Artifact aremor (Chest + Legs) are better than VA, right?

<Solved> Too stupid to notice gear has def/mdef stats >.>;

The reason I am asking this is because I did a calculation of VA legs vs 210 Artifact Legs, and the VA legs were better. So, I would like to ask if anyone could give some advice if I am doing something wrong.

I am about spend 1600 esos so I really want to make sure my calculations are correct. I used Dervys stat weights (https://dervyxiv.wordpress.com/) to come up with my calculations. For this, I have used the following stat weights:

Str: 1.000
DET: 0.133
CRT: 0.158
SS: 0.125
Parry: 0.1

Void Ark Armor (Chest+Legs) weight score: 413.639
Artifact Armor (Chest+Legs) weight score: 433.775
Artifact Armor w/o Parry weighted in: 427.175

I am show that when you have the 210 versions of the Artifact armor (Legs + Chest) that they are better than the VA armor. Is this correct?

EDIT: Sorry, this is WAR Artifact gear (and others too, I'm sure).

I'm at work and can't pull the stats now but IIRC the 210 tank gear is without a doubt better than the VA gear due to the increased defense and the higher primary stat values alone.

I am assuming you are speaking about the pally eso gear, just glancing over the stat weights you provided and Ariyala's it would look like the Eso chest and the VA pants provide the highest damage weight combination.

This is a big problem I have with the DPS tank meta obsession, is that it entertains the idea of piddly DPS secondaries actually outweighing increased DEF/MDEF and STR on higher ilvl gear. It shouldn't even be a question. I love my deeps as much as the next guy, but it should never be a thing to consider increased det/crit/whatever over increased STR and defense stats. DPS can make those kinds of concessions but....That's where I draw the line as a tank.

Upgrade your ESO gear. And if its really that important to you to max out your det or whatever, hit the Diadem. 210>200, period.

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Originally Posted by Dante_V

I am assuming you are speaking about the pally eso gear, just glancing over the stat weights you provided and Ariyala's it would look like the Eso chest and the VA pants provide the highest damage weight combination.

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Technically yeah, but if the OP really cared that much about that piddly difference, they wouldn't be a Lalafell.

I'd get the 210 Eso pants over the VA pants unless there was something better that can be purchased with the Esoterics in the meanwhile.

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Originally Posted by xvshanevx

I am about spend 1600 esos so I really want to make sure my calculations are correct. I used Dervys stat weights (https://dervyxiv.wordpress.com/) to come up with my calculations. For this, I have used the following stat weights:

Str: 1.000
DET: 0.133
CRT: 0.158
SS: 0.125
Parry: 0.1

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Parry does not have a stat weight; arbitrarily using 0.1 for it will only mislead you. The stat weights are for damage only; which Parry contributes nothing to.

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Originally Posted by CGMidlander

The stat weights are for damage only; which Parry contributes nothing to.

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Technically, it does for an MT DRK. But I think Parry is too maligned for people to care enough to math that out with how jaded they are on the subject. I'd love to see it happen one day though.

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Originally Posted by Jamillion

increased defense

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I forgot that there are def/mdef XD thanks

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

Snip.

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Ya, I forgot there was a def/mdef stat on the equipment. Ya, I don't run diadem nor relic. And, yes, I am not a big fan of the DPS-tank meta, but its something we have to deal with until the devs address the situation.

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Originally Posted by CGMidlander

arbitrarily using 0.1 for it will only mislead you. The stat weights are for damage only; which Parry contributes nothing to.

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Originally Posted by xvshanevx

Artifact Armor w/o Parry weighted in: 427.175

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

But I think Parry is too maligned for people to care enough to math that out with how jaded they are on the subject. I'd love to see it happen one day though.

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I personally would love to see Parry removed and replaced with a more effective secondary defensive stat. Such as Versitiltiy currently found in WoW. That secondary Increases total damage and increases flat damage reduction.

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Originally Posted by xvshanevx

I personally would love to see Parry removed and replaced with a more effective secondary defensive stat. Such as Versitiltiy currently found in WoW. That secondary Increases total damage and increases flat damage reduction.

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You're like the 45987209385702345th person to have this thought. This perfectly highlights the biggest problem with Parry which is that it doesn't really increase damage and no defensive stat will ever be valued unless it is "free" kinda like Piety or unless people can have their cake and eat it too (hybrid offensive and defensive stat). Parry could proc 100% mitigation instead of 20% and people would still hate it because its not damage and the playerbase of this game is conditioned to think that way.

