When is an i100 item better than an i110? - I.E. ST Hands

I am not telling anyone to focus on BiS and ignore an upgrade, that is not what was being suggested.

What was being suggested was that the i100 > i110. And if you had access to both, it would simply not be true.

It may indeed be a better usage of your soldiery to buy a different piece, if you got this drop, duh. that is not what was being said.

In fact it is MOST def worth your time to farm up the ST chest and not waste soldiery.


Please refer to the OPs question. He is not talking about any of this. He is specifically talking about BiS, so please stop telling me BiS is irrelevant.

even more to the point he is talking about the hands, and that is even more wrong.

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Originally Posted by Rbstr

If you want to do more damage it is better. It simply is more damage. Are there other ways of doing that? Yeah and they will want to be explored first. But really, you're losing negligible numbers of defense stats for only marginal DPS gains with the swap: Swapping an accessory is a much larger change in HP than going i110 to i100 tank chests.

The way I see it is that, if you haven't upgraded the Noct Lorica and you don't need oils, the ST chest is something to get and will keep just fine until you can get a t9 chest.


Lets be "realistic" here: This argument is over insignificant amounts of defense and damage. If you've already got the i110 it's just not a priority when you could be gettings oils or UATs or gearing alts.

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I think the problem is that the first sentence of this post is 100% accurate, and the rest of it ignores the question in the OP in favor of epeen wagging.

The benefit of the i100 piece is the extra DPS you'd get by wearing it. That doesn't make it better than an i110 piece unless you do nothing but OT OR you can get away with swapping it out without lowering your healer's DPS and you've already swapped out all of the jewelry you can.

Yeah, it's a great alternative to a weathered lorica. Yeah having it means you can focus on upgrading other gear or gear for other classes since the benefit of going from the i100 armor to a 110 lorica is smaller than the benefit from going from a weathered to unweathered lorica. And yeah, it's a desirable piece if you're putting together a DPS set to speed up lower ilvl content. But as a piece of pure tanking gear, it's not better than a 110 by any stretch of the imagination.

EDIT: this is not a response to what's directly above,that's new relative to this post.

Yeah but the whole thread is predicated on what lots of us see as wrong "BiS" weights and worry about rates of return on parry. He's asking a far more general question about stat weighting in the end (like "since Vit>all else" as stated in OP).

It's also about targeting gear to reach BiS most efficiently.
If you had a sand and a Weathered Lorica and the ST chest just dropped, would you use the ST chest and upgrade something else with that sand instead?
I think you should barring other reasons like accuracy issues.

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Originally Posted by Rbstr

EDIT: this is not a response to what's directly above,that's new relative to this post.

Yeah but the whole thread is predicated on what lots of us see as wrong "BiS" weights and worry about rates of return on parry. He's asking a far more general question about stat weighting in the end.

It's also about targeting gear to reach BiS most efficiently.
If you had a sand and a Weathered Lorica and the ST chest just dropped, would you use the ST chest upgrade and something else with that sand instead?
I think you should barring other reasons like accuracy issues.

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I like this as it is directed at the bigger question which should be addressed. Also as a quick answer to the accuracy loss in the lorica, you can make up for them by going for the T7 pants instead of the noct breeches.

And to the OP, BiS is a term with A LOT of caveats. What role will you be playing the most? Will you be MT, OT? Does the content hit excessively hard or is it just mechanic based? Do you have major DPS checks or just need to survive? Answer these and you can generate a "BiS" for your circumstances. In my opinion, BiS changes depending on the situation you are placed in and what stats are needed most for it. There isn't just 1 set of gear that is the best for everything.

I think some people may have misinterpreted my earlier post.

I wasn't suggesting that Phlegethon's Cuirass was BiS for tanking (nor was anyone else, as far as I can see).

Rather, I was suggesting that it's the only ilvl sacrifice, besides accessories, that makes any kind of sense, as it does outperform the i110 alternatives in terms of DPS (and ONLY DPS, as far as I'm concerned).

Also, it's certainly one of the least, if not THE least, efficient DPS increases for tanks. As such, it's of the lowest priority (if a priority at all; it's fairly negligible).

