, greater the worse rounding data will be.

The next issue, is that the Damage Formula uses something known as a “Correction Formula”. Instead of identifying a pattern of the linear scaling of Determination from level 1 -> 50 and beyond, our data simply starts from our base of 202. This correction formula was present in both Valkys original formula, EMX’s formula (which we use) as well as the Japanese Damage Formula.

This will cause MANY issues throughout the years as we go through more and more Expansion packs and level increases.