I'd still love to see MT DRK math on Parry. Its the only instance of parry providing a DPS return.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

You're like the 45987209385702345th person to have this thought.

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Jesus, calm your fuckin' tits, and stop being such a drama queen.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

Parry could proc 100% mitigation instead of 20% and people would still hate it because its not damage and the playerbase of this game is conditioned to think that way.

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The parry stat is disliked because it's random mitigation, something that can't be relied on when a boss is using tankbuster #378 that you'd use an actual cooldown on anyway. (Sentinel, Inner Beast etc.) Because you already used a cooldown to lower the incoming damage from said tankbuster, getting a parry would just be overkill, and will just result in overhealing from the heal that gets tossed to you moments later. It would be slightly useful against auto-attacks, but those are mostly negligible.
Also doesn't help that magic can't be parried, so that lowers the amount of attacks that could possibly be parried by a significant amount.

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Originally Posted by Nezerius

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This is another common saying, but I don't think it holds water. You don't even consider parrying when a tankbuster comes because you already have a CD rotation for it, of course. Its kind of a null-and-void discussion and doesn't even apply. No matter what a given tank thinks of his/her parry stat no one counts on it for a TB, so measuring it by that yardstick is not an effective judge of value because that's not what anyone hopes to utilize it for.

Auto attack damage is not negligible, its a huge percentage of the damage that you take in a given encounter, and parry mitigates hundreds of thousands of damage over the course of a fight now. Obviously none of it is anticipated by healers and it doesn't really change much, but it does happen. But the bottom line is, it didn't help you end the fight faster, and that is why it is undervalued. DPS is still the most effective mitigation due to raid design in this game. RNG has little to do with it unless the RNG was so extreme that you had a chance to go an entire phase of a physical fight without parrying. You actually parry quite a bit, its just not really helping anything in its current form.

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Originally Posted by xvshanevx

Jesus, calm your fuckin' tits, and stop being such a drama queen.

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Sorry my briefly stopping to call out your unoriginal suggestion had to send you into a tailspin of vulgarities and name-calling. Doesn't change the fact that its something that too many people say without really stopping to consider the core of the problem, which was the point of that post.

Such a stat still would only be taken for its DPS value, and if that value was higher than, say, DET, there'd never be a reason to use DET ever again.

Attaching defense to an offensive secondary just feels lazy. There should be more than one defensive secondary stat and it should be a choice, at least among most of them, as to what you choose, DPS or mitigation. And having something that just flatly reduces damage by xyz percentage, across the board 100% of the time does little to differentiate it from defensive stats that we already have (def/mdef). DPS secondaries all boost your damage, but in different ways. Det is more like a flat, across the board increase albeit very small, crit is RNG, and SS doesn't actually boost your damage outside of DoTs, but the rate at which you deal that damage. They really ought to come up with a creative, varied spread of tanking secondaries if they're going to do it at all, which I doubt, personally.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

Parry could proc 100% mitigation instead of 20% and people would still hate it because its not damage and the playerbase of this game is conditioned to think that way.

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Eh. If it was 100% mitigation would make it better but still not really usable per se because of the RNG factor.

People don't like it because it's unreliable. If it was reliable, it would actually be viable.

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Originally Posted by xvshanevx

Jesus, calm your fuckin' tits, and stop being such a drama queen.

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The irony in this post friggin kills me.

The only way to make Parry, as it is, valuable is to ramp up auto attack damage so high that the tank would need to be in tank stance, both healers would need to heal, and have the tank spike so frequently without parrying that you basically had to just stack this one stat and nothing else unless it just happens to be on the Parry piece. Parry is a flawed stat, there are many ways to make it better but xvshanevx's is fine. It would give us an actual worthwhile stat, a choice between being more bulky and durable to allow for more potential healer DPS or to use a more offensive build that prioritizes your own damage. It's not perfect, but it's a million times better than what we have now.

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Originally Posted by Ashkendor

Eh. If it was 100% mitigation would make it better but still not really usable per se because of the RNG factor.

People don't like it because it's unreliable. If it was reliable, it would actually be viable.

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The individual procs are RNG, but the total mitigation over the course of a given fight at a given parry rate would always be somewhere between x and y value with a few random outliers. Its not random whether or not parry will mitigate damage in a fight with consistent incoming physical damage, its just random as to when. But this isn't a flaw, technically. This is what parry is designed to do. Provide random spike mitigation. And it is reliable in that context.