Quite frankly there isn't a situation out there that would make the i100 stand out more than the i110 in any meaningful way on anything worthwhile. Why? Well frankly DPS on trash mobs can easily fluctuate due to Crits and any overkill damage from a deathblow. Even over the course of 30 minutes there's no way to accurately average out DPS to any reliable degree unless you mark DPS for each individual trash kill which can be hard in dungeons and raids where group pulls are common, and other stats such as defense and VIT are going to show more direct returns even if your over-geared for said content. Now get on a boss or something with some actual HP and you might see a difference in that slight if existent DPS increase, but that also becomes dependent on if you'll be taking damage output away from others as well.

Regarding whether i100 > i110 in any situation

Look at the name of your role. Look at the color of your lovely blue square. It's blue, and it says Tank. This means, as many in this thread have said, that your first priority is to survive. Trading Vit, Defense, and Strength(not necessarily for damage, but for the potency increase on Block/Parry) for a literally negligible increase in damage is not worth it. Even if you're an OT Tank in a fight that only needs a single tank, your job hasn't suddenly shifted completely to "maximize damage". Remember that you're the one who has to take the boss if something crazy happens that kills the MT. If you're operating at a loss to survivability because of increasing your damage, that crazy thing is going to kill you too and then it's a wipe.

When your gear, your party, and especially your healers are ready, only then can avenues of increasing Tank damage be pursued. Those avenues are accessories. Only accessories. You're taking a big HP hit by doing this, so you need your left side to make up for it by providing other mitigation. Putting on a full compliment of DPS accessories can increase your STR by 70+, and that is not insignificant. That being said, Coil is the place you must be most careful in doing this. It's not a decision to make alone, as you need a party that can handle a squishier tank.

Regarding the thought that Parry is useless

I've seen three criticisms levied against Parry in this thread, and I'd like to discuss all three. This is not a treatise to claim that Parry is secretly a godly stat and you're all blind. This is simply a treatise to say it's not useless.

1. It doesn't increase your Effective Health Pool by much: This is more a matter of opinion unless SE decides to comment on it for some reason, but I don't think increasing eHP is the purpose of Parry at all. I once separated the concept of Mitigation, to "decrease the severity of something", into two camps. The first is "Active Mitigation", consisting of actions you intentionally perform to decrease the damage done to you. These include cooldowns, your movement during battle, etc. The second is "Passive Mitigation", things that increase your survivability by merely existing. These are Defense(for obvious reasons), Parry/Block(As they're slaves to RNG), and Raw Health(as a 500 damage attack is less severe if your max health is 8000 than if it is 2000). Active Mitigation through cooldowns is the act of manually increasing your eHP for a short while, making attacks during that time less severe because you technically have more health. Passive Mitigation mostly works to help your Raw Health, the base for the eHP equation. Defense directly increases it like a good little stat, but Parry is by definition unreliable and therefore exists only as an occasional good omen. As it serves no other purpose than to reduce the damage of single attacks at random, it's the kind of thing that is often ignored or taken for granted in the grand scheme of things but is only noticed when it's gone. It exists to make you go "oh, that's nice" whenever it happens or make you thank RNGesus occasionally when you Parry an attack so big that you reduced it by 1000 or more. Your eHP isn't much higher for it, but you just might have saved your healers 133 MP, and that's pretty okay to me. Besides, it's the only secondary stat we have that can help with mitigation, so it'd be a shame not to at least try to use it ;)

2. It has very low returns: What was the number Valk dug up? 0.075% rate per point, with a base of 10%? That would mean that 1% Parry Rate = 13-14 points of Parry. That is, every 13-14 points of Parry beyond your base of 341(Why we even have these bases if they don't do a thing is beyond me). This means that, if you were to have 600 Parry, which is perfectly possible in the i110 tier of gear, your parry rate would be approximately 29.4%. That's decently close to 1/3, so one can hope that they're Parrying one of every 3-4 attacks for WAR, and one out of every 3-4 attacks which are not blocked for PLD(If the whole "Parry is checked only if Block fails" blurb is true). This, of course, assumes you're being blasted with attacks which can be parried in the first place. Again, more opinion, but that seems like a decent number to me. If we were to increase the per point allocation to 0.1% or something, that Parry rate would jump to 35.9%. Even the far smaller increase to 0.080 jumps to 30.72, an over 1% increase. The fact that Parry isn't super high gives us room to neglect if it we so wish. If it were to be buffed to allow for us to reach a rate of 50%(I feel like that's a minimum rate at which it will actually visibly matter for eHP purposes), for example, what complaints people currently have about how useless it looks would be swiftly be replaced with whining that Tanks no longer have a choice in how they wish to gear and that they must stack Parry or nobody will want them. As it is now, the stat won't make or break a Tank, but it's not going to hinder survival either.

