Yoshi P talks about Warriors- from Producer Letter Live @ TGS

[HiirNoivl]

You are not getting my point though.

First you say use crit to buff Inner Beast. Which is what I thought you wanted Crit for, and I understand that.

Then you say, "Don't ever use Inner Beast until absolutely necessary."

That means that you are stacking crit to have better Inner Beasts, but then you don't use it. So during the time where you are not using it, you are still not more effective defense wise than you were before you had crit, because whether you had crit or not, you still have that 15% healing buff.

So if you stack crit and then hold onto that skill that benefits from it (Inner Beast) then you are not better than you were before stacking crit. You only are those rare times where you use Inner Beast because you don't use it whenever you can.

What I am getting from you is:

1. If you don't have enough crit there is no point in using Inner Beast because you are actually losing out on your hp.

2. If you have enough crit, STILL don't use it until absolutely necessary, don't use it on each of Titan's big moves, but only when healers struggle with healing you after it. So when I DON'T use it after the big move, I will still have been worse than a Paladin who did mitigate that hit. Do you understand what I mean?

Plus I get it that you do more DPS with crit. I really get it. I don't care. I want to know that I have better defensive abilities. And if you read above, I don't see that extra defensive threshold if then you just don't use Inner Beast unless you are in dire need. I am not disputing that keeping the Wrath stacks is good. I am saying that stacking that crit isn't such a HUGE improvement DEFENSIVELY because you don't utilise the crit in a defensive manner often enough.

If the problem is surpassing that negative HPS threshold, then lots of crit should equal to lots of Inner Beast usage. Not to "Lots of crit, but STILL don't use Inner Beast" which is what threw me off in your replies. If the extra crit doesn't make you want to use Inner Beast more often, then no point in stacking it if you are after a better way to stay alive. You might as well stack strenght and keep your Inner Beast for emergency as you are doing already.

Also the maths on that thread don't take into consideration your normal crit, with use of Inner Release throughout the Chimera encounter, it's 15%ish for me without any crit stacking gear wise.

Someone also showed me some numbers from a reddit thread. He said,

"Taking an example of a Bard in full Darklight gear with Relic weapon, they received these results:

1 Determination/Crit rate = 0.033% damage increase
1 Dexterity = 0.2% damage increase
1 Weapon damage = 1.55% damage increase

As we can see, WD is beyond the best increase, so getting a +1 on your weapon is worth about 8 primary stats (str/dex/vit/int/mnd) and one primary stat is worth about 6 secondary stats.

A single WD is worth almost 50 secondary stats, so yes, it's really worth upgrading from Relic to Relic +1.

But also, apparently the WD scales off your primary stats, so the higher your primary stat is, the less damage increase you will get from WD. At the current level of this game, this is a non-issue, but it might pose a problem in the future when max level is perhaps 70+."

If those numbers are true and if strength contributes the same amount of damage to a melee than dex does to a ranged, then you wouldn't care about crit because:

1. You actually do less damage than with stacking strength
2. You need a lot more points in crit to get the same amount of damage increase as strength, therefore needing a lot more materia slots, and you only have a finite number of those so your damage caps a lot earlier than it does with strength
3. If by stacking Strength, your Inner Beasts are consistently better, even if they don't crit as often, the overall HPS might still increase and surpass the negative threshold because strength means more damage than crit overall

On top of that you don't know:

1. How much strength the person who posted your "eye opening thread" has
2. How he gets 2.0 skill speed
3. Can you, by stacking crit, surpass the HPS of him using 2.0 skill speed? Because of course, if you are stacking skill speed, you are out of Materia slots for crit

Thank you for your Detailed Reply.

For a better explanation let's look at what a Critical Hit actually is.



When you hit a Critical you'll see it say Critical! You hit Xmob for XXX damage (50%).

A critical hit is 50% more than a normal hit. Now, As a WAR, your mitigation depends highly on how much damage you deal. So you say you don't care, you'd better care. Inner Beast, Bloodbath, and even the cross class Second Wind are actually offensive skills because they scale with attack power and your ability to do damage.

The more damage you do, the more damage you can take. It's that simple.

When I first started stacking Critical Rate Materia, the goal was to increase the amount of times I used Critical Inner Beast to a level where I was comfortable using it. The result was a host more benefits that actually allowed me to use Inner Beast less.

For example. Before I started stacking Crit, when I was pulling multiple monsters, I would single target DPS one monster because I wanted to kill it faster as well as use Inner Beast to mitigate all the damage I was taking. There so no way I could use Bloodbath effectively because Bloodbath was ineffective in handling all the damage I was taking to any meaningfull extent. Why? Because my damage was so low.

After I raised my Crit Rate Considerably, I suddenly realized that using Vengeance and Bloodbath allong with Steel Cyclone healed me more than an Inner beast could while at the same time, dealing AoE damage and killing the enemies faster. It was a win win.

But I wasn't using Inner Beast. In this case, Steel Cyclone had more benefits.

So there are cases where Inner Beast will not be your heal of choice.

In the case of Titan, you still want to stack Crit so that when you use your Vengeance and Bloodbath Combo, you can gain more HP after Rock Busters and Stomps. And when you use Inner Beast you have a greater chance of Crit. But when you get Mountain Bustered in the face, and your Healer is distracted/out of commission you need more than a "chance" of crit. You need a Guaranteed Crit.

That's what takes me to Berserk, Berserk is raising your attack power 50%, Berserk is a guaranteed Critical hit. You want to use Berserk when you use Inner Beast in this case because if you do, you get enough Healing to over come the threshold of negative HP healed Guaranteed.. And if you crit that you get 50 percent more than that.

But again, this is when you're in a pinch or a bind. You dont' do this for every Mountain Buster. If you're not in a serious need of healing (such as the death/gaoling of your mages) your 15% heal buff will always be better ALWAYS. It took me a while to get this too. But you'll get it really quickly when you see how much Wrath V actually increase your HP regen and decreases the strain on your healers. You'll really get it more when you see how much Wrath V actually increases your damage dealt, which increases your HP regained from Bloodbath.

Do you understand why Wrath V is such a powerful mitigation and DPS tool?

What stacking Critical hit does, besides raising your DPS to crazy levels, you start unlocking the strength of the cooldowns you rarely, barely, and never-ly used before this allowing to regen more HP and closes that gap between PLD and WAR when it comes to EHP.

Regarding STR: You cannot "stack STR" in this game. STR is capped according to item level. I quite literally can add no more strength to my gear.

I've noticed that even the expert Websites are underestimating the gains to Crit Rate granted by abilities like Internal Release when they are used in connection with Wrath V. On the Psychflayer yesterday, I managed to achieve a sustained 33.3 Crit Rate, that fight is not a short one.

According to people's calculations I should have only been able to achieve 22.something percent before dropping off again to a 12.something percent.

There has got to be something else happening. I'm not sure what it is. But my DPS has gone up by 40 since I stacked Crit. And a good portion of that gets translated into mitigation.

One more EDIT: When you use Crit Rate you really increase your damage dealt far more than with STR on WAR. (It doesn't work that way on other classes.)