SAM: What Stats to focus on

Hello there,

i've just hit Lv70 with my Samurai and was about to get my gear and materias and meld Crit whereever I can like i did with most other jobs, because Crit is King. Right? Right??! But then again i did a quick google and found most ppl (regarding SAM) meld (Sks>)DHit>Det>(Sks>)Crit. I have to add, that most of these Posting where 3/4 year and older, so I start wondering what melds are useful -currently- to Samurai.

So my question: Which stats should I focus on?
I know there several ways to become useful to the party and I'm also more the guy to hit hard instead of hitting fast. Also I'm not the savage-player (at least not yet). I would like you to drop some recommendations/experiences. Any help is appreciated. :)

I had the same question, took a look on FF Logs and reviewed the gear of the best ranked SAMs via lodestone. It seems they lean more towards DH instead of just loading up on Crit. Almost no SS is melded on their gear.

Thank you. :)



Ich think this thread need a little *push*.

If you look at their gear stats and see no crit materia is that they are capped on crit gear is what we focus on more.

DH is then melded in followed by SS if your DH is capped on that piece. MNK/SAM gear most of the time already comes heavily crit stat.

Thats why on FFlogs yo udotn see alot slotted crit into their materia slots.


I always go Crit > DH > SS > Det

seems to be the way with most DPS

It really depends on what kind of build you're going for.

Samurai has a couple main builds.

The first, and most used in my experience, is the high skill speed build. Usually starts around 1150 and goes up from there with certain plateaus of GCD that help things align better (there's a different opener once you hit 1633+). Sks is good for Samurai for a few reasons- namely, like Black Mage does will spell speed, we benefit from it more than other melee DPS. More skill speed equal more kenki generated which means more Shintens, which is where a big bulk of our DPS comes from. For other secondary stats, DH tends to be favored because you'll be spamming a lot of Shintens. Sks isn't melded a lot because our gear already has a ton of it. I only meld it when I need to hit a certain sks time (which is usually just one materia max).

The second build is heavily crit based with lower skill speed. It does great damage, but tends to rely on a Bard, DRG and Ninja to really bring out its potential.