what in a theis is diminishing returns usually it is talked about in context where what it seems to mean is that if you do both X and Y then it's bad like with defensive cooldowns but for a lot of Final Fantasy 14 players what it actually means Beyond bad is sort of like a black box to that end in this video I will explain what we mean exactly when we talk about diminishing returns and also give some practical examples of how the that interacts with other things in the game hold on to your hats or glasses if you have any because this is going to get mathematical so there are two primary kinds of diminishing returns that we commonly talk about one is in regards to defensive cooldowns and the other is in regards to crowd control this one goes out to the white Mages I will cover both and I will also cover adjacently relevant subjects which will make sense when they come up let's begin with the simpler one to explain crowd control diminishing returns crowd control is effectively anything that can impact the ability for your opponent to act stuns paralysis slows heavy sleep and blind are some key examples of this with stun being by far the most common among them note that effects that reduce the effectiveness of Acts by your opponent is not crowd control this would mean effects that produce Damage Done For example like reprisal the way crowd control diminishing returns work is that when you apply such an effect the first time it will last its full duration as listed when applied an additional hidden 1 minute long effect is also applied to the Target which is the diminishing returns effect if you reapply the same type of crowd control within that minute it will only have half of the duration and will add an additional stack let's say to the diminishing returns effect and also reset the one timer if you reapply the same type of crow control again after that then it will only have a fourth of the original duration and will of course also add one more stack to the diminishing returns which actually replaces it with a complete immunity to that type of crowd control for 1 minute that's the general idea of crowd control diminishing returns note that this mechanic is not present in PvP at all now with that there are a few details to keep in mind about all this the first detail is that the diminishing returns effect is applied when the crowd control is applied itself so if you sleep something for 30 seconds and don't break the sleep then you can actually reapply a new Fresh 30 second sleep effect again 30 seconds after the first one ends because the diminishing returns only lasts a total of 60 seconds the second detail is that if you ever try to apply a weaker version of the same effect effect on something it will usually fail this means that if you apply a 30-second sleep effect to a Target and then attempt to reapply it before the duration drops below 15 seconds then it will simply fail to connect and if it fails to connect then the diminishing returns will also not be refreshed or affected at all in fact the primary way we interact with this feature of the game directly is through the White Mage spell holy which of course STS for form seconds then two then one due to the previously mentioned mechanics and some weird Jank that appears to be unique to Holy itself spamming the spell almost always still leads to a combined 7sec stun rarely 6 seconds and sometimes even eight or 9 seconds somehow I went over this in the second episode of my Final Fantasy 14 mythbuster series Link in the description if you're interested and now we get to the more interesting part diminishing returns of Defense cooldowns the key to understanding this subject is multiplicative stacking as opposed to additive stacking most Buffs in Final Fantasy 14 stack multiplicatively there are exceptions and I will talk about one of them later in this video but things stacking multiplicatively is so common that it is safe to assume that as the default in most situations multiplicative stacking means a * B which is usually a good thing if you're trying to produce a bigger number 3 * 3 is 9 but it's bad if you're trying to produce a smaller number a half * a half is a quarter additive stacking means a + b or a minus B even which is usually a bad thing if you're trying to produce a bigger number 3 + 3 is 6 but is good if you're trying to produce a smaller number a half minus a half is zero now how does this relate to defensive cooldowns well if a paladin uses ramp hard and Sentinel they both take 20% less damage and 30% less damage how do these stack multiplicatively this means that you reduce the damage You Take by one of them and then the other so 100% of the damage you take is first reduced by 20% 100% * 80% equals 80% obviously then the remaining 80% is reduced by 30% 80% * 70% equal 56% meaning you actually reduced the damage by 44% note that the order doesn't matter this is in stark contrast to how if they did in fact stack additively they would reduce the damage to 50% had the Paladin also blocked the attack then typically blocks reduced damage by 20% as well although although this can vary slightly when SED down or if you're using a weaker Shield but this 20% is simply multiplied onto the other things 56% * 80% equal 44.8% and so on an important reason why these kinds of cooldown Stack multiplicatively is because if they didn't we could run into a lot of weird inconsistencies in the game or weird game interactions the primary of which would be if defensive cooldown stack act additively and a paladin used Sentinel Rampart holy sheltron and bullwark then they should take zero damage right and if someone else in the party reduce the damage the Paladin takes by another 10% then the Paladin should be receiving healing instead of taking damage right another example would be how debuffs like reprisal would stack with other defensives but I guess we are getting a bit sidetracked now what is relevant is that this multiplicative stacking makes other defensive C Downs more predictable as well arms length increasing the time between attacks by enemies by 20% is equivalent to reducing damage taken by 56 or 16. 