VIT and STR accessories

[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.

[Donjo]

The dictionary definition of mitigation and the video game definition of mitigation (damage mitigation) are very different...

...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.

Actually, the two definitions are the same. Making an attack less severe is exactly the same as making an attack less effective. It's just trading two synonyms. A Warrior of all people should know that all attacks are less effective against you if you have more HP. The effectiveness of an attack isn't the size of the red number; it's the attack's ability to kill you if you're hit by it.

Because damage reduction is equivalent to having more HP, claiming that one is mitigation and that the other is not is a contradiction. It's basic logic.

[Brightsayge]

Because damage reduction is equivalent to having more HP, claiming that one is mitigation and that the other is not is a contradiction. It's basic logic.

If the damage is received at 100% of its intended value then no damage has been mitigated. Just because you have more health, the damage may be less severe, and you can incorrectly use the word mitigated, but you never really mitigated any damage at it was received in full. You just have more hp to absorb the full value of damage.

I take 1k hit with no mitigation I lose 1k health. Mitigation allows you to reduce the amount of damage received.
I use sentinel, take a 800 damage, 20% of the hit was mitigated.

both of those combined is our eHP. HP/(1- (mitigation/100)) eHP is the combination of both hp and mitigation.

[Orlandeu]

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This guy.

Donjo, you're completely missing the point of what mitigation actually is. You seem to be confused and think that your HP mitigates damage.
Your idea of Sentinel, IB, Rampart or any other damage reduction cooldowns to be synonymous to having more HP is just absurd. Having more HP is having more HP. It does not mitigate damage.

[Velo_Vandore]

Actually, the two definitions are the same. Making an attack less severe is exactly the same as making an attack less effective. It's just trading two synonyms. A Warrior of all people should know that all attacks are less effective against you if you have more HP. The effectiveness of an attack isn't the size of the red number; it's the attack's ability to kill you if you're hit by it.

Because damage reduction is equivalent to having more HP, claiming that one is mitigation and that the other is not is a contradiction. It's basic logic.

From the healers point of view, the mitigated attacks (if we take that to mean attacks causing less damage due to parry, block or defensive buffs like Inner Beast) will mean less damage to heal. However, that may be irrelevant in many cases, and not actually = saved mp - for example, the healer will cure 2 after a big hit and put the tank around max HP in either case (VIT or STR build).

The extra VIT will help prevent one hit KO's where a tank was not topped up before big hits, the defensive buffs were missed, the boss follows up with a second attack soon after big hit. For that reason I would say, in theory VIT is the safer option for fights with big hit attacks.

In dungeons where you're doing bug pulls, the STR build (mitigation) could be better in theory, even defensively. As a WHM, during big mob pulls I'll often rely on regen while I holy spam. With VIT builds, HP would be higher, but in theory would shoot down quicker. For warriors in particular the STR not only provides higher mitigation for all the small hit's, but greater self healing potential with Bloodbath (returns some damage dealt as HP), Berserk (Increase damage dealt by 50%), and Overpower (hitting all enemies to maximise overall damage / healing), in combination with other defensive and offensive buffs and self healing abilities. STR also will help with keeping emnity, and killing enemies faster which also equates to mitigation (shorter fight means less hits and less likely to run out of buffs, etc). It's hard to say without testing whether the damage gained with STR would be greater than the damage lost IF a healer would need to stop dpsing earlier / more often.

I can't speak from experience with different builds, but I can understand the theory behind STR build vs VIT and would not rule out either until I tried it myself.

To be honest it's not that important which is better (unless you care about maximising). React to issues you experience first hand and make you own choices. For example, while levelling up I struggled to keep aggro. Could have been my gear at the time or my skill / execution. I put my bonus attribute points into STR for the rest of the levels and found it much easier to keep aggro. I've not found I die too much from big boss one shots, so the STR point stay for now until I have issues.