I can go into A2S and based on my previous farms and parses safely say that I will mitigate 100-150K of damage over the entire fight at a given parry value, hypothetically. The only thing RNG has to tell us is whether or not a specific hit will be mitigated by parry, but this extends beyond the realm of what the stat is very clearly designed for. And this pretty much is why I stick to my argument that it is because it is not damage, rather than because it is RNG, that it is not valued. The RNG factor does not hinder the stat in what it was designed to do, what hinders it is that it competes for a slot on your gear with things like crit and SS.

Think about it. If you go into a fight with physical AA, regardless of if cleaves or TBs are physical or not, you are statistically guaranteed returns from parry. If you manage to not parry for an entire 10 min encounter of that design you may wanna get checked for cancer. It almost certainly reliably will mitigate damage, just not when we want it to, but we already have CDs for that, so that's a moot point. It was never designed to work when we want it to.

So, even if you mitigated the statistical highest amount for a given parry rate in a given fight it would still not be all that great because its not damage, as I said before.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

Auto attack damage is not negligible, its a huge percentage of the damage that you take in a given encounter, and parry mitigates hundreds of thousands of damage over the course of a fight now. Obviously none of it is anticipated by healers and it doesn't really change much, but it does happen. But the bottom line is, it didn't help you end the fight faster, and that is why it is undervalued. DPS is still the most effective mitigation due to raid design in this game. RNG has little to do with it unless the RNG was so extreme that you had a chance to go an entire phase of a physical fight without parrying. You actually parry quite a bit, its just not really helping anything in its current form.

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Sure, parry can mitigate a lot of damage if you look at the total damage mitigated over the course of a fight. But like you said, it doesn't change much when looking at individual auto-attack parries, as a simple regen tick or a fairy heal will deal with that just as easily as if the tank were to tank a full auto-attack hit. It's also undervalued because parry just scales horribly, you need a lot of it to even increase you parry chance by a bit.

The RNG part was aimed at how it's not worth taking parry into account when it comes to tank busters.
Bottom line is, there's multiple reasons why parry isn't a good stat. The lack of a dps value isn't the core problem, it's just one of those multiple reasons.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

Auto attack damage is not negligible, its a huge percentage of the damage that you take in a given encounter, and parry mitigates hundreds of thousands of damage over the course of a fight now.

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Could you provide proof on the "hundreds of thousands of damage"? Auto-attacks do indeed consist of a huge amount of tank damage but the "hundreds of thousands of damage" part needs to be proven. The problem, as it stands, is that it seems that the scaling of the parry stat is poor (apart from the RNG factor). But it is true that detailed studies have not been done in the matter.

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Originally Posted by Nezerius

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I addressed this a bit in the above post but I'll elaborate.

Even if you changed parry scaling to make the rate closer to 50% with modest investment and the amount mitigated like 30, 40, or even 90-100%, stop and consider whether you would really be swayed by that over crit, ss, etc, especially when they compete for slots on your gear. You probably wouldn't.

And again, the RNG argument is a judgement based on assuming parry is supposed to be doing something that was never designed to do. You have CDs for when you need reliable, guaranteed mitigation.

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Originally Posted by Merkava

Could you provide proof on the "hundreds of thousands of damage"? Auto-attacks do indeed consist of a huge amount of tank damage but the "hundreds of thousands of damage" part needs to be proven. The problem, as it stands, is that it seems that the scaling of the parry stat is poor (apart from the RNG factor). But it is true that detailed studies have not been done in the matter.

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I misspoke, currently this is not the case. A recent A2 parse showed that I mitigated about 40K in a 7 minute clear in a full DPS build (min parry on left side, full slaying). I'm not going to post that here because I don't feel like being banned but I am on FFLogs, you can find it. However, it used to be much much higher during progression on that fight, when I stacked more parry on my left side due the the 100% physical nature of that fight and the fight took longer due to less gear and me wearing more melds than slaying.

Still waiting for a math whizz to drop some numbers on that whole DRK MT thing.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

I can go into A2S and based on my previous farms and parses safely say that I will mitigate 100-150K of damage over the entire fight at a given parry value, hypothetically.

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Just throwing this out there: This statement says nothing at all about the stat, Parry. For a proper indication of how much the stat matters, you'd need to compare a parse with a gear set that has as little Parry as possible with one that has as much as possible.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

Even if you changed parry scaling to make the rate closer to 50% with modest investment and the amount mitigated like 30, 40, or even 90-100%, stop and consider whether you would really be swayed by that over crit, ss, etc, especially when they compete for slots on your gear. You probably wouldn't.