666 repeating of course percent and this Stacks properly and multiplicatively with a more mundane cool down like Rampart as increasing the time between attacks by 20% and reducing the damage by those same attacks means you reduce the amount of hits you take by 16.67 % and then reduce the damage of the attacks that come in by 20% Which is multiplicative leading you to take around 1/3 less damage when combined before we move on I also just want to mention that tanks nowadays also have defensive cool Downs that are sort of like nested defensive cooldowns in the form of things like holy sheltron which applies to 15% damage reduction effects simultaneously these effects are separate so they stack multiple NE atively as well which leads to absolutely wonderfully pretty calculations such as having a defensive cool down on hand that actually reduces damage taken by 27.75 and not 30% and with that let's start to explore adjacent subjects the first one is defensive cooldowns in relation to barriers HP increases and healing which is connected in the context of effective HP or ehp let's start with a somewhat strange example ehp is part of why we tend to use defensive cooldowns early in a large pool in dungeons if you have full HP let's say 100,000 HP and you use rampad reducing the damage You Take by 20% Then those 100,000 HP can take a total of 125,000 damage before you die instead of just 100,000 this is in essence what effective HP is calculating how much damage enemies could shove at you literally before you would die if you instead save Rampart for a panic situation where you only have 20% HP left 20,000 then rampad would actually only let you survive 25,000 damage meaning rampad is drastically less helpful unless you receive healing of course in a situation where you're taking sustained damage You could argue that Rampart also inflates the value of heals you receive for its duration the way we calculate ehp is by dividing your actual HP by the % of damage you are currently taking for example with Rampart 100,000 ided 80% equates to 125,000 HP increasing effects are obviously the most literal way to increase your ehp but if it is accompanied by an increase in healing received it can typically also be translated to be equivalent to damage reduction to take a particular example warriors's thrill of battle both increases HP and healing received by 20% which is basically the same as extending your HP in such a way that damage you actually take is only worth 56 of what they would actually do making it equivalent to reducing damage by 16.67% if this was combined with rampad it would like we saw with arms length be equivalent to taking 1/3 less damage which translates to 150,000 ehp based on the previous example of 100,000 Bas HP and finally barriers these are different in two ways the first being that some of them can be flat amounts unrelated to your actual HP the second being that barriers usually take the hit for you before actual HP takes damage which sometimes allows you to bypass mechanics entirely as some mechanics in the game fail to apply their secondary effects if they don't connect actual damage to the player for this reason it can be somewhat important to know that barriers also benefit from damage reduction effects in the exact same way your actual HP does this means that barriers can be added straight to your base HP and included when calculating total ehp however sometimes it matters more how much ehp the actual barrier itself has for example if you're looking to see if the barrier will actually break which is particularly significant for Dark Knights and somewhat significant for sages let's take an example from a dark knight using TBN the blackest Knight with 100,000 HP TBN will add 25,000 to the ehp leading to a total of 125,000 if we then also use Rampart then we land at 15 56,2 ehp with as we saw earlier 125,000 of those being your actual HP and the remaining 31,250 being TBN so the question is whether whatever attack or attacks plural that you are anticipating will actually do 31,2 50 before the damage reduction from Rampart and this is actually the entire idea of ehp if before you used any cooldowns you knew that you were actively taking 10,000 damage per second from whatever you're fighting then it can sometimes be easy to think of ehp instead of trying to calculate the reduced damage intake if you know you're taking 10,000 damage per second and you use ramp part and TBN then you know that TBN will break after 4 seconds that is true whether you observe that you have 31,250 HP on that barrier or