Quote Originally Posted by Molly_Millions View Post
That being said, would you go for DEX or VIT as PLD for your 2nd stat? (STR is clearly no. 1 for tanking.) It seems to me like it's a toss up, since VIT now only increases max HP.
I'd have a hard time coming down on that decision until some more rigorous Dex testing is done (by myself or someone else). From a purely "how much health am I getting/mitigating" word of mouth says (I forgot to look myself, so I'll just have to take others' word for this) VIT returns ~8 HP per point, though other numbers have been quoted. Based on my findings, DEX returns ~0.13% increase in mitigation rate (mitigation in this case refers to in incident of either Block or Parry) per point. Each mitigation incident will block 14%-11% damage on a STR based PLD, resulting in an overall increase of 0.018% damage mitigation over time. On an enemy that hits for 1000 damage, that's going to result in a reduction of ~0.18 damage per attack (averaged out, in reality it's going to be a much more extreme distribution).

VIT is a sure thing, it will give you a flat buff to your survivability, at the cost of your healer's sanity (and MP). Dex is a gamble, where the more Dex you add, the higher your chances of winning but with higher returns than HP on a win. Stylistically, I want Dex to be a viable alternative. At this point though, I would need to find something very interesting at higher Dex/Parry values to make it worthwhile. It also depends on how high you can get your Block value with STR. If Block value can get up in the ~25% range, pumping Dex and trying to get that "win" to come up more often makes more sense.