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to be honest i thin vit is third mainly because all ur gear u get for PLD gives VIT & STR so if you gear you're self right u can spend 15 points on dex 10 on str and 5 on vit, but as TirionCrey said, no endgame can't be tested. Plus the gear we have now is great but in a few months is going to look like level 1 armour with all this new stuff coming.
Ahh, the old healthpool vs mitigation chestnut. I dislike specs based around huge health pools and nothing else, but in endgame scenarios that's sadly usually the best option. I sort of agree with Lunar regarding needing to see the actual figures of STR/DEX mitigation, but from what i've seen testers find (like 40+ strength needed to boost block mitigation 1%? And needing similar Dex to gain 1% parry/block) I'm inclined to believe that Str and Dex arent providing enough mitigation per point to be noticeable.
The question that DOES need to be asked though - compare a 30 STR paladin to a 30 VIT. Ignoring the block amount... will his damage be noticeably higher? How much of this damage increase will translate into threat too? One thing we don't know at endgame -yet- is DPS requirements for fights and how much threat well-geared DPSers pump out. I doubt 30 strength will make a difference, but if actually holding aggro becomes a bigger issue for tanks, Str might still have value.
So few data we have here, and please don't apply the WoW model. The GCD is 2.5 seconds here, not 1.5. We don't even know if the parry/block/dodge will scale anything like WoW. The problem my healer says the most is not having enough time to do stuff rather than mana issues. I stack pure VIT now. I have a full colleague party on Skype to play with. The healer tells me, He never goes OOM, it's a faceroll to heal. Combined with the fact that bosses hit like a girl right now, I don't see any downside of stacking VIT. Maybe later into the game, when my healer starts saying, "xxxx dude why are you taking so much damage?", THAT'S when I feel it would be the right time to start getting mitigation. Coz the fact is, how strong the tank is, or how tanky the tanks is, is NOT judged by the tank. It is judged by the healer. He knows exactly when it's easier to heal.
I have currently put my 30 points into VIT. I'd say it is the safer option, especially for Paladin where +450HP (assuming 1 VIT = 15HP still - didn't pay it much attention, I will admit) - with a great deal of damage reduction that 450HP goes a lot further than it would appear (talking about effective HP). This is also true if it comes to taking high magic damage, because you can't block/parry/evade that and having more gives a bigger buffer to fall back.
On that, if Stoneskin does only affect physical damage, like Lunar seems to think (I cannot verify either side so I won't state any as fact), having an extra layer of (physical) damage mitigation actually seems to make Stoneskin more worthwhile against mobs with a lot of magic damage (Primals come to mind); take a 3k nasty magic attack from a 4500HP pool, you still have a 810HP Stoneskin to take some physical follow up hits.
It is possible that, upon knowing any boundaries for next tier block/parry rates, having a few points in STR or DEX might be beneficial in the long term, but under the current knowledge I still favour VIT over the other 2. I would probably go STR after VIT, just because it does boost damage along with mitigation (and I prefer to take less damage). I would put into DEX if, and only if, it boosts my rate up a tier and only so far as to take me up that tier.
I can see that the choice of stat allocation will change as the game develops, as new gear is obtained and as the calculations are tested and refined. For example, those 3 DEX you put in to take you up a tier may become useless when you have some gear which does that without those 3 points being there (basically, those 3 points are doing nothing). At that point, you would want to swap them for something else.
The general conclusion for me is that increasing STR and DEX, with regards to damage mitigated and proc rates only, depends entirely on whether it will have a long term benefit or not (i.e. over a % tier). VIT, on the other hand, will always have a benefit - each point is +15HP (or whatever value it is), and that is immediately transparent to you. Thus, the safer option until more testing comes and you can see what the effect of raising STR or DEX will have.
I side with Lunar here. VIT is an essential stat that cannot be ignored, but given how few abilities scale from max HP I don’t believe it to be the end-all-be-all many seem to think. STR is just as important to Paladins because it shores up our weakness of low damage = low threat, and boosts our mitigation which is the central theme of our form of tanking. While a good Paladin may be able to hold threat with easy regularity it doesn’t change the fact that more enmity is a good thing for when things go wrong, or even just a little bit sideways. A straight VIT PLD might lose threat when a BLM gets a string of crits or some adds spawn at an inopportune time, but a WAR or STR PLD would be able to manage these situations far better. Come End Game there will be times when your skill is tested and battles don’t go as planned, where your tidy rotations and strategies get thrown out the window and you need to go into damage control. Will a few hundred extra HP really help you there?
Over the course of a battle with any given enemy, who knows how much 26% parry chance and 44.44% block value will stack up to 20% pc and 40.44% bv** in overall mitigation, or how big a difference the requisite change to HP any variance in stat allocation would grant? Yes, it takes a large chunk of STR to reach a new tier, but each tier grants a % bonus, and I think 1% mitigation to every attack you block will add up to far more survivability than an extra 100 HP will.
**source: http://valk.dancing-mad.com/?page_id=227
I'm just going to throw into VIT and reallocate if needed. I got 7k seals from on and off FATE grinding, so 10k isn't bad. Keep up the research though! :D
I think 30 vit won't hurt honestly. It wouldn't diminish my ability to maintain threat and does give me some breathing room if I make some mistakes.
My suggestion is to look at the effect that the stats have as you gain in level. Low level materia is easy to come by. Draw your own conclusions as you level and then wait to allocate stats.
As to what's been said before, I would say that VIT would win out in theoretical benefits but there's really no way to draw conclusions yet, so I'm taking my own advice and waiting until it actually matters.
100% vitality. With our already insane mitigation makes our HP pool scale very very well. Also higher HP = stronger stoneskin. The little amount of damage/threat someone would gain from going 100% strength is so piss poor when compared to a DPS class out put. There would be only a handful of times that any points into strength would result in you having aggro over them.
dex in beta forums was calculated to be crap but i am not sure if they changed it since then.
just my 2 cents.