
Originally Posted by
Mojo
You have some tremendous misconceptions about how STR, Double Attack, and Triple Attack work.
To begin with, you don't need any native Triple Attack trait to receive benefit from Triple Attack gear. Epona's Ring, for instance, will give you a 3% Triple Attack occurrence despite not having the trait to begin with. The same statement can be said for double attacks.
STR can help in two ways. First, 2 STR = 1 Attack. Most people understand this quite easily. The second is a bit more obscure, it's called fSTR. fSTR is a value calculated from the difference between your STR and the mobs VIT. The value is augmented onto the DMG from your weapon. It's a weird step function that only increases by one per 4-6 STR you add. A general rule of thumb is that with a high margin between your STR and the mobs VIT, then +4 STR = +1 DMG, which is often the case with MNK these days for a variety of reasons. However, fSTR also caps. The cap is 8 + weapon rank. Weapon rank, for hand to hand weapons, is (DMG+3)/9, rounded down, where DMG is the +DMG listed on your weapon. So for 90 Verethragna, for instance, the fSTR cap is 8+(35+3)/9 = 8+4.22 = 8+4 = 12. The fSTR cap will occur when you have (14 + 2x weapon rank)*2 more STR than the mobs VIT, so in my case 44 STR. Once you go beyond this point, then the only advantage to more STR on meleeing is due to the 2 STR = 1 Attack (which is somewhat of a pitiful bonus, to be honest.)
Full Tantra +2 feet/body/head/tathlum, Rajas Ring, Black Belt, (all of this is standard TP gear) red curry bun and merits yields STR+66. So any mob I'm fighting, as a hume MNK, will need at least 105 VIT in order for fSTR to become uncapped. This doesn't really occur anywhere outside of Abyssea except on a few HNM nobody fights (but even then I doubt this), and even if it does, it's not really a big deal (I'll explain why in a bit.) Inside of Abyssea, this never happens, because cruor buffs add between 30 and 70 STR on top of this.
Now, let's say that, for some reason you might encounter a situation where fSTR starts to become uncapped. The total DMG that's used for your melee attacks is this.
Total DMG = 3+0.11(h2h skill) + weapon DMG + fSTR. 90 MNK with 8 H2H merits, Faith Torque, and Tantra gets 391 H2H skill.
Total DMG = 3 + 0.11(391) + 35 + 12
Total DMG = 3 + 33.01 + 35 + 12
Total DMG = 3 + 33 + 35 + 12
Total DMG = 93
So losing 1 fSTR brings my melee DoT down by 1.08%. I understand that not everybody is going to have Verethagna and Faith/Tantra. So for those calculations, you could just use capped merits and Taurine Cesti.
Total DMG = 3 + 0.11(377) + 28 + 11
Total DMG = 3 + 41.47 + 28 + 11
Total DMG = 3 + 41 + 28 + 11
Total DMG = 83
Losing 1 fSTR equates to a 1.20% decrease in melee damage.
So in either of these cases, it's very small, and unlikely to occur anyways.
Double Attack/Triple Attack, on the other hand, will raise your DoT immensely. The marginal gains can be approximated by the following (for double attack.)
% increase = 100*(n)/(100 + d). n represents the double attack increase some piece of gear provides while d is the double attack you had before adding that gear. So, in the case of brutal earring on a MNK/WAR with no other gear (n = 5 from earring d = 10 from double attack trait), the double attack increases their DoT by this much.
% increase = 100(5)/(100 + 10) = 500/110 = 4.54%.
That's huge in comparison to the pathetic advantage of more STR.
For Triple Attack, you could use the following.
% increase = 100*(2*m)/(100 + 2*t), m is the amount added by the new piece of gear, t is what you already had. So in the case of Epona's Ring, the DoT increase just from the Triple Attack portion, could be approximated by this.
% increase = 100*(2*3)/(100 + 2*0)
% increase = 600/100 =6.00%
Lastly, those two equations I gave aren't exactly correct. They don't take into account how double attack and triple attack overlap and the contribution of kick attacks (double attack can't proc on them) to your DoT. However, the changes they would only affect the results by fractions of a percent. So these are still pretty good ballpark figures, and adequately shows that meleeing in STR over Double Attack/Triple Attack is a horrible idea.