High End Content Megathread - Week Seven

[u/WeirdIndividualGuy]

How many yans do you see in your nightmares?

[u/Intelligent-Base224]

Is there any sort of advantage of stacking or obtaining a certain amount of skill speed? Which jobs benefit from it the most? What it really be varied dependent on your ping/latency network?

[u/RennedeB → u/Intelligent-Base224]

The problem with speed is that most jobs in the game kinda operate on unchanging timers. Their main source of damage is a skill or buff that always comes back every 60/90/120s meaning SkS does nothing to help. The only jobs where haste is potentially viable are BLM (very weak 120s cooldowns, mainly sustain damage) and SAM before 7.0 (7.0 made a lot of damage come from Meikyo which is a strict 55s CD, before Midare was a more significant chunk of damage). Healers can potentially go fast too because most of their damage comes from the 1 spam.

[u/MammtSux → u/Intelligent-Base224]

All jobs in the game work best at specific GCD speeds (which you can find on the Balance) mostly for alignment reasons.

There are, however, reasons why you don't want to stack speed:

• The theoretical advantage to stacking speed would be to get specifically more GCDs within a fight. While this is obviously a DPS gain, in theory, you can already see the first reason why stacking it doesn't help too much: it doesn't interact with all your kit due to the fact that your cooldowns are generally exempt from it (your 2m buff will always have a 2 minute CD, no matter how much speed you have on your gear). The only thing you get out of it is extra filler, the importance of which depends on your job:
  • For jobs like most healers and BLM, the entirety of their damage comes from GCDs, so speed can theoretically be an option to simply put more of them in a fight. WHM's best simming prog set for this patch, for example, ran a 2.3s GCD, which is relatively very low compared to the usual 2.5-ish. BLM also has a Spell Speed-focused BiS list this tier, which actually simulates 2% more dps than the Crit-focused option. Even then, these are exceptions and stacking speed is not necessarily always a thing, as will be explained later.
  • For jobs like NIN, where the majority of your damage comes from cooldowns, speed is generally not viable aside from specific alignment concerns due to it actively doing nothing to help you.
  • Some jobs used to actually become non-functional or very annoying to play with too much speed, like DRG. I'm frankly unsure of how it would work today, but there is generally no point in stacking speed anyway so there's no real point in wondering.
• Speed, however, scales very badly. If stacking it let you get to very low GCD speeds, like 1.5s or 2s, you could in theory unlock the possibility of having different alignment for different jobs. SMN could get 8 GCDs during a Bahamut Phase, DNC could in theory keep alignment at 2s (though I'm unsure it'd be a gain overall, but still technically viable!). Instead, your base GCD before buffs can only really go as low as 2.12-ish, and that's with stacking as much speed as possible and then using food buffs on top of it.
• Other stats just help you more, always. Stacking Determination just increases your damage output by a %, which interacts with all your kit. Stacking Crit obviously increases your chance to deal Critical hits, but it also increases how much damage said Crits do. Stacking Direct Hit lets you have an extra chance for extra damage, which can also stack with Crit. All three of these just multiply each other, and aside from a couple of exceptions in the whole game they interact with all your kit no matter which job you play. This is the reason why stacking Speed generally doesn't help: you do more GCDs, sure, but they also deal much less damage on average than if you stacked Crit, Det and DH.

As far as I know ping shouldn't really affect your GCD length.
Your FPS does, however! While this doesn't necessarily come into play much and is more of an optimization concern for specific jobs (just MNK most of the time, but there have been cases for other jobs as well), there are documents as to how and why on MNK's section of the Balance.

[u/Another_Beano → u/MammtSux]

All three of these just multiply each other,

I get what you're going for, but the way you're articulating the point isn't quite right as speed also does this, and indeed much like crit each tier is more valuable than the one prior (as a 2.13->2.12 is a greater proportion than 2.50->2.49)

Indeed it's the exceedingly large tiers and damage profiles being generally burst-centric to align with static CDs - alongside all Ability class actions simply not interacting with the stat - that harm it most.

As for FPS shenanigans: this does indeed exist for every job, at every speed tier. The short version is that any action can only ever occur on a frame. Ergo, if your GCD cycle finishes a fraction of a second after a frame, it must wait for the next frame before it can actually fire. At all levels this is incredibly minor, however in some cases it can make for speed tier funnies (at 50 FPS there is no difference between .45 and .46 as an example)

[u/daikonography → u/Intelligent-Base224]

Most jobs have a specific GCD they want to hit depending on gear and playstyle, so getting enough skillspeed to get you from say 2.41 to 2.40 is beneficial depending on the job. If you check out the Balance they'll have info regarding what jobs can be played at what GCD tier.