Dragoon - Crit, DET, or Skill Speed?

A simple question that I'm sure has been answered SOMEWHERE, but when I search for it all I find are arguments.

Which of those are the best for a Dragoon to take?

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...otation-Reborn

why post on a forum if you won't read something found 3 posts down?

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Originally Posted by Eclips

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...otation-Reborn

why post on a forum if you won't read something found 3 posts down?

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Gee, IDK, maybe because that post is enormous and I just want to know one thing? I searched through it already and couldn't find a definitive answer. Besides, if someone hadn't seen that thread before and wanted to ask the question I'm asking, do you think a thread that has a title about ROTATION would think it would be that detailed? When you think of a skill rotation you just think 'oh that'll tell me what rotation I should use for max DPS, not what stats I should have'.

Oh, and by the way, if you know the answer it would have taken you far less time to just reply with that one word (and a few filler letters for 10 char if needed) than to post what you did in a condescending manner.

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So You're Leveling a Dragoon...

...and you’re trying to plan out your future. Sadly, you are going to be disappointed. Visions of flying through the air fill every baby Dragoon’s head, leaping onto enemies then escaping quickly to safety, or jumping into the air to avoid those pesky ground AE attacks that every single enemy uses. Then you hit 30, get your Jump…and it kind of sucks ass. It does about as much damage as any regular ability might do and it doesn’t protect you from any boss abilities.

But, before we get too deep into the Dragoon nitty gritty, let us start from the beginning. Everyone has 30 stat points to spend by the time they hit 50, and you want to know where to put yours. The following weights (provided by EasyModeX) will help you both in choosing how to spend your stat points, and when selecting which piece of gear to wear. Here are the relative stat weightings for Dragoons:

Weapon Damage: 8.488
Strength: 1
Determination: .323
Crit: 0.184
Skill Speed: .152

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just took me 1 second to scroll down in this "enormous" post.
use the thread Eclips posted for you above.

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Originally Posted by OnyxStrife

blablabla

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Congratulations, you have now spent more time complaining about the answer that I gave you than it would have taken to just browse the post / click the link that I gave you.

Let's think about this logically. If you were at the point where you could min/max your gear, you wouldn't mind reading the post. Instead, you came here and lazily made another post to clutter this already cluttered forum. Perhaps next time respond with a thank you instead of a sarcastic remark for the help you have received. Just for the sake of the argument, I would think that a new person would browse through the very organized and detailed dragoon thread to which many people have contributed.

I hope my answer has helped you in your search and wish you good luck in your adventures in Eorzea.

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Originally Posted by Eclips

Congratulations, you have now spent more time complaining about the answer that I gave you than it would have taken to just browse the post / click the link that I gave you.

Perhaps next time respond with a thank you instead of a sarcastic remark for the help you have received.

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Pointing me to a thread that I've read before isn't helping me whatsoever, first of all.

As I had told you before, I've already read that thread. Point me to the line within OP's post where he says 'Pick (insert Crit, DET, or Skill Speed here) for maximum DPS' and I'll shut up, but I'm not seeing that anywhere. The only obvious thing I'm seeing is he says that Skill Speed is a bad option. After that it's a bunch of math, which I am bad at.

I know that every stat point needs to go into Strength, I now know that Skill Speed is not a good choice of the three, but I still do not know if he's saying Determination or Crit are better. It is not immediately clear to me which one to pick. The purpose of crit rate is obviously how often you land criticals. Basically at this point, what I am now asking, is whether or not it's better to stack critical rate or determination.

If I have the max crit chance I can possibly get, will my crits be doing more damage than if I were to have stacked determination and have an extremely low crit chance.

Not everyone is good at math or understanding exactly what this guy is saying in the following :

Weapon Damage: 8.488
Strength: 1
Determination: .323
Crit: 0.184
Skill Speed: .152

This sets strength as the baseline value of 1, and compares the rest of the stats to this baseline. Obviously weapon damage is the most valuable, coming out at 8 times the value of strength, followed by determination, then crit and skill speed. So for example, if you have to sacrifice 4 points of strength to obtain 15 points of skill speed, all you need to do is multiply 15*0.158=2.37 to see that 15 skill speed is really only worth 2.37 points of strength and so it is not worth the 4 lost strength points to switch gear.

In order to know what he's saying here you more than likely are going to have more knowledge of the game than I do right now. I HAVE TRIED to understand it, and that is the problem i'm getting at here. If I understood what he was saying in that part of the post I WOULD NOT HAVE POSTED THIS THREAD. I don't understand why you need to be rude about it.

Looks like you understand the math to me. If not, you can find a more detailed explanation here.

If that doesn't work, I'll go ahead and throw out the sarcasm and explain this in easier to understand terms.