And again, the RNG argument is a judgement based on assuming parry is supposed to be doing something that was never designed to do. You have CDs for when you need reliable, guaranteed mitigation.

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If parry started making a significant difference in survivability, in a boss encounters that'd push tanks towards being more defensive rather than more offensive? Sure, I'd go for it.
Thing is, just changing parry scaling won't fix the stat. Like I said in my previous post, there's multiple reasons why parry isn't a good stat. Currently it's only good for reducing a random auto-attack by a bit, which doesn't change much.

And your side of the RNG argument is just as much of an assumption based on your conception of what the parry stat was designed to do.

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Originally Posted by Nezerius

And your side of the RNG argument is just as much of an assumption based on your conception of what the parry stat was designed to do.

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I think its a pretty educated assumption; Parry can't be counted on for mitigating tank busters, CDs can. Therefore, parry was not designed to mitigate tank busters, CDs were, and judging the stat by that criteria is something of a straw-man argument.

Parry is RNG. So is crit. Guess why people don't have a problem with crit being RNG? Because its damage. Really simple concept.

I honestly don't know why I'm being fought on this. Damage is the most effective mitigation for better or for worse therefore you'll never pick parry over a dps secondary in a dps race, regardless of how it scales, unless they do something absurd like make you parry 100% of the time with enough parry. That's pretty much the main reason why people don't take it, sure it has other flaws, but even if you mitigated those flaws, it wouldn't make it more desirable than the alternatives given the way raids are designed in this game. I'm struggling to see why people are arguing against this. Its perfectly in line with the overwhelming trend of tanking in this game which is to see how much mitigation you can sacrifice to maximize DPS.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

I think its a pretty educated assumption; Parry can't be counted on for mitigating tank busters, CDs can. Therefore, parry was not designed to mitigate tank busters and judging the stat by that criteria is something of a straw-man argument.

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We'll just have to agree that it's a badly designed stat, that will only bring in mediocre results in the most physical-heavy fight in the game (A2S).
It can't be counted on for tank busters, nor is it capable of having a significant impact on individual auto-attacks. No healer is gonna care about how you reduced the damage of an auto-attack by 400.

The stat needs to have a complete overhaul, as whatever its current design intent is, it clearly isn't a useful one.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

Parry is RNG. So is crit. Guess why people don't have a problem with crit being RNG? Because its damage. Really simple concept.

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Crit is fine because getting a crit is never really wasted. Every time you crit, it removes even more HP from an enemy, HP that they won't get back. It all contributes towards killing that boss at the end of a 10m+ fight. You have a chance to crit on (almost) every GCD, off-GCD, DoT and autoattack. Parry's RNG is different because of the size of your HP bar and the fact that it's physical only. You can't rely on a parry to keep you alive because enemies do a bigger percentage of your HP bar than you do to them per hit, and you can't rely on it to save MP or help healing because often a precasted heal would heal for the amount you parried anyway.

What people are forgetting here is the ACC on the VA chest. The WAR esoteric chest has SS / Parry.

As long as you can drop ACC for Crit and Det on your other gear to take advantage of the ACC on the VA chest, the comparison is much closer. Overall, you will have less stats on your gear but Parry is completely worthless and SS is the least desirable DPS stat.

So, the Crit on the VA chest is ~9.5 stat weight worth of STR (which more than makes up for the gap between i200 and i210 STR) and you have the ACC which converts to Crit and Det on your other gear vs. the SS on the esoteric chest. It's a very, very minor difference but the VA chest is potentially better for pure DPS.

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Originally Posted by Launched

Crit is fine because getting a crit is never really wasted. Every time you crit, it removes even more HP from an enemy, HP that they won't get back. It all contributes towards killing that boss at the end of a 10m+ fight. You have a chance to crit on (almost) every GCD, off-GCD, DoT and autoattack. Parry's RNG is different because of the size of your HP bar and the fact that it's physical only. You can't rely on a parry to keep you alive because enemies do a bigger percentage of your HP bar than you do to them per hit, and you can't rely on it to save MP or help healing because often a precasted heal would heal for the amount you parried anyway.

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I mean... you're using 5x as many words to say essentially the exact same thing I was. RNG that removes HP from the enemy=good, RNG that prevents you from losing HP=bad. RNG mitigation=no RNG DPS=yes.

He was saying crit's RNG is neutralized by the length of fights and the size of boss HP pools.

