Question about Warrior/Marauder Gear...

Hi all!

So I'm trying out Marauder as my first tank class, and I'm NEARLY to level 30. In looking at some of the gear around level 29, I noticed that there are some pieces where you can't equip a helm with certain body armor or you can't equip boots with certain leg armor. I started noodling around with the stats to try and figure out if the trade off of losing a gear slot was worth it, but I couldn't quite get a mental grip on it.

The game seemed to think that the "best" armor set wasn't these pieces that used two slots, but the stats and iLvl seemed to say otherwise?

Does anybody know if the game's "Equip Best Armor" is smart enough to do this correctly, or should I be looking at this with a closer eye?

At earlier levels the recommended gear button might do some things that look peculiar. For combat jobs you mostly stop having to manual review its armor decisions at Lv50 and its accessories decisions after Lv60. At these levels gear stops including multiple role flags and you can reliably just go by the highest item level (IL) items available, until you start doing savage raiding and have multiple same-IL items with different secondary stats to choose from.

Prior to these levels you have multi-role-but-some-of-the-roles-are-wrong gear (accessories and caster/healer armor marked "all classes", non-tank physical dps gear marked for all "Disciples of War" including tanks), multi-slot gear (which consolidates multiple slots' stats into one slot), and lot more vendor gear (on which the IL is a lie because normal quality gear in reality has the stats of something with significantly lower IL) so you do have to do manual checks whenever equipping recommended gear.

Green/blue gear from duties will always be HQ (and therefore true to IL) even though they are not explicitly marked HQ; but crafted green/blue gear needs to be explicitly marked HQ or else the IL is a lie. If the gear recommender says something with a lower IL is higher, check if there's a quality difference that makes the main stat on the "higher" IL gear actually less than the main stat on the "lower" IL gear.

With specific regard to multi slot armor, a multi slot piece and a set of individual slot pieces will have the same stat totals if they have the same IL, quality, and intended role. That is, the vitality and main stat (STR/DEX/INT/MND) will be the same, and the total points of secondary stats will be the same (though not necessarily the exact same secondary stats).

It's usually correct, but the game isn't very smart with this particular situation where the body takes the head slot as well, but it doesn't matter if the game gets it wrong at that level. A healer will still keep you alive.

There isn't any gear that takes multiples slots from level 50 and up (if there is any at level 50, you are not likely to come across it). 1-50 is like the pilot episode of a TV show where they tried lots of things and a lot of it wasn't that good and got improved.

The tank damage stat is Strength and from level 30, their gear usually has GLA PLD MRD WAR DRK GNB. If it says DoW it's not as good and All Classes is probably worse, but this starts to stop after level 30 when jobs get unlocked.

Item Level is generally better in almost all cases and one of the only exceptions is crafted gear that isn't High Quality. When you compare two pieces of gear of the same item level, then you can start comparing substats and usually Critical Hit, Direct Hit Rate, then Determination are most preferred, but these are really subtle differences that don't need to matter until max level. Even when doing the hardest content at level 90, you can get away with not paying that sort of attention to the substats, although some people do that because they want to do their best down to every point of damage.

For a tank under level 50, just manually equip whichever gear gives you the highest DEF stat. The recommendation system gets confused because you have the ability to equip DPS gear, which changes from level 50 onwards (60 for accessories) to having role-exclusive gear.

Thanks for the tips, everyone! I really appreciate it! I'm enjoying my foray into tanking and you all have put my mind at ease.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

For a tank under level 50, just manually equip whichever gear gives you the highest DEF stat. The recommendation system gets confused because you have the ability to equip DPS gear, which changes from level 50 onwards (60 for accessories) to having role-exclusive gear.

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More specifically, the recommendation is based primarily on the main stat for the character. For tanks that's Vitality. So the recommendation algorithm will suggest the usable item with the most Vitality for tanks - but since non-tank gear provides just as much Vitality as tank gear on lower levels, the recommended item may not be suitable for a tank.