VIT and STR accessories

[SirTaint]

Sir, you need to calm down. The previous poster said absolutely nothing about using Parry. Furthermore, Parry is not useless and such words should be saved for things that actually are. Fortunately, pretty much everything in this game has a use so that's pretty difficult to do.

He said he preferred a DEF build. There are 2 defensive stats in the game. DEF and Parry. That is why I acknowledged them both. Parry is a useless stat on gear and DEF happens by default via ilvl.

[Donjo]

He said he preferred a DEF build. There are 2 defensive stats in the game. DEF and Parry. That is why I acknowledged them both. Parry is a useless stat on gear and DEF happens by default via ilvl.

Okay, then it looks like we're just thinking of things differently. I personally think of Vitality as a defensive stat so I assumed that "defensive build" meant "more HP" as nothing in the game is more effective at passively helping you not die after Level 50 than simply having more HP.

[SirTaint]

Okay, then it looks like we're just thinking of things differently. I personally think of Vitality as a defensive stat so I assumed that "defensive build" meant "more HP" as nothing in the game is more effective at passively helping you not die after Level 50 than simply having more HP.

I wish VIT was a true defensive stat. It would make gearing more interesting besides do I have enough HP? If so stack STR.

[Zaft]

Okay, then it looks like we're just thinking of things differently. I personally think of Vitality as a defensive stat so I assumed that "defensive build" meant "more HP" as nothing in the game is more effective at passively helping you not die after Level 50 than simply having more HP.

VIT is NOT a defensive stat. In fact, VIT is the worst stat in terms of mitigation, and it will often simply stress your healers rather than increase your tanking potential. You should only consider VIT when you require a bigger health pool in order to avoid one-shots and give your healers some room for error.

[Donjo]

VIT is NOT a defensive stat. In fact, VIT is the worst stat in terms of mitigation, and it will often simply stress your healers rather than increase your tanking potential. You should only consider VIT when you require a bigger health pool in order to avoid one-shots and give your healers some room for error.

Wait... what? Vitality is the most effective mitigation stat in the entire game, bar none. Nothing else comes even close. Parry is RNG and is thus automatically worse. For a single point of Defense to be more valuable than a single point of Vitality, every attack hitting you needs to have a base potency greater than 36250 damage. It is the base value that almost everything keys off of to determine your effective HP at any given moment. To believe that having more HP somehow makes you less Tanky is a fallacy. There's a reason that the competition is always against STR and VIT: both stats are the best at what they do(increase damage dealt and increase ability to survive, respectively).

Second, stating that high VIT "stresses healers" and then to "use it when you want to give your healers room for error" is a contradiction.

Finally, here's the standard "HP is Mitigation" argument.

To mitigate something is to reduce the severity of it. We can measure the severity of an attack in two manners:

1. How large the red number is.
2. How well off the target is after the hit.

Most things we call mitigation are the things that affect point number one. However, a 900 damage attack is less severe to someone with 9999 HP than it is to someone with 1000. Therefore, the attack was mitigated purely by the possession of more HP.

[Zaft]

snip

You're misusing the term mitigation. Mitigation means a decrease of damage taken, not "how much HP is left afterwards". VIT does not decrease any damage, it simply increases your HP.

Strength increases your mitigation by increasing the amount of damage reduced when you block or parry.
Parry increases your mitigation by increasing the rate at which you parry attacks.
Skill Speed increases a WARs mitigation by increasing how quickly they can re-up Inner Beast.

[Donjo]

You're misusing the term mitigation. Mitigation means a decrease of damage taken, not "how much HP is left afterwards". VIT does not decrease any damage, it simply increases your HP.

Strength increases your mitigation by increasing the amount of damage reduced when you block or parry.
Parry increases your mitigation by increasing the rate at which you parry attacks.
Skill Speed increases a WARs mitigation by increasing how quickly they can re-up Inner Beast.

No, you're misunderstanding the breadth of what mitigation truly is. You're ignoring exactly half of what I said in my previous post. I quoted, almost verbatim, the literal definition of "mitigation" in terms of the English Language and applied it precisely to game mechanics. What you are trying to pass off as the entirety of mitigation is just Damage Reduction. It's only part of the process of mitigating an attack. Here is the simplest way mitigation can be defined:

An attack has been "mitigated" if it fails to kill you.

There are two major ways to prevent an attack from killing you. The first is Damage Reduction: the act of making the red number smaller. The second is simply having enough HP to take the hit.

To continue on, Damage Reduction is just an illusion. It is exactly equivalent to and can thus be abstracted down to having more HP. That 1000 point shield on you isn't reducing the strength of the enemy's attack; it's giving you 1000 more health. Sitting in Shield Oath isn't reducing the enemy's strength; it's increasing your maximum HP by 20%. Defiance and Thrill of Battle, bless their hearts, skip this illusion and just increase your visible HP number. Every skill that imparts Damage Reduction is just increasing your HP. Therefore, if we assume that possessing more HP is not mitigation, Damage Reduction isn't mitigation either and we can conclude that we aren't ever mitigating anything at all. This, of course, is a fallacy due to the previously stated definitions of a mitigated attack being less severe/unable to kill you and the fact that failing to reduce the severity of attacks will kill you.

At the end of the day, HP is mitigation. In fact, it's the only mitigation we have.

[Zaft]

snip

The dictionary definition of mitigation and the video game definition of mitigation (damage mitigation) are very different. Here's a quote from WoW to help you understand:

Mitigation is the reduction of attack effectiveness. Types of melee and magical spell mitigation are absorb, armor, block, defense, resilience and resistance.

Not to be confused with avoidance, which includes such stats as dodge, miss and parry.

The crucial difference between the two being that an attack that is mitigated still does damage to the player, however an avoided attack deals no damage.

What you're arguing in your fourth paragraph is eHP, which is an equation that factors in mitigation to determine the effective hit points you have. This is not the same as mitigation. To calculate eHP, you would use eHP = HP / (1 - mitigation / 100), and you cannot take block/parry/etc into account, as these are not constants.