Opinion for Tank Gear

With the new gear out for a while, I’ve been wondering something.

What would be better; the Rinascita gear with full Materia, or the Lunar Gear?

I know eventually the Lunar Gear can be upgraded to 630, especially when the new Alliance Raid comes out eventually (hopefully in the next patch!), but for now I am comparing it between the 610 and 620, since I don’t fully understand what most of the info box says and can’t find the answers anywhere online.

I would think the Lunar Gear would be best, since the Strength and Vitality increases would do more than what the Materia can do, but I wanted to be sure before I fully invest in anything. Especially with how expensive the new gear is.

I also mainly play as Warrior as a Tank, if it depends on classes. And I already do have 610 gear all around, some being Purgatory until I can afford the better gear, or upgrade to Lunar if that is better.

iLevel>Substats.

Stat weight always favors core stats like STR and VIT over substats by a substantial amount. So even things like 5 STR/VIT will far out weigh any crit/det or other sub stats. So a higher item level item with skillspeed/tenacity will be better than a lower ilvl with crit/det.

The 60 extra substats you get from pentamelded materia on Rinscita gear is roughly equivalent to 9 Strength. So for chest and leg gear, the 620 Lunar gear is usually better.

For head, hands, and feet gear, it's a close trade-off, and you have to look at the specific substats you're getting. The priority for substats on WAR is Crit>>>DH(melds)>DET>SkS>>TNC.

That's a bit of a simplification, and you'd have to look into stat tiers and GCD alignment to know exactly how much SkS to aim for. I wouldn't worry about that though, unless you're doing Savage/Ultimate raids. If/when you get to that point, you can look up the optimal builds in The Balance discord server.

If you wanna know how all this is figured out, you can look up Allagan Studies.

TL;DR: Item level is more valuable than materia most of the time. But optimizing around substats can get you 0.5% more damage if you know what you're doing. It's not worth the time for most people though.

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Originally Posted by Leonerdo

you'd have to look into stat tiers and GCD alignment to know exactly how much SkS to aim for.[/B]

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There's a very simple answer for warrior, absolutely none. Unless you really need to squeeze in an extra GCD before downtime, and that is entirely fight specific, having 0 skill speed on your gear makes it so that your Upheaval and Inner Release never drift if you press them on cooldown.

Interesting… so basically every 9 points in Strength is the same as 60 Determination. Knowing that will REALLY help in the future! Thanks for giving me specifics like that!

I often see a lot of people with gear that has the max number of Materia in each piece of gear instead of the Blue gear, and I figured it was because they had that there until they get one if the better gear for it, such as the Lunar Gear. But after seeing so many, I had to wonder if it was because of some specific builds or if that gear was slightly better because of numbers from the Materia.

The game really should tell you about the 60 points of material equals 9 points of Strength/Intelligence. Now I can finally calculate which one is better far more easily!

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Originally Posted by M_Red

The game really should tell you about the 60 points of material equals 9 points of Strength/Intelligence. Now I can finally calculate which one is better far more easily!

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If you want to go really in-depth use this https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...#gid=772715780
Make a copy, choose the job at the bottom, put in your current gear set + melds and then put in a 2nd set with whatever upgraded piece of gear you want to get, it will calculate how much you gain from that piece.
It can be a bit iffy with skill speed because excel can't really calculate the correct damage increase for something that affects your rotation.

In nearly every circumstance, ilvl wins out here. Occasionally, we'll get a rare exception where a crafted Crit/Det piece can beat out a non-upgraded tome piece with SkS/Ten due to tanks not naturally getting Direct Hit. This actually happened last tier where 2.45 gcd tanks ran a crafted ring.

Generally speaking though, you always go for ilvl. Only healers have a bit more of a decision here because unlike Tenacity, Piety doesn't have any damage value. It's a complete loss. So you only want exactly the amount you'll need and nothing else.

There are cases where the pentamelded gear can be superior, but with changes made to accessories in the last expansion (2 slots for melds instead of just 1 for non-crafted gear), they effected closed that loophole.

Take a look at the Rinascita Ring of Fending vs the Lunar Envoy Ring of Fending. The tomestone gear has:
+10 iLvl (just a number technically)
+9 STR
+9 VIT
+3 crit
+2 det

Since they share the same substats, you can only get an extra 36 crit (or DH) with the melds. If accessories worked like they did in SB, you could get +72 in substats, like crit. And that might actually make a difference. But you would need a piece of crafted gear with crit/DH +72 from melds compared to Lunar Envoy gear with tenacity/skill speed. I feel like that happened more often in SB (poor sub-stats on tomestone gear that could be beaten with pentamelded crafted gear). That extra guaranteed materia slot makes the argument fairly moot.

In SB, my BRD's tomestone weapon had +1 damage but had skill speed and determination. Whereas the crafted bow had crit/dh and was pentamelded. I compared those two exhaustively and found the crafted bow was indeed superior.

However, I think instances like that are few and far between. It isn't like we can meld STR onto accessories anymore. Back then, crafted accessories were often superior to tomestone accessories. Generally speaking, iLvl is king.