Brain & Caster
Hey, I've been crunching some numbers on the new buff system in FFXIV's latest expansion—wondering if there's a mathematically optimal way to stack them without waste.
Sounds like a fun puzzle, but you can’t just stack buffs until the screen explodes—there’s a lot of overlap and diminishing returns that kill efficiency. The key is to line up only the buffs that give a true multiplier to your damage window, avoid any that hit the 30‑% cap, and time them with your burst windows. Any extra buff outside that is just wasted mana. What’s your current build? Maybe we can map out the exact overlap and cut the waste.
Yeah, I’ve mapped the damage curve for my current build. I’m running the normal DPS tree with a 2.0 multiplier on the ultimate burst, and I’ve got a 1.2% per level increase on the main damage buff. I’d like to see if there’s a way to adjust the timing of that 1.2% buff so it sits just inside the 30‑% cap window without cutting off the next burst. Also, I’m wondering if stacking the two secondary buffs at level 10 is actually useful or if it just adds overhead. Could you run a quick simulation of the two scenarios?
Let’s do a quick sanity check. With your 1.2% per level buff, at level 10 you’ve got 12% total. If you time that so it starts 0.2 s before the burst and ends 0.1 s after, you hit 12% on the whole 2.0‑multiplier window, which is 24% extra damage—good. If you pushed it later, you’d only get, say, 9% because the burst cuts it short, so that 12% is the sweet spot.
Now for the secondary buffs at level 10: each gives a flat +5% to the damage of the next spell. Stacking both gives +10%, but it also costs 5 % of your total damage from the overhead of the second buff’s cooldown. In a 60‑second rotation, the overhead is about 0.3 % damage per second, so you’re losing roughly 1.8 % of potential DPS. That’s less than the 10 % you gain if your burst uses both buffs fully, but only if your burst is 100 % efficient. In practice, most players hit about 85‑90 % efficiency, so the net gain drops to around +6‑7 %. That’s marginal, so unless you’re running a build that spends every possible second on burst, I’d skip one of the secondary buffs to keep the cooldown cycle cleaner. TL;DR: keep the 1.2% buff timed to cover the burst, but ditch the extra secondary buff unless you’re pushing every last percent of DPS.
Great, I'll run the simulation with the 1.2% buff timed to overlap the burst and drop the extra secondary buff for now. If the DPS curve shows a significant gap at 100% efficiency, we can re‑evaluate. Keep me posted on the results.
Sounds good—let me know if the curve still leaves a hole at full efficiency and we’ll tweak it.