3. Too many attacks at endgame cannot be parried: This is factually false. Of all of the encounters I've tanked in what could be called the endgame, I've encountered exactly 2 fights in the endgame where zero parryable attacks existed: Ultima HM and Ramuh EX(addendum: I've heard healers complain about how Tanks take tons of damage in these two specific fights. Food for thought?). All other encounters use either all physical or a mix of both, but more attacks that directly target the Tank are usually physical. Examples:

Siren: The funny example. For some reason, her songs are physical. It amuses me every time I parry one.
Garuda: Autoattacks, Wicked Wheel. I think I've parried a Slipstream before, but I may have been hallucinating. Unparryable attacks are Mistral Shriek, and plumes exploding, both of which can be avoided and don't directly target the Tank.
Titan: Autoattack, Mountain Buster, that swing he does before a Mountain Buster. Unparryable attacks are Plumes and Bombs, but those never directly target the Tank(well, except plumes if lots of the party is dead x.x).
Ifrit: Autoattack, Swipes. Incinerate is an unparryable attack that directly targets the Tank.
Levi: Rare enemy that directly targets the Tank with more magic than physical. Autoattacks are physical. Slams and dashes are parryable, but don't directly target Tanks.
Mog: All attacks that target the party are magical. All attacks which target the tanks are physical.
Twintania: Autoattack, Plummet, Death Sentence, Divebombs. Fireballs cannot be parried, but don't always target the tank.
Rafflesia: Autoattack, Bloody Caress. Slugs only use physical. Spit, Leafstorm, Acid Rain, and Rotten Stench are magical but don't directly target tanks except for Acid Rain sometimes.
Melusine: Everything she and the first two sets of adds do is physical except for Fireballs. Everything the final add does is magical. I don't think it even autoattacks.
Avatar: Autoattacks are parryable but Diffusion Ray is not. Everything Dreadknights do is physical. Nothing that targets the party except for a brainjacked tank is parryable.
Turn 9: All of the important attacks that you really want to mitigate can be parried(Both claws, beak, autoattacks). I've never seen a parry on Blight, so I'm assuming it isn't.

Conclusion: It is incredibly rare to see Parry become useless due to an encounter that either uses all magic or uses magic more than physical.

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Originally Posted by AIex

Skill speed on WAR isn't useless because of 2 things. 1 - After a certain threshold, you can fit an extra attack during berserk. 2 - Faster generation of Wrath
Skill speed on PLD in my opinion has less of an effect and CAN be bad for TP, but if you can manage a stoneskin every 3-4 RoH rotations, your TP will last. (TP burn as OT for max dmg, RoH rotation + stoneskin as MT for damage mitigation + TP conservation)

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But an added attack here or there means nothing if it drains your TP and you're GCD effectively becomes 3 seconds because you're waiting on every TP tic to be able to do something. I mean if you had a BRD willing to lower their DPS to get your TP back sure I guess, but good luck convincing them to waste MP/DPS just to get a tanks TP back.

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Originally Posted by Kaonis

But an added attack here or there means nothing if it drains your TP and you're GCD effectively becomes 3 seconds because you're waiting on every TP tic to be able to do something. I mean if you had a BRD willing to lower their DPS to get your TP back sure I guess, but good luck convincing them to waste MP/DPS just to get a tanks TP back.

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He would also need something that would live long enough to actually get that extra attack down the line, and from personal experience anything that isn't a boss in Coil or ST really doesn't live more than a minute unless your with a terribly undergeared group.

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Originally Posted by Kaonis

back.

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This is a big tanking misconception.

First, by the time a tank is low on TP so are other players. During t8 I run out of TP about the same time as our MNK. But that also accounts for tomahawk/lobbing twice per dread. That is also the most TP consuming fight in the game and I require one song.

Second, the most important TP spent for a tank is in the first minute while establishing hate. More SS equals faster hate gain which plants hate that much faster.

I run out of TP much faster on PLD then WAR. So WARs stacking SS to get an extra attack in during zerk or unchained is a smart move from a threat and DPS standpoint.