For the average dragoon, as you start gearing at 50, you'll find lots of new gear and stats to explore. As a baseline (as you can see here in the weights that you've linked,) you will be using

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Weapon Damage: 8.488
Strength: 1
Determination: .323
Crit: 0.184
Skill Speed: .152

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as your stat weights. This is a list of all the stats relative to strength. When you're looking to upgrade your weapon, start by looking at the weapon's damage. If the weapon's damage is even 1 or more higher than your current weapon, it is probably a good upgrade. I can't think of any weapons that aren't linear in the weapon damage + strength increase at 50, so you can't go wrong choosing the higher ilvl / weapon damage upgrade.

Now let's look at the other stats. Strength, Determination, Critical Hit, and Skill Speed.
Strength is your main stat. Make sure you're getting it when you can. With the current items in the game, chances are you're going to want to upgrade to the highest ilvl item that you have, and it most likely has more strength.

Determination increases your damage done to the mobs.
Critical Hit increases your chance to critically hit.
Skill speed lowers your animation lock / global cooldown when using abilities.

According to the stat weights, 1 str = ~3 Det = ~5.4 crit = ~6.6 skill speed

So let's look at two items: The Inferno Bangle of Striking (i90 ifrit ex bracelet) vs the Hero's Bracelet of Slaying (i90 myth bracelet)
Inferno: Strength +13, Accuracy +16, Critical Hit Rate +11
Hero: Strength +13, Accuracy +11, Determination +11
So if we add up the stat weights referencing the table we keep quoting, we can see that the Inferno has an item value of : 15.024 vs the Hero's value of : 16.553.

We don't weigh accuracy because there is a hard cap for it, but as you can see, the Hero's bracelet maths out to a much better value for the item.
In reality, this is going to increase our dps by very little. However, when you optimize all of your pieces to make a "best in slot" set, you can significantly increase your dps output through "min/maxing" your gear.

Just to throw out some insight from an i90 dragoon who has completed all current content and has almost every piece of dragoon gear available, these maths work out best.
Dragoons use a combo system and rely heavily on dots and auto attacks, which makes skill speed pretty much shit for us. Critical hit is good, but the difference between having 400 critical rate and 500 critical rate is something like 4-5% critical hit chance. This seems like a good increase until you realize that stacking critical hit to 500 gets you about 17-18% critical hit chance in full i90 gear. This really isn't much considering you have life surge which gives you a sure crit.

tldr; Str > Det > Crit > Skill Speed //// 1 str = ~3 Det = ~5.4 crit = ~6.6 skill speed

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If I have the max crit chance I can possibly get, will my crits be doing more damage than if I were to have stacked determination and have an extremely low crit chance.

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I went ahead and pulled this quote out to kind of help you understand the bigger picture of how this works.
The amount of damage output you do overtime takes into consideration your determination, your critical hit rate, and your skill speed, no matter whether you stack one or the other. Fortunately / Unfortunately in FFXIV, the actual gear customization you can choose is very little. When you get the max critical you can, you won't be lowering your determination really all that much, and vice versa. Let me find the BLM graph someone linked to help you kind of visualize this.

http://i.imgur.com/KvihQt0.jpg source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...TDVkM1E#gid=50

You can see that it is for black mages, and they have different stat weights. But take note that there is very little change in the amount of damage being done based on whether someone stacks something or not. The same big idea applies here for dragoons.

But really, the best way to answer your question is to use math to determine the values (which we have listed here for you.) If you were to ask me to explain to you in a couple of sentences how to determine stats for your dragoon, I would say it like this:

Stack strength, then determination because it is worth about 1/3rd of strength. Critical hit is worth about half of your determination, and skill speed is worth a little bit less than that.

To further explain this, let's say you're fighting a monster for 60 seconds. That gives you something like 24 attacks. If you have a 15% critical rate, 3-4 of those attacks (excluding dot ticks) and your auto attacks are going to critically hit. If you have 20% critical hit rate, 6 of your attacks are likely to critically hit. I think the highest I've ever seen posted on this forum from a parser is a guy who super stacked crit at the expense of ever strength and he managed to only hit about 25% critical rate. So let's say you're stacking determination with lower crit, down to even 10% critical hit. That means about 2-3 of your attacks are likely to critically hit. However, when stacking determination, those other 20 attacks are all guaranteed to do more damage. According to all of these guys who have been mathing it out for a while, they suggest that determination actually increases your damage by a significantly larger amount than upping your critical hit rate would, for a dragoon. Once you move on from 24 attacks to something like 100 attacks, the numbers start to even out and because even more obvious.

I find Crit/Det to be more optimal, since a lot of your bonus damage comes from your buffed life surge crit, and the jumps, and leg sweep also. since skill speed doesn't reduce CD on any of those, it's a wasted stat for those abilities.
That being said, my record dps for T4 involves a lot of skill speed (well over 500).

I am by no means a 'BiS' dragoon. I got a lot of crap I'm not supposed to want on my gear set. However, I'm also a very high DPS dragoon. Ultimately the stat you want is weapon damage and strength, anything else is icing on the cake, and it will come down to how well you dance with that pole in ur hands... ahem, i mean how well you use that spear you have...

So if you want to be conventional take Det/Crit, if you want to be special take SS/Det, if you want to be awesome, get GOOOOOOOOOD

WD > STR > DET > CRT > SS.