Available stats and their impact on BiS
Hola!
Full time Paladin here to post on general end-game gear. That being said, I will be using Warrior as an example!
I recently started a discussion on Reddit regarding Warrior secondary stats and it's prompted me to also post here on the official forums!
The initial post can be read <here> and was essentially pitting 4 different secondary stats against each other and discussing what benefit each would give.
The majority of the post was regarding Parry vs Skill speed
Parry
- Carries a lot of weight per stat point, doesn't require huge amounts to see improvement
- Unreliable form of defense as player is suspect to RNG
- Only parries mobs that are in front of your character
When I misstated that large amounts of Parry only granted the player 2%-3% Parry chance, I was corrected.
A Reddit user posted
Followed by
Skill speed
- Allows for faster Wrath stacking- Inner beast buff up frequently which is a reliable form of mitigation
- More flexibility when using Storm's abilities
- Skill speed as a stat holds very little weight, requiring a large amount to see any difference
A Reddit user posted
Quote:
you can say thta you need 859 SS to knock of .5 seconds per GCD. but if you think about even half that, .25 seconds per GCD, that's about 10% off of the 'cool down' of inner beast. which means you're getting 6 seconds of less damage every 18 seconds instead of every 20 seconds. Every 10 rotations, you're also getting another Inner beast in compared to baseline. which is another ~500 health or so. the .25s off per GCD is also a lot more easy to achieve.
Both have their pros and cons.
However, pushing aside which of the two stats is better, players will find that only Parry can be stacked as the majority of iLv. 90 gear bottlenecks the player!
A Reddit user posted
Quote:
Assuming warrior and assuming we're still going for full Vitality as priority stat, and assuming we'll get our Accuracy in slots that don't have ilvl 90 items with skill speed, our options look like this:
•Weapon: 26
•Head: 15
•Wrist: 16
•Ring: 11
•Neck: 16
•Ear: 16
•Total: 100
At a base skill speed of 341, that puts us at 441, just shy of the 442 breakpoint.
http://i.imgur.com/WuEndGQ.png
Which means you'd be gaining a .09s decrease in your GCD of 2.5, for a magnificent 2.41s Global Cooldown.
That is horribe, horrible itemization. Especially considering you need every ilvl90 piece of gear with Skill Speed on it, and for every other slot, you'll be needing to make it up for it with accuracy pieces, which at ilvl 90 do not all exist.
It's a shame that in its current form, FFXIV encourages players to all follow a similar playstyle should they be on the same job, especially when there is clear evidence of players looking to branch out into different styles!
Whilst the difference between stacking Parry and Skill speed isn't going to change a player's approach to a fight tremendously, it is an encouraging start to a variety of diversely statted jobs!
I hope to see more stat options available to each job in the future, or at least a respectable amount of Skill speed available to Warrior.
tl;dr
Portions of the community have shown interest in statting their jobs in different ways to accommodate different play styles. FFXIV however has a small selection of viable equipment with a lacklustre selection of stats causing players to funnel into a single style of play.
I hope 2.2 has more options available! :cool: