Different attack types used different balance points, where piercing highest chance to actually hit at all, but had the least chance of being a glancing blow, while blunt attacks had the least difference between full hits and glancing blow strikes, slashing in between. Weapons had further modifiers for 'impact' (a multiplier of attack power that dealt lingering suppression on the target - slowing, delaying, or canceling its abilities or movements), 'penetration' (which multiplied the attack's impact to attempt to ignore armor completely, and 'balance', which controlled how enemy target's armor mitigation curve - how far one has to penetrate enemy armor for decent effect. Penetration and impact worked against each other slightly; the more penetration (damage priority), the less impact (mitigation priority) dealt. Blunt weapons tended to have the lowest pen, piercing the highest, while both blunt and piercing weapons needed relatively little. Slashing weapons, potentially the most devastating, needed fairly high impact and penetration in order to meet their armor-piercing needs. (Note: penetration literally removed enemy armor, adjusting its balance, essentially chipping away at the part that would be glanced - so it made sense to, say, open with piercing (DRK strike-lead), follow up with blunt to enlarge the opening (MNK in pursuit), and rip through with slashing (DRK reaper). On paper it sounds a overly complicated, but in-game it worked just as one would realistically expect. All that's really needed is to keep things roughly consistent, so that these factors need not be re-theory-crafted with each new gear-set or raid tier, if ever.