You observe that you have 25,000 on the barrier and the 10,000 damage you were taking per second is now 8,000 ultimately it is an alternative way to think of damage intake that allows you to skip some calculations and rely on the information you already have unchanged this also further relates barriers to being observable as indirect healing as by taking t 5,000 damage on a shield instead of on your actual HP you have a situation of a penny saved is a penny earned you didn't lose 25,000 HP so you saved it so you indirectly healed it this can also lead to Dark Knights having deceptively more self- sustain than they actually do but this isn't some sort of magic trick I'm not about to pull a Bonnie out of a hat acknowledging this information simply might lead you to use TBN more often but it doesn't make TBN any more power ful than it already is one final thing to talk about before we move on is that while stacking defensive cooldowns has this diminishing returns effect what really matters when stacking cooldowns is taking little enough damage or alternatively having enough ehp that whatever attack you will take will not kill you this is why you may sometimes hear about kitchen sync mechanics in contexts like Savage rating attacks that do so much damage Dage that you need to use every single cool down to survive it to take an example if an attack does 200,000 damage and you have 100,000 HP then you could survive it by using both Sentinel Rampart and holy shron so doing any less than that would be kind of pointless because you would die anyway for the second adjacent subject we have damage increasing Buffs that is of course what we sometimes somewhat accurately refer to as simply raid Buffs as most Buffs stack multiplicatively I probably don't need to tell you that damage increasing Buffs do so as well to take an actual example of how damage Buffs stack Dron has both L charge and dragon site which each increases the damage the draon does by 10% if they are used together you first go well land charge increases my damage by 10% and then you take that number and go all right dragon side increases my damage by 10% so if you were doing I don't know 10,000 DPS then L's charge would increase that to 11,000 and then Dragonite will increase that to 12,100 or in other words 110% time 110% equals 121% this also gives rise to why we have this thing called 2minute bursts because raid Buffs align at this time which can lead to absurdly big damage boosts with how they all stack together I have a separate video discussing this subject in more detail if you're interested Link in the description and for the third adjacent subject we finally get to additive Buffs these are exceedingly rare but have some telltale signs of them so you can often predict which ones they are typically additive Buffs will affect the probability of something happening this means Buffs that increase crit chance Direct Hit chance and Parry chance for some example TOS directly available to jobs the resulting effect of this interaction is that a job with zero chance to direct it which is absolutely possible will still gain value from a buff like B's battle voice which increases your directed Chance by 20% note an additive 20% the only way to know this for sure is by testing it yourself as the toolive itself is not very good at tipping its hand that it is additive but what this means is that that a player with 0% Direct Hit chance benefiting from Battle Bo will go up to 20% Direct Hit chance while a player with 30% directed chance will go up to 50% similarly a player with 25% crit chance would go up to 35% crit chance while affected by a draon battle Lany and finally as the base chance to Parry is 10% a gunbreaker with camouflage of would actually have a 60% chance to Parry which actually means assuming the B 10% chance to Parry 15% damage as a given a build-in 1.5% damage reduction that camouflage reduces damage taken by about 16.85% against physical attacks an interesting interaction of directed and crit chance increases being additive is that having more Direct Hit indirectly makes direct hit boosting rate Buffs less impactful not by much but it is there on the other hand because critical hit the stat increases both the chance and power of crits they don't have this weird negative Synergy I hope this overview of how Buffs stacked together was helpful and if you have some examples of more complicated Buffs that you require help with understanding how they work together I would love to hear about it in the comments and maybe we can figure these things out together now that is all for this video thank you so much for watching if you would like to support me in my channel more directly you can become a member like these wonderful people here you can also alternatively support me through Co Link in the description you can also support the channel by letting the YouTube algorithm know by liking the video leaving a comment subscribing sharing and hitting the Bell to get notified when next I post a video fun fact all directed chance you have from stats or Buffs appear to be added additively as extra bonus damage to your actual direct hit on attacks that are guaranteed to Direct Hit guaranteed Critical Hits instead only have this interaction for crit chance gained from Buffs and your crit chance from your stats are not [Music] included