Whereas parry's RNG is not neutralized because our HP pools in relation to incoming damage does not offer any noticeable gains to effective healing.

If we had massive HP pools, then maybe the accumulated mitigation from multiple parries could save the healers a few GCDs worth of healing. The reality is a parry won't do anything because it doesn't really change how we are healed.

So no, it's not RNG mitigation = no, RNG DPS = yes. It's a consistent DPS gain over a 10 minute fight = yes. Effectively no practical mitigation gain = no.

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Originally Posted by Brian_

….So, the Crit on the VA chest is ~9.5 stat weight worth of STR (which more than makes up for the gap between i200 and i210 STR) and you have the ACC which converts to Crit and Det on your other gear vs. the SS on the esoteric chest. It's a very, very minor difference but the VA chest is potentially better for pure DPS.

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The total stat weight math for the VA chest is 102.48, (93+(60*.158))
The total stat weight for the ESO upgraded chest is 101 (ignoring sks for the moment). This means the secondary stat upgrade on the VA piece over the ESO + piece is 1.45%.

What you fail to consider is the upgrade in defense. VA is 424, ESO+ is 456. Or a 7.1% upgrade, favoring the ESO. You have to weigh out both sides of this coin when you are a tank, and this percentage bump on the defense is a pretty significant increase. IMO, the ESO+ is worth the minimal DPS loss over the VA ** ASSUMING** you have the ESO and twine to spare.

I do this type of math when determining my upgrade order (ESO to ESO+) for my other classes I am gearing, after my main class is well loaded. If upgrading my monk head piece is an 8.5% upgrade going to the 210, I would upgrade this piece over doing a different item on another class that would equate to a smaller percentage increase in stats – ie. PLD feet is an 8.3% upgrade.

You can make a stronger argument between the VA pants and the ESO+ pants - depending on which tank class you are. The secondary stat split on PLD is 3.8% in favor of the VA piece. It is 11.6% advantage (VA) on WAR, unless you are starving on accuracy. As I haven’t seen DRK stat weights, I borrowed the WAR formula for now and I got a 1.3% split (it is closer to 3% if you use the PLD sks weights .104). So I give it a yes to VA legs for WAR, a probably for PLD, and a probably not for DRK.

***Please remember, we are still debating the value of Secondary DPS stats vs the value Defensive stats. Someone please get bored and go do A1S for unmitigated HCP in all 190 gear, 200 gear and 210 gear. My healer made the comment last night that I take significantly less damage now than I did 8 weeks ago. There is value to this, but it is value that is more difficult to measure.

Consider the possibility that this extra defense could allow you to drop your tank stance more frequently.

My major question involves the balance and value of the Skill Speed stat weight. WAR needs 480, but the .125 multiplier seems…..high. In fact, it is by far the highest of any of the classes I have seen theory crafted thus far. Can somebody smarter than I explain the transition from a soft cap on sks (2.x prevailing thought) to where we appear to be presently??? Are we getting out an extra gcd or something?

I specifically said "potentially better for pure DPS."

I didn't fail to consider the upgrade in defense. That was not the point of my post.

@Brian_
Perhaps some better re-arranging in my post would have been wise. None of my statement should be considered if you and your group are able to handle tanking in full DPS stance. If you are not within this classification, and you have to spend some amount of time in your tank stance, additional defense may allow you to drop into DPS mode more frequently and it may allow your healers to DPS a bit more (increasing your DPS at a greater rate, and possibly the entire raid group as well).

Perhaps I didn’t make my point clear enough, or took too long getting there. I was looking at what route has the better value for 8 man content. I stated that the VA chest is an upgrade over the ESO+ by a very small margin when looking at it with DPS blinders on. I debate on whether that small upgrade is of greater value to my team over the much larger defensive upgrade. And yes, the stat weight difference in the chest piece is quite small, so small in fact that I believe I can get more out of having that extra defense by dropping my tank stance sooner and for longer periods of time.

Of course, value is very subjective. I admit(ed) that it is extremely difficult to quantify the value of what added defense brings for both you and your party. I do think that you can easily debate both sides of this coin when the percent you gain based on just the stat weight increase is so small.

The tiny amount of DEF and MDEF and VIT is not going to allow you to drop your tank stance sooner.

And, even with that logic, any gains you see from defense will only be relevant in the span of time you gain out of tank stance.

Whereas if you stack a passive gain in offensive stat weight, it's relevant 100% of the time regardless of your stance.