Before we begin, I’d like to give a special thanks to Arisue Neetsha for making me reconsider how Determination works, Sunny Hirose with supporting evidence, as well as an active poster who goes by the name Kaesebrezen.
Determination is a stat that has largely been misunderstood for the most part. No one actually knows, even to this day, how it works, or how it’s implemented into the Damage Formula.
Originally, Valk who created “Version 1” of our damage formula, used these correction factors for our damage formula:
- Auto-Attacks: + (DTR-202)*0.11
- Weaponskills: + (DTR-202)*0.035.
Yes, this was incorrect. The main thing that Valky never managed to understand is how other stats impacted the effect of Determination. Has he used a “+DTR”, he basically stated that Determination was an independent value which was added on top of the remainder of the damage formula… which is incorrect.
WD is influences Determination and this was proven in EMX’s work. But, there was still a few issues with Determination, especially at much higher ilvls, which did prove to be troublesome.
The Japanese had another way around this. Instead, they multiplied Determination by the remainder of the Formula. I never quite understood why, but then I began to theorise, what is Determination was affected by both Strength and Weapon Damage?
Kaesebrezen brought up an interesting point. Why is the value of Determination at level 50 exactly the same across all jobs, in a similar fashion to Accuracy and Critical Hit Rating, but our main Attributes aren’t? Well, strangely, if you open up your Character Menu, all stats that are under “X Properties”, are usually percentages. Accuracy can be converted into a Percentage. Parry is definitely a percentage, so maybe Determination follows suit?
Maybe Strength does influence Determination.
And that’s where Sunny Hirose came in with his new findings of Determination.
He took a few data points and observed the influence Determination has on damage, at varying Strength Values. Not only that, the influence Determination has on Damage is greater, the more Strength you have. This means, especially at higher levels of Strength, the weighting of Determination will be greater. If Determination was not affected by Strength, then the slope of all graphs would be equal, but they’re not. They’re all going through and meeting at a cross-point.
This graph alone is one of the main things needed to support the theory that in the damage formula, we either have WD*DTR + STR*DTR, or quite simply, as the Japanese do, treat Determination as a Multiplier.
Dervy does Theorycrafting 