Bravely Default: Stat Modifiers

Stat modifiers seem fairly straightforward.  After all, it's just telling you "this stat is this much better".  However, there's a nuance to some of them that I'm going to take way too long to explain.  Consider this screenshot of the effects Tiz had when I sent Rapid Fire recently.

At first glance, Critical 1000% might seem a bit excessive.  After all, a 1000% critical hit rate is way more than necessary to guarantee a critical hit.  But think again, because that's not how it works.

The special move I used to get Critical 1000% on Tiz was the second Katana special, Breaking Wave.  It raises your party's critical hit rate by 900%.  That may sound confusing and just as excessive, so now I'll actually explain what's going on.

Your characters' critical hit rate is determined by their stats, job level, and so forth.  It's a percentage, as you might expect.  Breaking Wave and the other special moves and abilities that raise critical hit rate don't raise it directly, rather, they raise a multiplier that starts out at 100% and gets applied to the character's critical hit chance before the game determines whether or not you're going to get a critical hit.  In this base state, your effective critical hit rate is 100% of your base critical hit rate.  So if your base critical hit rate is 10%, then 100% of that is still 10%.  Using Breaking Wave to raise your critical hit rate by 900% is adding 900 percentage points to this percentage multiplier, making it 1000 (as pictured).  So, 1000% of 10% would be 100%, and a critical hit would be guaranteed in this scenario.  Your characters' actual critical hit rate may very well be higher or lower than 10%, but when using Breaking Wave, a base critical hit rate of 10% is the absolute minimum you need in order for Breaking Wave to guarantee you critical hits until the effect wears off.

It helps to remember that any time you see a percent sign next to a number, divide that number by 100.  100% is 1.00, 10% is 0.10.  So, multiplying a 10% critical hit rate by 100% means multiplying 0.10 by 1.00, which if you know your basic math, then you remember that multiplying anything by 1 doesn't actually change the value.  Multiplying that same 10% critical hit rate by 1000% is the same as multiplying 0.10 by 10.00, which results in 1.00, meaning the effective critical hit rate would be 100%.

Being that I've now explained it twice using different terms each time, hopefully you now understand what's going on.  In the end, I had the Critical 1000% effect for the rather obvious reason that it would enable Tiz to get a critical hit, and thus Rapid Fire would deal more damage.